1. Introduction
Museums recently have come to be seen as particularly important sites for the examination of cultural values and knowledge (e. g., Bal, 1996; Bennett, 1995; Haraway, 1989). Through display and commentary, museums depict certain truths about the artwork, history, or artifacts they house; yet, such truths always are incomplete. Museums purport to reveal facts about people and places, culture and experience, but their truths are bound by the specific values of the era in which the museum is founded, influenced by the selective choices made by the curators, and structured by the museum’s architecture and design.
This paper builds upon recent inquiries in the fields of rhetorical and cultural studies into the communicative dimensions of museums by analyzing the discursive messages in a relatively new and different project: The Women’s Museum in Dallas, Texas. This privately funded museum opened in 2000, and significantly is the first national endeavor to tell the story of women in the United States. Hence, its means of establishing arguments about women’s activities, social roles, and cultural contributions are important to examine for what they reveal about how topics, themes, and events are articulated as significant in the public consciousness.
The rhetorical analysis in this paper focuses on describing and analyzing the communicative aspects of the museum. In essence, I conceptualize how the museum argues through visual and experiential means of presentation and interaction. The museum architecture, exhibits, and promotional materials are analyzed to reveal the patterns of language, imagery, and persuasive strategies embedded within them, especially as revealed by choices that include and exclude particular topics regarding women’s experience and history. The methodology employed is developed from several critical models, including those used in recent cultural studies critiques of museums (Bal, 1996; Bennett, 1995; Ferguson, 1996; McLean, 1999). The paper concludes with an evaluation of the social and political implications of the museum’s messages.

2. What is a museum?
In recent U.S. history, several museums have become sites of controversy. Of particular note are two incidents of public outcry in response to exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution, one about the Enola Gay warplane and the other a reinterpretation of art depicting the American west (Boyd, 1999; Dubin, 1999; Harris, 1999, Lubar, 1997; Yeingst & Burch, 1997). Both exhibits drew responses to what some segments of the audience perceived as anti-patriotic, revisionist, or liberal interpretations of the historical record. Such controversies indicate a deeper set of questions regarding the definition, purpose, and role of a museum. Two explanations can be gleaned from the literature of museum professionals and from that of critical and cultural studies. Both understandings of the museum are relevant to developing a critical analysis of the discursive dimensions of The Women’s Museum and similar public institutions.

First, museums are defined philosophically in terms their essential characteristics and purposes, that is, what they are. Greenblatt (1991) captures the essence of the philosophical debates as the contrast between “resonance” and “wonder,” the difference between emphasizing knowledge and relevance versus seeing a museum’s purpose as stimulating in visitors a fundamental sense of awe. As Chambers (1999) astutely notes, museums can be understood as existing at the nexus of three dialectics, or competing poles, scholarly versus popular, research versus education, and elitism versus inclusiveness (151), which govern how its meaning is articulated in diverse and contradictory ways both from within and without. Some proponents argue that museums are timeless sanctuaries, or temples, versus the notion that they are community forums (Morrissey & Worts, 1998; Pittman, 1999; Roberts, 1997). Museums also are marked by conflict between their educational and entertainment functions such that clashes often arise among the curatorial, educational, and design staffs (Dubin, 1999; Harris, 1999; Noriega, 1999; Roberts, 1997; Weil, 1999). In turn, the goals of museum professionals frequently do not match the public’s expectations, as is evidenced by controversies about particular exhibits.

Academic critics who define the museum from a rhetorical or cultural studies perspective perceive similar dialectical relationships, but they emphasize the intellectual, social, or political function of the museum, or what it does. They conceive of the museum in a discursive model by reading the exhibits and architectural spaces as texts and describing their compositional and communicative elements. For example, Bal (1996) discusses the synecdochal and metaphorical strategies employed in different exhibits, while Roberts (1997) adopts a narrative framework for understanding how exhibits tell stories. Moreover, many critics adopt a semiotic model of analysis to describe how a museum exhibit can be conceived as a system of signs that evokes meanings. Eco’s (1986) account of American tourist attractions and theme parks and the work of Baudrillard (1983) on simulacra and simulations are important representatives of this approach. Cultural critics also evaluate the impact of discursive elements in practice, moving beyond a descriptive framework to explore how museums function socially, politically, or ideologically as means of control or as loci of power. Bennett’s (1996) essay about what he calls the “exhibitionary complex” is illustrative of arguments regarding how museums can be understood as sites of power and surveillance. Drawing upon the theories of Michel Foucault, Bennett argues that the museum’s power is that of creating an “order of things” and a place for people within it as spectators and participants in the validation of the museum’s authority (89). Similar to Bennett’s (1996) argument, Ferguson (1996) analyzes what he refers to as “exhibitionary rhetorics,” the symbolic tactics of control used by museums (183).
Critics also insist on placing the museum into its social and political context, for it is precisely here that they find its communicative and ideological power. According to Bennett (1996) the museum became the central mechanism through which the state could communicate an image of civility and intellectualism, particularly as it came to function as the showcase for colonial possessions and international power. Similarly, Haraway (1989) critiques the ideological messages regarding racial and cultural hierarchies typical of natural history museums. Mayo (1994) and Smith (1994) describe the patriarchal biases typical of museum representations of women. These studies clearly establish that the museum is a means through which power is wielded and a particular set of values is upheld.

In this analysis of The Women’s Museum, Ferguson’s (1996) description of exhibition rhetorics will be used as a springboard to create a critical framework for the study. He describes the “politics of representivity” wherein who is featured in museums and in what ways constitutes a “highly observable politics” at work (176). Primarily, museums control the visitor’s sense of reality, normality, and perceptions of the museum’s authority through three strategies: nomination, hierarchy, and textuality (Ferguson, 1999, 183). Although his essay does not fill out these categories in detail, these terms provide heuristic points of entry for a discursive inquiry. First, I will use nomination to refer to the techniques used in the museum to render presences and absences. A critic must analyze how who and what is named and given voice exists in a tension with what is ex-nominated and therefore silenced or unseen. Second, I will use hierarchy to describe how museums confer order and structure onto exhibits and their contents. Here, the critic must note what aspects are given primacy, which are sublimated, and the narrative structures that confer causality and relationships. Third, I will use textuality as a category to reference the symbolic strategies employed in museum discourse to create meaning.

3. Inside The Women’s Museum
As a foundation for the discursive analysis of The Women’s Museum, this section first will provide a brief description of the circumstances leading to its development and construction. Next, the rhetorical dimensions of the museum will be examined through the lens of the three critical concepts of nomination, hierarchy, and textuality. Knowledge about the specific vision of The Women’s Museum as articulated by its founders at its inception is relevant to an understanding of the discursive tone, strategies, and contents of its exhibits and space.

The Women’s Museum’s beginnings are rooted in a coalition between what one observer referred to as “a cadre of A-type Texas women” (Dillon, 2001, 58) and a large corporation with very deep pockets. The project originated with the Foundation for Women’s Resources, a national organization founded in 1973 to promote the welfare of women and girls (Stoeltje, 1999b, 3).
The group’s president, Cathy Bonner, provides a mystical explanation for the concept that became The Women’s Museum, claiming that the initial idea came to her in a dream early in 1996 (Hutcheson, 1998, 5f).
The result of a true vision or not, clearly the concept of a women’s museum is a reaction to a perceived lack of spaces where women’s history and experiences are featured. As Bonner argued in 1999, “There are over 8,000 museums in this country and less than 10 of them are focused on women. The National Park Service has over 2,000 historic sites and less than 10 focus on women’s historic contributions” (Stoeltje, 1999a, 3).
In 1998, SBC Communications, the holding company for several U.S. telephone companies, announced that it would donate $10 million to the project, a sum which provided almost half of the funds necessary for the museum’s completion (Stoeltje, 1999a, 3) and was the largest corporate contribution in history to any women’s organization, fund, or program in the U.S. (“Museum for Women,” 1998, F8). Following SBC’s donation, 300 individuals pledged $5,000 contributions, a clear indicator that “America’s silk-suited wealth” was indeed what Bonner called the museum’s “stealth weapon” in its quick development from concept to reality (Trescott, 2000, C1).
The city of Dallas donated the building, a 1909 former coliseum located in its Fair Park area near the Cotton Bowl and other museums (“Presenting,” 2000, 82).
A third major partner entered the enterprise in 1999 when at the groundbreaking ceremony Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) announced that The Women’s Museum would be one of 20 institutions allowed access to the Smithsonian Institution’s 140 million artifacts (“Museum for Women,” 1999, A12).

From its inception the museum was conceived as neither archival nor artifact based. Instead, its full title announced its forward-looking mission; officially, it is named “The Women’s Museum: An Institute for the Future.” The second part of the name refers to its focus on helping young women learn technology via a computer laboratory and classes held there. Yet the title also bespeaks its contemporary design, popular culture content, and high tech focus. The affiliation with the Smithsonian allows the museum the flexibility to include artifacts in its exhibits, but the vision of the founders indicated that they wanted to create something that would transcend usual practices. As Bonner stated, “We knew it had to be an experience. If you walked through the door and it didn’t knock your socks off, it wasn’t worth doing” (Dillon, 2000b, 31). When the museum opened in September 2000, visitors were greeted with a 70,000 square-foot, multiple level exhibit space, built almost entirely with private funds. Bonner’s statement on its opening day regarding the museum’s purpose is a fitting place to begin a discursive analysis of it: “Museums are ritual places where we present what we value” (Teicher, 2000, 13).
An interpretation of The Women’s Museum via the concepts of nomination, hierarchy, and textuality reveals that it values the avoidance of controversy, contemporary events and personalities, and a utopian vision of the future.

3.1. Nomination
The nomination practices evident in The Women’s Museum can be understood through the analysis of opposite pairings of rhetorical terms that delineate to which aspects of women’s history and experience it grants presence and voice. At the center of these pairings is the fundamental dialectic between victimage and celebration. Statements made by founder Bonner and by the museum’s executive director Candace O’Keefe clearly articulate the inclusionary and exclusionary boundaries of its vision and practices. In a description of the development of the museum’s contents, Bonner stated, “We decided early on we would not be victim oriented. We tell the stories of inspiration” (Teicher, 2000, 13). Similarly, O’Keefe summarized the sense of the museum by drawing a telling contrast: “This is a ‘Wow the woman!’ place, not a ‘Woe, the woman’ place” (Trescott, 2000, C1). The distinction drawn here between focusing on oppression versus highlighting achievement echoes the fundamental tension that marks inquiry in women’s studies. Analysts differ regarding whether women’s history should be conceived in terms of discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation or celebration, strength, and productivity. This distinction has been described as two stages in the development of research in women’s history, with the inquiry into oppression preceding the examination of women’s separate sphere (Banner, 1994); I argue that, more importantly, they must be understood as inherently interrelated phenomena. In embracing only the conception of celebration, The Women’s Museum gains a specific set of rhetorical advantages, yet with very significant political implications.

The museum’s celebratory focus reveals a second implied distinction that determines its nomination practices, the rejection of aspects potentially perceived as “feminist” in favor of embracing things “female.” The exhibits emphasize the “women’s sphere” with an emphasis on personal experience, a separate and different female realm that produces different cultural products in fields such as art, music, and literature, and achievements in public, but not traditionally political, activities such as sports and entertainment. Hence, the museum avoids content that could be perceived as feminism often is perceived, as negative, critical, biased, and anti-male. What a visitor experiences instead is an almost unrelenting depiction of celebration that virtually is devoid of controversy – unless one looks very carefully and closely to find it.
Some of the most interactive and entertaining exhibits in the museum provide good illustrations of the preference assigned to celebrating women’s achievements, especially in popular culture. For example, an exhibit called “Funny Women” allows visitors to sit in a rather postmodern theatre space where four high-definition televisions are embedded into a wall at skewed angles and different heights. Here, they watch a ten-minute videotape of excerpts from television situation comedies, recorded stand-up routines, and comedy-variety shows featuring several female comics, from 1950s legends Lucille Ball and Martha Raye to newer faces such as Paula Poundstone and Victoria Jackson. The inclusion of popular culture references within a museum space has the potential to challenge social and political notions of what is significant in a culture, but as Hughes (1997) notes in her discussion of the public reaction to the placement of the chairs from the studio set of the 1970s television show All in the Family in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, “Without the context of history, displays of popular culture artifacts risk becoming mere attractions. The larger framework gives artifacts greater meaning and allows more compelling interpretations” (172). In the “Funny Women” exhibit, some clues are provided to a larger context of resistance in the quotations interspersed among the clips, such as Bette Midler’s statement that “I’ve realized that the key to comedy is about freedom.” But the exhibit as a whole remains largely mute on the broader context wherein humor is a strategy of opposition used by women throughout the centuries and in many contexts besides that of popular entertainment.

Another exhibit celebrating women’s contributions to popular culture is the Poetry and Music Listening Room, part an area of the museum devoted to “Thought & Expression.” The main placard in the area reads: “Creativity can spark the power of the individual, energize a generation, and change the course of social events. Through their passionate expressions in art, literature, and music women have fostered a unique vision of both the world around us and the future ahead of us.” Inside the listening room itself, one encounters a touch screen that allows the visitor to choose a selection to be played from among groupings of three women’s names that are presented; for example, one choice offered is among music performers Bonnie Raitt, Ella Fitzgerald, and Patti LaBelle, while another presents writers Dorothy Parker, Maya Angelou, and Gertrude Stein. When a name is touched, the screen presents a brief biographical description of that woman, and then the selection is played. The listening room has wonderful acoustics, so the experience of hearing the song or poem is quite enjoyable. However, what again is lacking is the larger context for this listening experience: Why were these particular women chosen? How has their contribution influenced others? What are the groupings meant to represent? The visitor comes away with little more than an acknowledgement of each woman’s existence and perhaps a reminder of her biggest hit recording or most popular poem.

The exhibit featuring women in sports further illustrates the inclusion and exclusion patterns in the museum that uphold a notion of public performance while avoiding partisan or overtly political topics. Here the viewer is greeted with a large video screen upon which images of women participating in a variety of sports are projected. To the immediate right of the screen the wall is covered with approximately 18” x 18” sized full-color photographs of women athletes arranged in a blocked fashion. No labels or titles identifying the individual athletes are used in the video or on the wall of photographs. The sensory effect of the display is quite powerful as one can be struck by the strength and beauty of the images. However, because they are not identified and historicized the exhibit also renders these women anonymous and therefore silent. Accompanying the screen and wall of photos are three stands containing booklets in which particular athletes and their performance statistics can be located; no other text or narrative is provided to place the images or the athletes’ achievements in context. Absent are any number of controversies, documentation of discrimination cases, and accounts of the struggles women often had to undertake to participate in many of the sports depicted. The overall effect is to reinforce the achievement rather than document the circumstances.

Compounding the emphasis on personalities and popular achievements is the absence of equivalent exhibits featuring women’s history in other public realms such as elective politics, journalism, public protest and agitation, public address, law, or military service. Aspects of all of these areas are dispersed into other exhibits: For example, one can locate birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and politician Barbara Jordan in the “Unforgettable Women” cases, and after careful inspection the suffragists can be discovered in the Organized Movements case somewhere among Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s pamphlets and the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment’s buttons and bumper stickers. Other references to events or milestones can be found on the women’s history timeline or embedded among the elements of the visually busy “It’s Amazing” area that addresses gender stereotypes and myths. However, the inequity of presentation quite loudly communicates that the museum values topics and personalities that safely depict a women’s sphere absent of any political ramifications.
In all, the museum’s emphasis on the celebratory allows it to avoid controversy and offense, thus broadening the potential appeal of its contents but dulling their impact. Designers seem to have wanted to forestall the kind of reaction that Mayo (1994) claims successfully squelched attempts to designate locations related to women as national historical sites: they “in general had been characterized as ‘the three L’s’ – leftist, labor, or lesbian” (59). Rather, by fitting well within a post-feminist politics and a postmodern landscape that assumes the future is open and resistance strategies are a matter for the archives, The Women’s Museum’s focus upon achievement and popular, contemporary personalities is inoffensive, engaging, and entertaining. However, the almost complete silencing of the perspective of oppression and negativity rejects what historian Banner (1994) calls “a venerable women’s studies notion that patriarchy is an unvarying substructure that privileges men and that has existed across time and cultures” (44). Exhibits that simply present a female sphere without attending to the oppressive structures that necessitated, motivated, or structured women’s experiences and actions renders their history into an unproblematic series of individual, colorful, but ultimately disconnected performances.

3.2. Hierarchy
A hierarchical critique must examine the dimensions of the discourse that structure the contents into a sequence and order, such as the architectural details and the placement of exhibits. Critics need to chart what Burke (1950/1969) refers to as the rhetorical relationship between the container and the thing contained. According to Sirefman (1999), “by virtue of being within the public realm, museum architecture is laden with social, political, and moral issues” (297). Moreover, the path visitors are instructed to follow as they move among the exhibits provides significant clues as to what is valued and devalued. As Bal (1996) argues, “the walking tour in the museum [is] a narrative that must be taken seriously as a meaning-making event” (212). In The Women’s Museum, the hierarchical elements clearly reinforce its nomination practices in articulating that admiration of contemporary achievements is more significant than knowledge of the past.
Examining the history of the museum’s location and the architectural vision that shaped it provides some initial points of inquiry. The 1909 building was the first coliseum in the city of Dallas, used for cattle auctions and shows during the daytime and for operas and music performances at night. In 1936 as part of statewide centennial celebrations it was renovated in an art deco style, including the addition of its signature statue of a woman rising from a cactus at the entry, and rededicated by Houston philanthropist Jesse H. Jones to the “spirit of Texas women” (Stoeltje, 1999b, 3). Until its transformation into The Women’s Museum, the space had been used mostly as a city storage facility and had fallen into an extreme state of disrepair. Architect Wendy Evans Joseph carefully restored the stucco exterior and the statue, and left the interior open so that upon entry the visitor sees the entire three-story space at once. Joseph states, “I didn’t want a complete break between inside and outside. I wanted a dialogue and a feeling of continuity between old and new, like Paris’ Musee d’Orsay” (Dillon, 2000a, 36). Unfortunately, the placement of the exhibits creates a disjunction that belies this sense of continuity and produces a very different effect.
The museum’s top to bottom, past to present flow reproduces many of the ideological effects of the “exhibitionary complex” described by Bennett (1996). He argues that one of the key disciplinary technologies that developed in the 19th century museum was the “progressivist taxonomy” whereby exhibitions “located their preferred audiences at the very pinnacle of the exhibitionary order of things they constructed” (104). The rhetoric of the exhibition translated the idea of progress into a utopian statement about a future that promised an “imminent dissipation of social tensions” (Bennett, 1996, 104). For the 19th century exhibition of technology or anthropology, this progressivist taxonomy placed the privileged classes at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of nations or diverse racial groups as those who naturally would lead the way to the utopian state. In its 21st century form evidenced by The Women’s Museum, the rhetoric of progress is presented as a utopia already attained: visitors are positioned as the recipients of a future free from the need for any politics of difference or resistance.

The direction of the walking path and the specific placement of the exhibits within the building reveal how this utopian message is articulated. In many respects The Women’s Museum architecture echoes that of the Smithsonian’s Holocaust Museum, for which architect Joseph also was the senior designer (Dillon, 2001, 58). Both use a strategy wherein a visitor begins at the top level and works down to the lowest. As Sirefman (1999) argues, the Holocaust Museum is an example of the appropriate use of a didactic style that “architecturally manipulates the visitor’s journey, enforcing the gravity of particular historical events” (313). In that museum, visitors eventually are led to a four-story Hall of Witness where they silently can contemplate what they have learned about the horrors of the past. In The Women’s Museum, the path from above to below moves the visitor to contemplate only the ease of the future that lies ahead for her, not the lessons of past struggles.
The walking tour and exhibit placement convey a primary value to the things contemporary, while literally locating the past in the shadows, corners, and stairwells. Upon entry the visitor stands in the large open space called “The SBC Gathering” and encounters two of the museum’s signature elements: the Electronic Quilt and the Bank of America Grand Stairway and Wall of Words. The Electronic Quilt is a 35-foot tall display on which the blocks comprising the “quilt” are thirty different video screens that flash images of faces, the museum’s logo, and artifacts like political buttons. The faces morph from one to another: Gloria Steinem might dissolve into Amelia Earhart into Mary Kay Ash. This display is a clever harkening to the tradition of women’s quilt making as a form of expression, but specifically avoids any value judgments regarding its juxtapositions. The message is that the women depicted and the activities they represent are of equal significance, whether in protest, adventure, entertainment, or the cosmetics business. The Grand Stairway continues this blurring of distinctions, leading visitors up along a curved wall on which are displayed quotations from famous women, again co-mingling political figures with entertainers.
Additional aspects of the hierarchical ordering structured by the walking path emerge when the visitor explores the second level. The initial exhibits encountered are the “Milestones in Women’s History” and “Unforgettable Women” displays. The first is an undulating wall of facts and names that begins at the year 1500 and follows a timeline to the present. The other is a set of thirteen cases displaying artifacts and quotations representing notable women. These exhibits are grouped thematically, placing three women – sometimes oddly juxtaposed – in the same case. For example, under the title “Record Breakers” one finds adventurer Amelia Earhart, athlete Babe Didrickson Zaharias and attorney Sarah Weddington. These exhibits are the most traditionally historical in the museum, but are placed in a covered hallway area and are relatively dark and uninteresting compared to what lies ahead in the circulation path. Turning a corner brings the visitor directly out into the open, brightly lit main space of the museum and provides immediate access to some of the most interactive and entertaining exhibits, an architectural message telling them that it is desirable to leave the boring, stuffy past behind as quickly as possible.
The featured exhibits on the remainder of the second floor work to reinforce the message that only a brief homage is due to historical context in defining what is significant regarding women. The visitor now can sample from among the “Funny Women” exhibit, the poetry and music booth, or the “Words that Changed Our Lives” display. The latter is a set of three touch screens where when visitors can select a term – such as slavery, sexism, motherhood, virtue, or racism – they are presented with the names of three women and a brief quotation from each. Selection of “suffrage” brings up the choice of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth, while “feminism” presents Kate Millet, Susan Faludi, and Betty Friedan. Another touch of the screen sends the words up an electronic post that extends far above the visitor. The technological wizardry here is spectacular, but the words are devoid of context and relation. The effect dazzles, but the exhibit conveys little sense of each woman’s historical significance, let alone any knowledge of the concrete circumstances in which her words emerged.

Two additional placements illustrate the hierarchy that privileges the celebration of achievement over contemplation of the past. From the second level the visitor exits into a stairwell containing a comparatively small and traditional display called “In the Spirit” that addresses women’s contributions to religion and spiritual life. Unlabelled black and white portraits are suspended from overhead, and at the top of the stairwell is a small board that briefly identifies eighteen women and their writings or achievements. Accompanying the narrative display is a small, dark case containing some artifacts and objects. By contrast, upon leaving the staircase and entering the first level the visitor immediately sees the large video screen and the colorful sports display. The lighting and placement priorities also dramatically are illustrated by the large case juxtaposed to the right of the sports area. Here the visitor finds the “Organized Movements” exhibit that houses memorabilia and artifacts from a wide variety of social protest and public advocacy campaigns. The materials are not ordered chronologically, nor are political campaigns distinguished from social reform. Situated adjacent to the bright multiple colors of the sports exhibit to the left and the brilliant blues and greens of the medicine and health area to its right, the movements exhibit literally is consigned to a dark corner.
The last exhibit perhaps best exemplifies the rhetorical implications of the museum’s depiction of oppression as an archive best suited for the shadows. After placing the past in its architectural attic, the museum’s walking tour ends in a small auditorium where visitors are shown a seven-minute film called “The Next Thing.” Accompanied by images of people of diverse ages and ethnicities, a female voice states: “For your convenience the next exhibit is open 24 hours and features life size displays in no particular order. We have a name for this exhibit: we call it the future.” The film portrays this future as an open space full of possibility, and the visitor herself as a work in progress. While the sentiment here is admirable, the depiction exemplifies the progressivist rhetorical strategy by placing the visitor in a utopia free of worry.

3.3 Textuality
Museums also communicate at the symbolic and textual level. Specific language and image choices convey a museum’s message in powerful ways, revealing the values and relationships it seeks to promote. As Ferguson (1996) argues, a museum’s exhibits comprise strategic systems of representation (178). While a full description of the textual strategies employed by The Women’s Museum is beyond the scope of this analysis, the interpretation of some significant discursive choices and juxtapositions can further reveal the values it espouses and the rhetorical tensions in its discourse.
First, the museum’s utopian focus ironically is challenged by its own logo, the “Spirit of the Centennial” statue at its entrance. Standing 16 feet tall, the statue depicts a nude woman grasping the thorny branches of a cactus. Proponents of the museum interpret it as a positive symbol, reading it as a depiction of the female rising from the thorns. Founder Bonner suggested that “it represents all women’s struggle for recognition” (Frisinger, 2000, E4), while at the groundbreaking ceremony Hillary Rodham Clinton said the image “somehow sums up a woman’s life to me. There will be a lot of stories of lots of women who may have stepped on a few or had a few thrust at them, but came right out and kept going time and time again” (Hutcheson, 1998, 5F). Yet, what such interpretations deflect is a reading of the statue within the meanings of the nude female from the tradition of high art. As Berger (1972) argues, ways of seeing the female developed wherein the nude signifies woman as object, or as a container for patriarchal notions of nature contemplated or civilization redeemed. These embedded meanings of the nude provide an alternative reading to the woman and cactus statue as a sign of activity; rather, the piece serves as a reminder that the decontextualization of women’s experience found in the museum is connected to a legacy of objectifying women rather than locating them as active subjects.
Second, the presence of corporate sponsor identifiers accompanying the texts of most exhibits signifies a crucial economic intersection that determines the museum’s particular nomination and hierarchical strategies. Museums must compete for public audiences in a time when amusement parks and multimedia attractions are becoming increasingly sophisticated (Harris, 1999; McLean, 1999; Noriega, 1999; Pittman, 1999; Roberts, 1997; Weil, 1999). This pressure to garner consumer dollars coincident with a shrinking source of government funds leads to the circumstance where there is breakdown of distinctions between museums and other sites of entertainment (Noriega, 1999); consequently, they depend upon corporate sponsorship with increasing frequency (McLean, 1999). Cultural critics denounce this “Disneyfication” of the museum, and argue that corporate entanglements inherently influence exhibit contents (Dubin, 1999). Significantly, Mayo (1994) argues that it is not an accident that as corporate funding increases the amount of political and feminist content in museums decreases. In The Women’s Museum, the exhibits with even a small amount of political content – the Organized Movements and the Words that Changed Our Lives displays – have no corporate sponsors.
Third, the language chosen to describe exhibits reveals a museum’s values. The “It’s Amazing” exhibit in particular exposes how linguistic depictions direct the attention toward specific meanings while deflecting others (Burke, 1966). First, the title of the exhibit invites a reaction of disbelief and implies that the contents address circumstances no longer in existence. The placard at the entry to the maze reinforces this interpretation: “Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. That’s definitely the case with America’s more outrageous attempts to explain the differences between men and women. Take a journey through the bizarre, entertaining – but absolutely true – aspects of folklore, legends, and stereotypes about gender.” By labeling the contents as “folklore, legends, and stereotypes” the museum invokes powerful meanings attached to these terms that associate them with the opposite of truth. Hence, the language connotes that incredulity is the proper response, and that the contents should be treated as curious relics of what people believed in a time now past. Though the maze actually contains descriptions of gender role definitions still very much in practice, the terminological screen works against the visitor seeing their contemporary manifestations.

4. Conclusion
This analysis of the discursive practices of The Women’s Museum reveals that it extols the virtues of women in a largely apolitical way, placing them as recipients of a utopian future free of struggle. The nomination strategies that characterize the exhibit contents celebrate contemporary achievements, especially those in popular entertainment, but avoid controversial topics and personalities, particularly those that could be construed as feminist. The hierarchy of values reinforced through architecture and exhibit placement clearly places the contemporary personalities as the featured actors, while location and lighting strategies diminish the interest and impact of past achievements. The museum’s walking tour deposits visitors into a future where anything is possible, ignorant of any need to look to the past for lessons and guidance. Finally, the textual strategies work to further underscore these values through symbolic articulations that deny contradictions and unite corporate sponsorship with exhibit contents.
These discursive meanings create an understanding of women’s history and experience that is narrow and limited. Importantly, critics describe museums as “modern ritual settings in which visitors enact complex and often deep psychic dramas about identity” (Duncan, 1993, 192) and as “potent force[s] in the forging of self-consciousness” (Kaplan, 1994, 1). Historical museums discursively can figure the visitor’s sense of identity in regard to its contents in several ways that correspond to the forms Kenneth Burke (1945/1960) describes as the four master tropes. A metaphoric construction might lead visitors to see similarities and correspondences between their experiences and the articulated past. A synedochic construction might demonstrate to the visitor how she is part of a greater whole, or, how certain historical events or persons represent a larger context. Even an ironic figuration might lead a visitor to question what she knows by constructing new relationships that invoke fresh patterns of awareness through, a perspective by incongruity. However, in The Women’s Museum, women’s identity is articulated in a metonymic relationship in regard to the exhibit contents. The complexity of women’s experience is reduced to the simple celebration of the most easily accessible and least offensive parts. Consequently, the identities construed in the visitor’s encounter with the museum’s exhibits are limited and uncomplicated. Though on the surface The Women’s Museum appears inclusive and diverse, its discursive strategies reveal meanings constrained by their cheerfulness and limited by their caution.

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The result of modern dynamic global changes in the world has created special interest in the communicative process as a means for overcoming certain prejudices and transgressing boundaries in modern societies. This transgression is connected with the development of new paradigms in discourse analysis, which allow seeing the meaning of words, public speeches and interviews in relation to the overall global context part of which they are. This becomes especially important when the speeches political leaders make and interviews they give become part of virtual communication via the Internet. Their speedy translations into English expand the audience to global size and we believe that the functional rhetorical impact is not limited to direct actors of the interview situation.
We chose the genre of the interview as a subject of our paper because of its great potential in disclosing the interactive strategies of the participants and pragma-dialectical features of the resulting texts, the study of which, as we’ll attempt to demonstrate, can further develop the argumentation theory. Besides, this type of communication is connected with the what is known as source approach (McNair, 1995, XIII).
In the Oxford English Dictionary, the interview is defined as a “face to face meeting for the purpose of a formal conference, between a representative of the press and someone from  whom he wishes to obtain statements for publication”. The genre of the interview appeared in the US in the middle of the 19th century. Two eminent figures are credited for having invented the interview: Horace Greely, editor of The New York Tribune, and James Gordon Bennett Sr, the proprietor of The New York Herald.
The rapid development of this genre in mid-nineteenth century came as a result of many factors, the most significant of which was the new perception of public figures. According to Christopher Silvester, the editor of The Norton Book of Interviews, “The interview created for the reader an illusion of intimacy with celebrities” (Silvester, 1996, 5). He calls the interview “a broken-backed form of discourse which is necessarily partial” (op. cit., 3).

At the same time, “the interview technique grew from the familiarity of journalists and readers with verbatim court reports” (op. cit., 4). Therefore, from early on the form of interview has been earmarked by its connection to the court procedure. As will be shown below, its rhetorical structure still retains the idea of the two competing parties in a situation similar to the one in the courtroom. The difference lying in the fact that there are has two “consistent isotopies in legal discourse: its legislative level and its referential level” (Greimas, 1990, 102-106) whereas we have in the interview one referential level.
Rhetorical approach is connected with the pragma-dialectics as a theory and we follow the idea that the Aristotelian norm of successful persuasion is not necessarily in contradiction with the idea of reasonableness. Thus formal (a-rhetorical) approach is not necessarily looked upon as contradictory to anti-formal – functional, contextual one. Frans van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser write of three levels of manoevering. “Rhetorical manoevering can consist of making a choice from the options constituting the topical potential associated with a particular discussion stage, in deciding on a certain adaptation to auditorial demand, and in taking policy  in the exploitation of presentational devices” (Eemeren, Houtlosser, 1999, 165). Topical maneuvering in confrontation stage is conducive to the most effective choice among potential issues for discussion by restricting the disagreement space. Auditorial demand is creating a “communion” and by presentational devices following Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca new rhetoric concept, we believe that rhetorical figures attract attention and bring the change of perspective (Op. cit. 167). This changing perspective is of special importance to present-daypublic speaking in Russia.

Our paper focuses on rhetorical devices and argumentative techniques as they appear in the interviews given by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the course of the last three years from 2000 through 2002. The interest in the rhetorical features that appear in the public addresses of the new generation of Russian politicians rises from the fact that the latter are in stark contrast to the preceding practice of Soviet Public speaking. We can now say with confidence that the Soviet rhetoric based on unsubstantiated evaluative utterances demised together with the regime (Maslennikova, 1998). In their public appearances, the Russian leaders of the interim period showed varying ability of public speaking, which attracted linguistic attention rather for its faults than for its merits. The new generation of leaders stands out for a considerably improved use of argumentation and ability to answer spontaneous questions, let alone correct use of grammar. In this respect, President Putin’s interviews can serve as interesting and gratifying material for the study of subtext, allusions and tropes in argumentation.

Before we present out findings we would like to introduce the three basic ideas underlying our analysis:
1. From the vantage point of political discourse, we will follow the understanding of political language offered by Brian McNair, Denton and Woodward. These scholars stress the intentionality of political communication, which encompasses “all forms of communication undertaken by political actors for the purpose of achieving specific objectives” (McNair, 1999, 5). Political communication is normally connected with the struggle for power and establishing the dominant or more stable position in social environment. Though discourse theory constitutes a relatively new approach to political analyses, attention has been drawn to the articulation in political practices (Howarth 1995, 118; 124-127) including not only “collective actants” like political institutions and organizations (see a company as a collective actant for persuasive and interpretive analysis in Greimas Social Semiotics (Greimas, 1990) but individuals as well..
We claim one of thee rhetorical shifts in interviews are in their pragmatic structure. The interviewer addresses his/her questions to the interviewee, who addresses his/her answers to the newspaper readers or televiewers. It is most obvious when we watch live interviews on television: the interviewee alternatively faces and addresses the viewers and the journalists. The interviewee is also prone to indirectly address the audience, both national and international through such statements as: “We would like the people of our countries to feel safe…”. “Petersburg is known for its patriotism, it has always been a characteristic feature of its residents”.

2. With all respect to the Bakhtinian School, we will attempt to deviate from the too well-established dialogical approach to text, and postulate that any text is, in actual fact, a combination of dialogical and monological constituents. Not to go into the extremes we will argue that a monologue is a certain a speech momentum in developing a topical content of one speaker. Either of these two constituenta can play the dominating role in the text’s pragmatic structure, thus implementing the speaker’s strategy. This strategy bears the influence of the speech genre: some genres are predominantly dialogical while others move the monological constituent to the front. Compare fiction and scientific discourse with the monological dominance in the latter. What is of significance for the purposes of this paper is the fact that while one of the constituents predominates in the text, the other one becomes covert, constituting the subtext which can be revealed through a set of markers.

3. Hence, we would argue that, paradoxical, as it may seem, interviews can be approaches as two parallel argumentative texts, each of which is designed by the participants according to their communicative strategies. One of them, produced by the interviewee is explicit while the other which belongs to the interviewer remains implicit, and only occasionally comes to the surface of the text the genre of interview allows for an open battle of constituents since it is in the interview that the monologue and the dialogue are most obviously at odds with one another. The goal of the interviewee is to express his or her view on an issue, while the goal of the interviewer is to direct the communication in accordance with a certain scenario. The aggregate of the answers is an organized set of mini-monologues of varying length, which are integrated into a longer monologue. The predominance of the monological constituent in the speech of the interviewee is readily revealed in the fact that many interviews are published without the interviewer’s questions, retain a sufficient semantic and pragmatic unity of the text.
The techniques of preparing the main message for the interviewers can be traced in President Putin’s account of his conversation with President Bush prior to their joint press conference in Liubliana in June of 2001 (Johnson’s Russia List #5312).

Putin: “I must say that I think from the very outset that I had a definite plan for our conversation just as he did. I suggested starting a discussion on specific issues, on those issues that provoke the greatest concern in the world, in relations between the two sides, and give rise to a certain atmosphere, to be specific, problems of antimissile defense.”
He listened carefully and then said: “Listen, let us talk on the whole about how relations have developed between the two countries over the past few years, the state that we are now, and where we are now, and let us look to the future.
… I must say in this respect he definitely took the initiative and changed the nature of the conversation but I was very pleased with this formulation of the question. I think that we did not utter just formalities at the news conference. A situation has indeed arisen that can be characterized by a fairly high level of trust.”

4. The communicative structure of the interview can be studied in reference to the actors ‘roles through defining the type of the interview. These interview types are fairly generalized forms like types of arguments, which are abstracted from any particular content (Tretyakova 1995) and they reflect the “communication key” which can be compared to a general code of conduct (Eemeren, 1996) where dispositional attitudes are disclosed within the interview proper. Apart from types there are certain schemes that reflect relations between what is stated as a premise and what is stated as a standpoint.

On the whole we analyzed 12 interviews given by President Putin to both Russian and foreign correspondents. These interviews fall into three main categories:
a. the unison interview characterized by coinciding pragmatic strategies of the participants, or, as it were, an interview in which questions do not create any problems for the interviewee and allow him to express his ideas and views in full. In this case the interviewee lives up to the interviewers expectation.
b. probing interviews presuppose neutrality of the questions asked while the  goal of these questions is to obtain extensive reaction to the burning political issues of which the interviewer becomes the mouthpiece;
c. aggressive interview, whereby the interviewer’s goal is to reveal the negative aspects of the interviewee’s views, position and even personality. In the extreme cases the journalist may have in mind damaging the reputation of or completely destroying the political actor he interviews.

1. Unison Interviews
A unison interview is often used for public relation practices and there exists a presupposed agreement between the interviewer and the interviewee. Thus the space for topical maneuvering is extremely wide. In fact, the interviewer does not set any restrictions on the answers. On the contrary, he or she plays to the advantage of the celebrity interviewed. Consider a most recent example of the interview given to The Russian National Broadcasting Company (RTR) and one of Petersburg newspapers, “Nevskoe Vremia” on the 10th of June 2002.

Q.: “Vladimir Vladimirovich it is in some way symbolic that these days we are celebrating the 330th birthday of Peter the Great, the tsar who had not only founded a new capital of the empire, but had also created this very special atmosphere for which the city is known. Since very early time, people have been talking of the spirit of St.Petersburg. What does it mean for you? Does it exist for you?”
Putin: “Yes, it does. It does exist for me, especially, because Petersburg was founded at the time which we call the golden days of Russian statehood. To a certain extent, it was a break-through into the future. And it is this spirit, the spirit of innovation, the spirit of pioneering, of breaking-through, which is, in my view, characteristic of Petersburg. However, that is not the whole story. I have not just randomly mentioned that Petersburg used to be the country’s capital in the golden days of its statehood. It explains, in my opinion, the fact that Petersburg has never separated its destiny from the destiny of the rest of the state. In this sense, and in the best sense of the word, Petersburg is known for its patriotism, it has always been a characteristic feature of its residents.
As a young man I had practically never traveled out of town. When I finally visited an average Russian city – I was simply crushed because I had lived under the impression that all other cities in the country should be like Petersburg, like Leningrad. What am I driving at? I am driving at an idea that it is the architecture, it is the harmony, the harmony in everything – in the outlines of individual buildings, streets and parks – that shapes up the taste of any resident, whether he goes to the Mariinsky Theatre every week or not, whether he visits the Russian Museum or the Hermitage every month or not. The city itself makes an imprint on its residents, creating harmony in their souls and giving them an incentive to strive towards harmony in their lives. It is also very important, in my view, – I would say it is one of the distinguishing features of Petersburg and the people who live in this city.”

In the excerpt above, we can reveal the following features of a unison communication:
a. the complete accord between the interviewer and the interviewee, thus confrontational interaction is reduced almost to zero;
b. the agreement on the predominantly positive axiological features of the evaluations;
c. the implied comparison: in this case to the time of Peter the Great, which is flattering to the current president.

The role of the interviewer is to a large extent reduced to hinting to a topic and allowing the interviewee to freely and without interruption express his views on the issue.
As for president Putin’s answer, we can observe his rhetorical arsenal, including shift of registers (cf. “Petersburg has never separated its destiny from the destiny of the rest of the state” as opposed to “I was simply crushed”), the use of rhetorical question as a composition organizing device (“What am I driving at?”), the construction of his remarks from general to the specific with vast examples from his own life.

2. Probing Interviews
A probing interview presupposes maximum objectivity on the part of the interviewer who makes a point of sticking to the facts rather than attitudes and assessments. Probing interviews are used for the disclosure of public image of elite actors or examination of some phenomenon.
The interviewee’s space for maneuvering is to a large extent restricted by the nature of the questions. Besides, the monological constituent and most importantly the pragmatic function of the interviewer’s text is implemented with the purpose providing direction for the answers.. Monological constituent here is so strong that the disclosure can be done as an Interview in a book form it happened with the book about V. Putin (Gevorkyan et al., 2000) or the set of  Interviews with Noah Chomsky following the attacks of September 11, 2001 on World Trade Center and the Pentagon which were compiled as a book (Chomsky, 2001).

Consider the following example from President Putin’s interview to American journalists on the 12th of November 2001 (Johnson’s Russia List #5541):
Q: “Mr. President, you supported the USA in this difficult and responsible time of war against terrorism without any preliminary conditions. What would you like to get in return and what result do you want to achieve?”
This is my first question.
My second question is concerned with the statement by bin Laden to the effect that he had nuclear weapons, which the media reported. Do you think this may be true? And a related question:
“Are you sure of the reliable safety of the Russian nuclear arsenal?”
Putin: “Let’s begin with our vision of the results of our joint efforts in the struggle against terror and what we would like to see at the end of this joint work. To begin with, we would like to see positive results of the joint efforts against terrorism, to attain a joint positive result, with terrorism eradicated, routed, liquidated not only in Afghanistan but also throughout the world.
We would like to root out the conditions that engender extremism of different stripes. We would like to liquidate the channels of financing extremism in all its forms. We would like the people of our countries to feel safe.
And lastly, the derivative result of this joint work. We would like to create such new relations between Russia and the USA that would enable us to develop relations in all other spheres of collaboration. We would like to create a new quality of our relations. And we would certainly like to see the USA as a reliable and predictable partner.
This strategic task is much more important, as I see it, than any short-lived material advantages.
As for the international terrorists’ threat to use mass destruction weapons, we have had this in the Caucasus. As a rule, these threats are made and used to engender fear and uncertainty in the people, to influence the political leadership of the countries that are struggling against terrorism.
In the Caucasus this ended in an attempt to use home made jury-rigged devices, which could have an adverse effect on the environment. Indeed, they made such attempts, but they were ineffective. I think that in this sense the man you mentioned differs little from his disciples who are operating in the North Caucasus, in Russia. I would not overestimate the danger. But it would be likewise wrong to underestimate it, above all because we know about bin Laden’s connection with some radical quarters in Pakistan. And Pakistan is a nuclear power after all.
And we certainly should extend all possible support to general Musharraf in all his undertakings designed to consolidate the public forces in the country, support his attempts to ensure the involvement of Pakistan in the struggle of the international community against terror” (Johnson’s Russia List # 5541, 1-2).

The interviewer begins with stating the internationally acknowledged fact of Russia’s support in the US war on terror voiced be President Putin immediately after the bombing of the Twin Towers in NY City. However, the question following this statement downplays the ethical value of Russia’s position and focuses on the political and economic rewards Russia could be looking for in return for its position: “What would you like to get in return?” We can observe an immediate shrinking of the topical maneuvering space.
This is the point when the interviewer and the interviewee find themselves in a position similar to that of a courtroom. President Putin, finding himself in the position of the Council for the Defense and well-aware of the speaker’s intention, implicitly returns to the initial point of discussion: Russia and the US are equal partners in the fight against terrorism.

However, towards the end of his answer, adhering to his principle of confronting and answering any question, he fires back: “This strategic task is much more important, as I see it, than any short-lived material advantages.” By placing this part of his answer in the strong position at the end of his mini-monologue, he enhances its finality and importance.
The second question also starts with a statement. What makes it different it from the first question is lack of proof which makes the speaker resort to reinforcement through reference to other sources: “the statement by bin Laden to the effect that he had nuclear weapons, which the media reported.”
The nature of the question “Do you think this may be true?” is obviously different from the previous one: the interviewee is not limited in either the scope or direction of his answer. Hence, the change in the format of the response which turns into a mini-lecture on how to deal with information coming from the terrorists. Putin follows the classical pattern thesis-antithesis-synthesis:
thesis: these threats are made and used to engender fear and influence the political leadership;
antithesis:  it would be wrong to underestimate the danger, because of bin Laden’s connection with  radical quarters in Pakistan. And Pakistan is a nuclear power after all;
synthesis: we should support General Musharraff’s attempts to ensure the involvement of Pakistan in the struggle of the international community against terror.”

Each part of President Putin’s answer is supplied with argumentation ranging from statement of fact to the intentional repeated use of the Caucusus example which draws an implicit parallel between the war in Afghanistan and the Russian war in Chechnya.
The answer to the third question, presented somewhat on the sidelines but in actual fact, one of utmost importance: “Are you sure of the reliable safety of the Russian nuclear arsenal?” remains unanswered, which is a rare case for Mr Putin’s interviews and Q and A sessions.

Another example of a probing interview is the one given by President Putin to the correspondents of the Russian newspapers “Izvestia,” “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” and “Trud” in March of 2001 (Johnson’s Russia List #5135):
Q.: “You became president of the Russian Federation almost a year ago. What have been achieved since then? What are the successes; what are the failures?”
Putin: “We haven’t achieved everything we planned. In my view, however, we’ve done the most important things. Specifically, we’ve made considerable progress toward strengthening Russian statehood. Remember the state we were living in? One in four regional laws was unconstitutional or counter to federal legislation. Two-thirds of regional laws have now been brought into compliance with the constitution.”

One more example from the same interview illustrates the use of evaluative constructions with preceding argumentation:
For the sake of brevity, we will allow ourselves to summarize a fairly lengthy question.
Q.: “Why does Russia have to pay off the Former Soviet Union’s debts while the other states of the former union refuse to recognize Russia’s jurisdiction over the Former Soviet Union’s property abroad which was supposedly granted in return for assuming the payments.”
President Putin: “All this property is still considered Soviet, and therefore its ownership is considered debatable. But we are paying billions in debts on behalf of the former Soviet Union States. That is why I don’t think much of this decision.”

3. Aggressive Interviews
Aggressive interviews are of special interest for the purposes of this paper since they usually have negative assumptions or preconceived ideas as their point of departure. These are the texts in which the interviewer takes an active position in the course of the Q and A procedure The interviewer’s goal is to reveal the negative aspects of the interviewee’s views, position and even personality. In the extreme cases the journalist may have in mind damaging the reputation of or completely destroying the political actor he interviews. It is a very challenging dialogue where presentational devices play an important role, as they are signs of an instrumental relation between the premise and the standpoint.
The complexity of aggressive interview lies in the shifts that may lead to the preference of disagreement instead of resolution of the discussion. One of the goals of this interview not just to seek information but to argue certain points of view. The convergence of topical potential, auditoria demand and rhetorical devices may form a comprehensive expressive interview. By expressive function we mean emotional intensity of speech strategies that is reflected in the expressive syntax – repetitions, split sentences, pseudo-questions and figurative speech with metaphors and catchphrases.

One example of this kind of interviews is Putin’s interview to a Canadian Correspondent Michel Cornier CBC. It starts with a brief introduction and a general question “Have you decided, Mr President, to give a pardon to Mr. Edmund Pope?”
Putin (translation):
“According to the legislation in force in the Russian Federation, such a decision may be effective only after a decision of the court. It will be effective on December 14 at midnight, since then I can take as decision.”
Cornier,CBC:
“Have you decided, Mr. President, to give a pardon to Mr. Edmund Pope?”
Putin (translation):
“According to the legislation in force in the Russian Federation, such a decision may be effective only after a decision of the court. It will be effective on December 14 at midnight. Only after that can I make a decision.”
Translation2:
“Under our legislation such a decision can only be taken after the decision by court, the court verdict has entered into a force and that will happen on the 14th December 14th at zero hours. And I will be in a position to take that decision only after that.”

Here we have repletion of the same question and three ways of translation from Russian into English which show the importance of the issues under discussion and
1. give the audience readers right for the interpretation by analyzing the differences;
2. to take over the attention of the audience and
3. to take the initiative for topical maneuvering. The next offered topic is the images of the two countries:
Cornier CBC:
“Mr. President, the image Canadians have of the relationship between Russia and Canada is about hockey. Now what image do you want to project about Russia to Canadians and the image that you want to project about yourself to Canadians?”
Putin (translation):
“The impression which has been with regard to hockey during first match between national team and Russian team in 1972 – we are good neighbours. We are strong states/ We have things to be proud of/ We are almost neighbours in our territory in the North/ We are in a position to resolve our issues on a good neighbourly position and we have the prospects of resolving our common problems jointly.”
Cornier CBC:
“What image do you have of Canada? Do you know the country at all?”
Putin (translation):
“It is not very difficult to make a conclusion with regard to what kind of country Canada is because I visited that country just one time about six years ago. I was in the south of Canada in one of scientific centers and in addition I have to say that we are very similar countries with regard to sizes of our territories. We are vast countries. Russia. As we know is the largest country as to its territory in the world and Canada follows in that list.”

Here we have pointed out appealing questions that can be interpreted as arrogant – projecting images and not expressing sincere attitude and insulting the interviewee by implying the lack of knowledge on the issue. Mr. Putin, taking no offence changed the key of the interview into positive mood by saying that Canada is a powerful state and that there is a very favourable attitude towards the country in Russia especially in terms of hockey.
The Interviewer leads his energetic path and the shift to assault appears in series of assertions and questions where modality plays and important role:
Comier,CBC:
“Mr. President, Canadians have maybe a bad image of Russia, the wrong image but thy think it’s a place that you can’t really do business, that it’s maybe poor or not yet very organized. Can you say anything to Canadians? Can you do anything to change that perception?”
Putin (translation):
“First of all, we have to root out those problems which do exist in reality and secondly objectively and in full to show the real picture of life in our country. It is true that we cannot say that our population is fairly rich. We cannot say that our population is rich – there are many low-income people and there are lots of poor people. This is a fact.”

It is obvious that in his answer Mr. Putin is reflexive and he is giving comment on the posed questions using statements with modals as well. This proves the fact of rhetorical competence of Vladimir Putin because in his replies he does not omit forwarded unpleasant inquiries. He is reflexive as to the content and continues his speech program using the same wording but in another key thus introducing the rhetorical shift into a non-aggressive speech programme.
In the aggressive interviews that made the interviewee usually resorts to rhetorical figures as a means of expanding the maneuvering space. Here are some used by Vladimir Putin in a number of his interviews: I’ll kiss you later if you still want it – a popular quotation from  Russian version of “Charlie’s Aunt” meaning a mild threat; We’ll keep the flies separate from hamburgers – a popular saying meaning one should solve the problem after proper analysis; Where is the money? referring to the money which disappeared in the off-shore investments of the Russian oligarchs. These rhetorical figures occupying strong positions in the president’s’ statements create a rhetorical shift enhancing the communicative strength of the statement.

Conclusion
The analysis of interviews given by Russian president V. Putin allows to conclude that modern Russian political discourse is based on classical rhetorical forms and that the interview as a genre is an effective form of political discourse serving as modern means of information exchange which expandss the number of interview actors.
Rhetorical shifts in Interviews are connected with the interpretation of the interview as a discourse form with asymmetrical pragmatic structure when the addressee is shifted via TV, radio, the Internet to an extremely wide audience. This leads to a considerably more complex interaction whereby the actual effect of the Q and A exchange drifts into the domain of virtual communication.
Rhetorical shifts as we have tried to show are connected with the juxtaposition of two constituents: the dialogical and the monological one. The prevailing position of either of them allows to distinguish three types of the interviews. The unison interview is characterized by coinciding pragmatic strategies of the participants. There is actually no confrontation stage and both the premise and the standpoint are similar, reflecting the relations of analogy. Both speech strategies are based on predominantly coinciding axiological features of the evaluations. The role of the interviewer is to a large extent reduced to the interviewee to freely and without interruption  cover the whole of the .topical space.
Probing interviews presuppose neutrality of the questions asked while the goal of these questions is to obtain extensive reaction to the burning political issues of which the interviewer becomes the mouthpiece. Relations between the premise and the standpoint are symptomatic, showing credibility and concomitance.
Aggressive interviews, whereby the interviewer’s goal is to reveal the negative aspects of the interviewee’s views, position and even personality. The interviewer’s questions restrict to a minimum the interviewee’s topical maneuvering space, making the latter resort to indirect means of expression and rhetorical figures, including communicative idioms. It is this type of an interview where the relations between the premise and the standpoint is an instrumental one leading to the use of diverse presentational devices of both actors. Reflexive strategy and rhetorical figures that attract attention become of special importance here.

REFERENCES
Chomsky Noah (2001). 9-11. An Open Media Book. Seven Stories Press. New York
Eemeren Frans H.van & Houtlosser Peter (1999). Delivering the goods in critical discussion. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, June 16-19 1998.
Eemeren Frans H.van (1996). Argumentation and Democracy. Speech Communication and Argumentation. Vol.2 ,4-19.
Gevorkyan Natalya, Timakova Natalya, Kolesnikov Andrey (2000). First Person. An Astonishingly Frank Self Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. Hutchinson. London .
Greimas Algirdas J. (1990).The Social Science: A Semiotic View. University of Minnesota press. Minnesota.
Howarth David (1995) Discourse theory. In: D. Marsh  &  G.Stoker  (Eds.)  Theory and methods in Political Science. Palgrave. New York.
Maslennikova Anna A. (1998). The Communist Language: Changes and Paradoxes. Philosophy in Post Communist Europe. Dane R. Gordon (Ed.) Rodopy. Amsterdam- Atalanta Georgia.
McNair Brian (1999).  An Introduction to political Communication. London.
Silvester Christopher (Ed.) (1996) Silvester Christopher (Ed.) (1996) The Norton Book of Interviews. An Anthology from 1859 to the present Day. W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London.
Tretyakova Tatyana P. (1995) Levels of stereotype in political discussions from the perspective of argumentation theory. Special Fields and Cases. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation. June 21-24 1994 (pp.225-229). Sic Sat. Amsterdam. The Netherlands
Tretyakova Tatyana P. (1999). Sustainable development: new paradigms in discourse linguistics. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation. June 16-19,1998 (pp.804-806) Sic Sat. Amsterdam. The Netherlands

Vladimir V. Putin’s Interviews and Speeches:
Johnson’s Russia List : #4716 , 31 December 2000; # 5135, March 6,2001 ;#5312, 20 June 2001# 5420, 1-st September  2001; #5541  12 November 2001; # 6195, 19 April 2002.
Nevskoye Vremya, 11 June 2002.
Michel Cormier, CBC. An Interview with Vladimir Putin, 13 June 2002.
//http: cbc.ca/ indepth/putin

[I]f there are times when dissent is appropriate and justified, [then] public deliberation cannot proceed strictly under the banner of mutual understanding. When the public’s form is fixed by a presupposition of consensus, the creative and generative elements of opposition are squandered before they ever appear. The citizen wakes up in a public, but has nothing to say (Erik W. Doxtader).

1. Introduction
The contestation of voices in contemporary public discourse has reached an impasse of a special type. While discourses themselves continue to foment, fragment, and reconstitute at a deceptively healthy pace, the conceptual grounds upon which they do so, the discursive sites of their activity, have stagnated. In so doing, these sites have inadvertently come to undermine the political efficacy of
1. the discourses they serve; and
2. speakers’ efforts to enact those discourses in local, productive spheres of influence. Uprooted from formerly fertile, now dessicated, soil, public discourse writ large has lost much of its rhetorical purchase and an equal measure of its practical strength. With both the sites of speech and speech itself compromised in this way, what remain to us are fractious, diluted schemas of “the public sphere(s)” or “civil society,” any or all of which are poor conceptual substitutes for vigorous and inclusive public deliberation among active citizens speaking in spheres of fruitful civic association.

So goes the line of argument we seek to explore in this essay, an essay which responds to widespread reports of theoretical dead-ends reached by theorists and critics who were once hopeful of framing spheres of public discourse in ways that might encourage inclusive forms of deliberation among engaged private citizens. Though we do not presume ourselves able to gerrymander the conceptual terrain of public speech in a way that would afford ideal breathing room for all, we do think it crucial to ask why it is that the most obvious and, in recent years, most lauded corrective to disintegrative public discourse, civility, has failed to make the difference that so many parties from so many quarters have expected it to make. In the interests of rhetorical pragmatism, we question civility at the scene of the proverbial crime: at sites of its application as the argumentative crown jewel of contemporary rhetorical theorizing’s pet project, civil society.
Contending as we do that efforts to promote civility as an ameliorative agent in civil sphere deliberation have failed in some crucial respects, we offer an alternative perspective on the problem, in hopes of establishing two claims. First, we seek to show how civility is intentionally or unintentionally wielded so as to silence oppositional or counterpublical voices in public contexts, thereby removing the very possibility of real “argument” from the equation. We find that this is most often accomplished by default, as efforts to apply “civility” directly in the service of real citizens’ real speech frequently fail. Second, and relatedly, we argue that civility’s sub rosa gatekeeping of what counts or does not count as “legitimate” speech in the civil sphere is both dangerous and deeply misguided. As we hope to make evident, our second claim is the unintended outcome of the failure of the efforts described in our first claim. That is, failing to apply itself to the meat of the deliberative problem in question, “civility” instead tends broadly to bracket one set of argumentative possibilities in favor of a simple but weak reinscription of another.

Emerging from these claims is a third and larger one: that civility’s true task must be the guarding, not gatekeeping, of fair, inclusive, public/argumentative infrastructures, not content. As we see it, the latter must be altogether freed from well-intentioned but ultimately disingenuous attempts to keep public conversations “on the right track” and/or “on the right topic,” while the former must be secured and stabilized only insofar as is necessary to permit full discussion of matters at hand. In the final analysis, we claim that public discourse is successful only and precisely to the extent that its calls for civility protect those speaking voices that are prima facie incivil or disruptive of a civil sphere’s normative discourses, because only protection this assiduous promises to secure full deliberative inclusion of all comers. Oppositional or counterpublical speakers must not merely be permitted to upset the apple cart; the cart must productively and acceptably remain in disarray for as long as is necessary for all parties to give full voice to their positions, even to the extent that suasive forms of disruption may result in a permanent skewing of what was previously held to be normative, acceptable, stable. Only in this way may conceptual frameworks of the public sphere and civil society achieve the fructifying deliberative outcomes that their framers so often champion but so seldom deliver.

2. The Overlooked Middle    
Erik W. Doxtader (2001) praises various conceptual efforts made by theorists hoping to inscribe participatory public spaces, but worries that the discursive tensions between societal norms and subaltern or counterpublical forces may give rise to mere violence. Broadly conceived, he notes, contemporary democratic cultures favor civil (i.e., polite) utterance of public viewpoints; but at what cost, if and when that articulation necessitates, or, begins to mirror, a radical severance from the norm? “Is there a point,” Doxtader inquires, “at which opposition bursts the normative bonds of discourse, leaving public deliberation to do the bidding of violence?” (337). If so, what is that point, and how might we avoid getting ourselves on the road and moving in that direction?
These queries stands in the service of a much bigger problem, one treated only partially but insightfully in Doxtader’s essay; and, one reflecting what we suspect is the belief that the numberless conceptualizations of the public sphere and the sphere of civil society may in the end do nothing to safeguard a balance between securing, on the one hand, the rights of all citizens to speak freely, and, on the other, the broader structures of a workable democratic society. In the midst of this unstated tension, what is ignored is the substance in the middle of the argumentative spectrum: the real speech and real deliberation of speaking persons, along with a critical capacity for what one scholar, writing of latter-day rhetorical tensions, has described as “the potential… to persuade people to make contingent choices in specific situations” (Murphy 2001: 260). The making of those choices, short of violence but without suppression of vigorous public contestation among all interested parties, must, we think, be the goal of argumentative and rhetorical theorizing. In this formulation but without that caveat in mind, most contemporary theorizing, Doxtader implies, falls apart at the very place where we need it most: where it could work to fashion sites for public deliberation that people might truly use and learn from. Absent a center connecting the two nugatory ends of a typical public disagreement, he warns, “civil society becomes vulnerable to extremism and insensitive to the nuances of public interaction,” and “[m]odels of deliberation become more important than examples” (338). Theory gives way to either abstraction or crude force.

One of us has previously addressed this problem in the context of discursive inclusiveness. Raymie McKerrow (2001) begins by bluntly posing a question not often asked: “Are there limits on what civility brings to the solution of human problems?” (1). There are no ready answers, but McKerrow perceives that the near-invisibility of the question itself has limited our opportunities to trace its potential resolution. In turn, and more importantly, McKerrow implies that the cloaking of the question is symptomatic of the larger suppression of oppositional (read: “incivil”) discourses themselves. In a kind of metonymic relationship, ‘incivility’ stands in as coded language for ‘oppositional or counterpublical discourses that may threaten the power and primacy of normative or mainstream discourses.’ Such a code thus established, it becomes all too easy to silence the procedurally or substantively non-normative Other (in Levinas’s sense) through procedural mechanisms that channel speech through a central grid of administrative control. The result is often a statist and fundamentally oligarchical construction that silences oppositional discourses on the grounds that they are impolitic, rude, or abrasive. Justified publicly as a defense of etiquette or social normality, the trick pony is easily discerned: “Civility” becomes the shibboleth of favored discourses, while “incivility” is the unanswerable trump card served against any who challenge the regnant powers. The irony here, McKerrow observes, is palpable: “A civility that masks or covers over the presence of deep disagreement retards social progress rather than, as it would otherwise seem, advancing it” (4). These calls for “civility” in fact secure stasis and nothing more.
In developing this position, and in response to his own corollary questioning – “Is there ever a reason for the expression of an uncivil rhetoric?” – McKerrow stresses that the functional prerequisite to unmasking the problems inherent in “civility” is to
“recognize that privileging civil discourse as a solution to human problems carries with it the promise of what might be called the tyranny of incivility. Civil behavior may be more than politeness, but in its execution it may also serve to mask very real differences in power relations. In a word, civility may perpetuate servitude” (3).
Recasting, then, the non-problem of “civility” (in its masked forms) as a highly problematic “civility” (now exposed as hierarchizing and quite usefully oppressive), McKerrow seeks to lift the veil and lay bare the anti-democratic and anti-discursive machinations of this kind of proceduralism. Syllogistically unworkable though it may be, the formula wields considerable rhetorical power:
1. All, McKerrow suggests, are welcome to the table, though especially those already at or near it.
2. All are welcome to speak, though only if what they have to say is “civil” in tone and content.
3. The power to define “civil” is held exclusively by those who are already at the table. The remainder of this banal enthymeme, as cultural critics from Isocrates to George Orwell have observed time and again, may be readily deduced. Civility keeps some in and some out in a manner, and with a forcefulness, ideally suited to the dictates of those already controlling ballot, gun, or gavel.

Building on this argument and its premises, we turn next to a consideration of the site upon which wars of conceptualization have been fought across (in particular) the past 10-15 years: the sphere of “civil society.” We demonstrate through two examples that argumentative strategies based on dialogic or aesthetic civility in the civil sphere have failed to address the problem of excluded discourses in any significant way, and that the putative aid “civility” offers to public culture is one-dimensional and uni-directional at best.

3. Civil Society and Civility
Civil society has proven to be an enormously popular theoretical construct in contemporary scholarly literatures. From communicative, political, sociological, rhetorical, philosophical, and historical perspectives, countless versions of “civil society” have been articulated (Chandhoke 1995; Verrall 2000; Tester 1992; Ehrenberg 1992; Cohen & Arato 1991; Elshtain 1999; Hauser 1998; Jacobs 1996; Lee & Wander 1998; Klumpp 1997; Rossi 1996; Zarefsky 1993). Among these many theoretical contributions, perhaps the most prominent and influential “working definition” of civil society is offered by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992). They write:
We understand “civil society” as a sphere of social action [located and operating] between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication. Modern civil society is created through forms of self-constitution and self-mobilization. It is institutionalized and generalized through laws, and especially [through] subjective rights, that stabilize social differentiation. While the self-creative and institutionalized dimensions can exist separately, in the long term both independent action and institutionalization are necessary for the reproduction of civil society (1992: xi).

We would stress that we detect in that definition both the great promise of civil society and its central defect. Speaking broadly for a moment, we think most of us would greet the happy marriage of the types of self-mobilized discourses and (productively) institutionalized democratic safeguards for those discourses described above with open arms. We can think of no reasons why anyone would not. But the coordination and enactment of that marriage, as Cohen and Arato would have it, contains the seeds of its own disaster, for we would argue that there can be no balance more precarious than one which must continuously weigh the interests of already institutionalized discourses against those of new, oppositional discourses, those not already empowered, not already ratified as being of good standing in the mainstream of public affairs. The scales are not balanced at the outset, for the administrative and cultural embeddedness of that which is “the norm” skews relations of power in favor of those who occupy the extant discursive ground (The scales are not balanced in the middle of the process, either, or at the end; lest we forget, the process has no end, and consequently, never attains a stable middle).

The role of civility might be a saving one, were it not for the knowledge that earlier critical voices have argued persuasively that civility functionally appears mainly on one side of the scales: the institutional side. The argument here is that we (as a silently libertarian public culture) are all too eager to claim civility as a pleasant nexus for the narrowly prescribed delineation of our merest civic duties, e.g., paying taxes, not harming others, and then to jettison it when claims are made upon our time and energies in the name of faith, service, or sodality (Elshtain 1999). Notwithstanding special political efforts toward communitarian thinking, the promise of “civility” in general releases us from the responsibility to think at all. As Randall Kennedy (1998) has argued, “The civility movement is deeply at odds with what an invigorated [civic] liberalism requires,” in that it dismisses “[I]ntellectual clarity; an insistence upon grappling with the substance of controversies; and a willingness to fight loudly, openly, militantly, even rudely for politics and [beliefs] that will increase freedom, equality, and happiness” (85). Note the language here. There is no guarantee of tidiness, and certainly no promise that one’s ideas will emerge from the fray unscathed. This is deliberation at, potentially, its roughest, with all the stops pulled out and little left unsaid. Precisely Kennedy’s point; and ours as well.

This mention of discursive substance brings us to a related subject, the structural constitution of the sphere of civil society, which, though not the focus of our inquiry, merits attention. Clearly, civil society has been treated in many different ways. John Ehrenberg (1992) sedulously traces the positive fruits of civil society in the formation of American democracy, but worries that both the sphere of civil society and the civil/civic speech it engenders may soon be crushed by unchecked economic forces (244). Writing of cybersalons, Jodi Dean (2001) distances herself (somewhat blithely) from what she takes to be Habermas’s insufficiently “situated” and too “abstract” public sphere, and instead embraces civil society as a sphere conducive to a plurality of discourses and outcomes (245; 254). Other critics have seen in civil society hope for responsible public action (Klumpp 1997); strategies for the resolving of controversial public problems (Rossi 1996); and a useful vantage from which to launch a critical investigation of the failure of race relations in the urban public sphere (Jacobs 1996).

In each case, despite differences in approach and outcomes, the critics’ understanding of the general structure of the civil sphere and its location between state and economy have been mainly consistent with one another. What is in question when we explore civility in the context of the civil sphere is, in most cases, not the former’s influence upon the shape or location of the latter; that much is understood. Rather, we tend to ask: How is civility deployed within the civil sphere as an agent of determination for what is and is not allowed to be said in that sphere? What are the outcomes of that agency, and what should our response to those outcomes be? Part of the point we make here is that mere technical fascination with structural problems is deadly to real speech, and must never be the focus of discursive inquiry. As G. Thomas Goodnight has keenly observed, “[D]ifferences among discursive groundings turn upon why discourses are comported to fit with or overturn normative assumptions which prescribe what counts as fitting, true, or proper communicative reasoning in the social world where interlocutors argue and audiences assemble” (1989: 62, emphasis added). The purpose of establishing a civil sphere must not be lost amid the details of its construction. The purpose is to emancipate and hear speaking persons who would give uncensored voice to their concerns in an open public forum, with the promise of response and the expectation of action. We wish to learn what role “civility” properly or improperly plays thereto.

4. Civil Sphere Civility: Two Forms of Argumentation
One strategy for ensuring or preserving civility valorizes its sheer on-goingness. Ronald C. Arnett (2001) posits “dialogic civility” as an engaged discursive praxis that serves mainly to keep dialogic partners talking. Offering “no system or technique,” Arnett’s unique version of civility “rather reminds communicative partners to keep the conversation going in the public domain” (320). The problems with this approach are several; we address two in detail.

The most crippling weakness of Arnett’s civility, as we see it, is its inescapably ex post facto, and therefore almost wholly politically inconsequential, approach to (not) solving real problems in real time. Arnett declares that “only in retrospect” can a person “understand whether the horizon of the historical moment” has been “met appropriately” (324). The problem with this approach, though it is one favored by cultural historians and especially by dialogue theorists, is that persons do not engage in public talk in hopes of only later, and even then only obliquely, coming to some kind of understanding about how to solve the problems that led them to deliberate publicly in the first place. Quite the opposite: they turn to public argument because they seek to fix what ails them, and what ails them is the unavailability of clean drinking water; the need for affordable housing; or the withholding of their basic civil liberties. What ails them is surely not “the horizon of a historical moment” or any other abstraction. We do not deny that the notion of “horizons” may itself be useful in conceptualizing dialogic civility, but that effort cannot be the end of the conversation, for at that point the real conversation has not even begun.
A related problem of Arnett’s framework is its lack of ambition. By “lack of ambition,” we mean specifically that Arnett operates from a minimalist dialogic ethos incompatible with what we would term the discursive physicality necessary to permit full, vigorous expression of oppositional or counterpublical views in a healthy public context. An oppositional discourse that shoots (as so many do) for the moon, e.g., an environmental standpoint politics, or an unapologetically biblical neoconservatism, simply cannot afford to be hamstrung by a dialogic framework which privileges timidity and (at best) incremental change to the degree that Arnett’s does. The overriding determinant of a civil sphere’s discursive merit must not be the kowtowing etiquette of the speakers involved. When what is said is significantly less important than how it is said, deliberation is already dead in the water.

Another concern: Following Freire, Arnett proposes a “face saving” model of dialogue that “supports the communicative background of the metaphor of dialogic civility” in a manner that protects “oppressed people” who, lacking face saving devices, “might reject learning and be unable to impact the public arena” (326). The range of possible objections to this formulation is vast, but we begin, in the form of a question, with its major shortcoming. How will “support[ing]” a “metaphor” help an unwed working mother in pursuit of health benefits for her ill child? How will acknowledging “the communicative background” of that “metaphor” serve the concrete interests of Christian or Catholic parents who seek transferable school vouchers for their children’s parochial education? Arnett’s model never touches down in the world of real speech. In emphasizing dialogism over dialogue, Arnett’s “dialogic civility” works best among persons who have nothing to lose or nothing to gain, i.e., theoretical persons, not real ones. If it is true, and we believe it is, that a model for deliberation that lacks “sufficient power to disrupt [normative] socialization” (Goodnight 1989: 66) will inevitably also lack the power to represent the discursive interests of any person not already ‘properly’ socialized, then Arnett’s model cannot practically help anyone. It secures civil speech in an empty room.

A different model of public civility is offered by Rochelle Gurstein (1996) in The Repeal of Reticence. Gurstein’s thesis, influenced by the respective work of Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett, advances an appeal for civic reticence in a public world that has lost whatever communal agreement on matters of taste it once had. Hopeful of rescuing privacy as a viable aesthetic category from the invasive leer of the mediated mass public, Gurstein justifies public reticence by arguing that public “intimacy. . . has been stripped of the privacy it needs in order to flourish” (7). Reticence, in Gurstein’s view, protects what is private, and the flourishing of the private self in turn ensures the requisite psychic energies to maintain a civil public demeanor in our aesthetically disintegrating public realm.

Gurstein’s argument is compelling, and there is much to be learned from her work. Her book is one of the few to take seriously (and in some respects, to advance) Sennett’s underappreciated argument about the civic usefulness of certain kinds of impersonality among public actors in the public sphere. However, we worry about the specific repercussions for public deliberation in Gurstein’s model. Her relative silence on that subject, in light of the inherently public nature of her concerns about reticence in the public world, is disturbing. She addresses, in turn, the historical origins of “privacy” and its long 20th century decline; the legal debate over the “right” to privacy; obscenity; mass culture; and lastly, what she terms “the stalled debate” about the modern public sphere. Revealingly, however, the chapter on the public sphere is the least convincing and least developed in the book. Gurstein undertakes a long summary of critics of (and in) the public sphere from the 1940s to the 1960s (Edward Shils, Leslie Fieldler, Ernest van den Haag), and follows with a series of arguments about the aestheticization of kitsch and pornography’s status as the “last vanguard” of the elimination of bodily privacy. The reader is nicely primed for a conceptual and practical move that will resolve the tensions among public, private, and social components of the self as articulated in these discussions.
Unfortunately, the book abruptly ends after a brief, recapitulative conclusion. To our knowledge, at no point are Gurstein’s broader claims about the public efficacy of civic reticence in fact tested against real public discourse. She is careful in writing about obscenity, pornography, and privacy to avoid exploring any of them in the context of actual public speech. Though motivated by a felt need to restore a sustainable personal privacy to the sphere of civil society, so as to allow for vigorous deliberation among private citizens speaking publicly, Gurstein’s treatment of civil society itself in the context of civility is limited to a one-line quotation of the political philosopher Harry M. Clor, who observed that “Civil society has an interest in the maintenance of, at least, that level of moral sensibility that is implied in the term ‘decency’” (302). Well, fine. And?

The problem here is multi-faceted, but may fairly be expressed as follows: Gurstein’s argument for civil reticence or public civility is premised on the ostensible death of a widespread recognition and (cultural) enforcement of aesthetic norms. But her secondary argument for civility’s usefulness as a privacy safeguard in public deliberation is rooted in the unstated belief that “civility” will be recognized by a community’s many participants as a cultural/aesthetic good. Herein lies a paradox that Gurstein’s thesis cannot and does not overcome. Limitations of time and space prevent us from disabusing our reader of the popular but groundless myth, deeply cherished by rhetorical and argumentation theorists, that “civility” is universally embraced as a discursive treasure. Suffice it to say that a wealth of finely researched and highly localized rhetorical/textual studies have generated enormous evidence to the contrary. Counterpublical discourses in particular have been shown to thrive on the generation of forms of dissent that directly violate norms of civil speech (McDorman 2001). Gurstein would have us impute from her (partial) argumentation that civility is good because it is good, and that it works because it is civility, and is therefore good. We would ask for more than this from an otherwise rigorously argued monograph. “Civility” may prove useful for the recuperation of a civil public sphere, but Gurstein has not shown us how that will come to pass.

5. Civility as Gatekeeper?
In an important thesis that conceives communication as, more often than not, an exercise in failure, John Durham Peters (1999) wryly notes that “[The idea of] communication as a bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near” (16). Peters’s remark presages a broader set of claims about the reluctance of communication theorists and speakers in general to acknowledge the role of failure in public deliberation. Peters argues that spoken discourse, electronic dissemination, and even powerfully symbolic religious discourses allow, at heart, ample room for rejection, confusion, or a simple lack of connection. To expect that communication will be total, much less totally successful, is grossly unrealistic, and is belied by several millenia of recorded misunderstandings.
At the beginning of this essay, we took pains to limn the argument that concern for speech itself is, and must be, imperative in public deliberation contexts. Doxtader (2001) and McKerrow (2001) separately but similarly call for unrelenting attentiveness to what happens to the real speech of real speakers, irrespective of whether the various frameworks offered up by theorists can find ways of tidily accounting for who says what and to what effect. To fulfill this call is to orient oneself toward a conceptualization of mainstream and oppositional/counterpublical discourses that allows for a reading of the discourses themselves on the grounds of their individual articulation, and with an eye, or an ear, for their substance first and foremost. Sometimes this orientation may lead us to see that the failure of a discursive category, such as civility, in fact represents, momentarily and strategically, a success of the very best kind: and norms be damned. As McKerrow contends,
[w]hat is present in this description is a recognition of the centrality of discourse in constructing the symbolic codes. What is equally absent is any recognition of who isdefining what it means to be either calm or excitable, active or passive, rational or irrational. Such a sense of civil society is meaningless in that it merely serves to perpetuate the dominance of those already in positions of power. It is one thing to     play nice with the cultural other; it is quite another to accept that person as an equal—an inescapable condition of being civil in the first place (3).

Playing nice with the “cultural other” must involve more that a procedural and patronizing willingness to “hear the other side out.” If we have shown in principle that civility is not the theoretical grail it has been made out to be, we hope also to have shown that neither is it a particularly successful gatekeeper. Gatekeeping requires at a minimum a binary reflexivity that “civility,” as understood in a number of the contemporary theoretical contexts we have discussed herein, just does not possess. “Civility” in at least one critical respect is not a filtering device; it is a blocking device, a static wall designed and deployed in the service of keeping out that which those who control local or global access to discourse(s) do not wish to have uttered. In this way, “civility,” as widely conceived in contemporary argumentative and rhetorical conceptualizations, is not an agent for fruitful civic discourse, and should be eliminated from those frameworks seeking to advance it as precisely that.

REFERENCES
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Zarefsky, D. (1994). The postmodern public: Revitalizing commitment to the public forum. Vital Speeches of the Day 60, 308-314.

My title is the pedagogy of judgment, a subject I hope is of interest since reasonable judgments represent the desired outcome of most argument. And yet, the pedagogy of judgment is seldom addressed, either in textbooks or scholarship. Indeed, I may not make much progress toward the promised pedagogy myself, at least not in this paper. But I will try to give you some sense of what is at issue, and why I believe the topic merits attention.
This paper, then, is actually a prologue to the pedagogy of judgment. That is, like the prologue to a drama, I will introduce the major actors and a bit at their history; forecast the plot and its conflicts; but, at the risk of frustrating the natural desire for catharsis, I will stop short of resolution, or even of predicting if this drama ends in consummation or defeat. Of course, to end so abruptly is to admit to uncertainty about the very possibility of instruction in judgment, especially in a post-modern world rife with incommensurate paradigms and unsure about shared standards for adjudicating controversy. As a result, this particular episode ends with the lead players in the wings, and with no Prospero to point the way to an eventual dénouement. Whether or not my own uncertainty is a sign of a more general aporia remains to be seen.
The first task of a prologue is to set the stage, which, in this case, means introducing Judgment itself, the hero of the drama, whose credits are impressive, but whose recent accomplishments may not be generally familiar.

Let’s begin, then, with the division of Judgment into three kinds:
1. a human faculty that enables sound decisions,
2. the process or procedures that result in such decisions, and,
3. the outcome or objective of the process, the actual verdict rendered.
My guide here is Edwin Black, who develops this trio through a review of the term krisis or judgment in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Along the way, Black works to distinguish krisis from opinion and belief by arguing that Aristotle might have posited either of these alternatives as the goal of rhetoric; but instead, he explicitly states that the end or telos of rhetoric is to make it possible for an audience to render sound judgment. In turn, Black argues that such judgments issue from systematic practices that can be identified, whereas opinions and beliefs are too obscure to influence. Consequently, our initial distinction is that Judgment (at least in its classroom role) is first of all a process by which we deliberate controversial claims and arrive at sound decisions. If this process is, in fact, systematic and identifiable, then it should be teachable. But this also remains to be seen.

Having cast the process of Judgment as our protagonist, the next step is to identify the roles our hero is prepared to perform. In this case, we can begin with the Kantian division of reasoned judgment into its logical, moral, and aesthetic forms, the first two of which rely on universal standards to guide the decision-making process. Alternatively, aesthetic judgment (which includes questions of taste and purpose) is that category which deals with matters for which determinate standards are not readily available. For our purposes, Kant’s first two forms constitute a single type that I will call Theoretical Judgment, i.e., judgment that invokes abstract, formal criteria in an effort to render decisions that are determinate. Kant’s third category, however, deals with matters of motive and purpose that are more concrete and contingent, matters that resist absolute standards and certain judgments. I will refer to this latter type as Practical Judgment, decisions regarding the qualified conditions of human conduct.

In effect, we have two protagonists vying for the lead: or could it be that Theoretical and Practical Judgment are actually antagonists, members of the same family with nothing in common and little respect for one another? Or are they simply siblings who have taken different paths? Should our syllabus in judgement make a place for both; should they get equal time, and how should we handle potential conflicts between them? To address these questions, my prologue takes the unusual step of inviting our two protagonists to audition – in person.
So, enter stage right Theoretical Judgment himself, or Theo for short, wearing a school tie and a lab coat, and holding a typed script, which he reads verbatim as follows:
“As a specialist, I am convinced that a rational system properly applied can identify the truth value of any claim by invoking foundational premises that are universally valid. So, naturally, you can expect me to act according to prescribed methods, with technical precision as the algorithm of my judgment. In practice, my methods appear under a variety of names, including formal logic, mathematical calculation, and scientific deduction based on empirical evidence. But in general, I proceed by interrogating the formal validity of a claim at issue and, in the end, I produce a judgment that is determinate and rationally binding. And yet, despite what you may think, I am ultimately an idealist, a seeker after knowledge in its purist form, abstracted from the idiosyncrasies of any particular manifestation. You can assess for yourself the success of my work in the great pageant of modern medicine and the sciences, but I have also had leading roles in the creation of wealth, the ordering of nations, and the resolution of social problems. It is self-evident, then, that every student should see me in action; and, in fact, I am already starring in many school curricula. So I am well rehearsed and ready for my role in this new production of yours.”
At this point, Theo nods, puts his script away, and takes a seat in the orchestra.

Not much stage presence, I admit. But Theo’s resume is replete with triumphs. In fact, his genealogy extends back to the ancients, with significant accomplishments in the late Middle Ages and Enlightenment. But the real ascendancy of analytical judgment is more recent and notably British, with Continental contributions from the Vienna Circle and others. Nonetheless, Kant is the grandfather of this particular tradition, having advanced the notion that judgment illuminates particular subjects by subsuming them within a set of transcendental categories. In turn, this notion follows naturally from Kant’s historic insight that what we take to be real is mediated by human agency, so that the actively judging subject contributes directly to the shape and meaning of phenomena instead of simply receiving sense impressions. Or, more precisely, human understanding assigns nature a formal structure dictated by a priori principles or categories that are mental in origin but universal in application. We access these principles by virtue of our ability to occupy a position that is purely rational and, as such, beyond the contingency of empirical conditions. In this idealized scheme, Judgement operates by fitting the fragmentary data of particular cases into a conceptual framework that is logically consistent and rationally compelling. And, as Theo hinted, this particular act has been filling seats in professional theatres since the debut of Modern epistemology.

Of course, we still have another actor to audition, an actor who has also been working steadily, but who tends to perform in smaller venues, with less fanfare, and fewer critical reviews. This lack of notoriety is perhaps due to the artless quality of her performance: she operates without explicit procedures, she adjusts herself somewhat differently to each new scene, and the finale of her shows is seldom grand and never actually final. But her star seems on the rise and she has recently landed some important new roles.
And so, entering stage left, is Practical Judgment, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with copies of her c.v. for circulation. This resume is an impressive one: she has been acting for a great many seasons, with memorable performances under such stage names as phronesis, prudence, and common sense, with supporting credits in smaller roles as kairos, decorum, and practical wisdom. Nor is she nearly as stiff as her counterpart, which she makes clear right away:
“Call me PJ; and while it is all very well for Theo to go by the book, one has to be a little less formal in dealing with human affairs, you know. I mean when people call on me, they typically need to know the difference between things that benefit their interests and things that don’t. Making such choices is never a formal process, though I do have my own methods. For example, I do my best to figure out what is advantageous and appropriate for the people and circumstances involved. Am I an opportunist? I don’t think so, because the ability to identify an equitable course of action for a particular situation is an important public benefit, which I think would be clear if you saw me perform.”
At this point, Theo, who had been taking notes, says, “how can you be sure your choices are ethical?” To which PJ responds: “ Of course, good people make bad choices every day; my goal is simply to listen to all sides, balance claims, and identify the position that seems most likely to enhance the public good. I know that this will hardly satisfy you, Theo, but perhaps if we could talk things over. There is a café around the corner named Le Jarin. It’s very nice.”
At which point, she turns to Theo, who gets up and walks with her into the lobby and out of the theatre.

With our lead characters offstage, let me add a few things about PJ. In the first place, she went to a Lyceum, where she learned about a kind of knowledge that is personal, emotional, non-technical, but not irrational. Moreover, her attention to the daily demands on judgment, to the small as well as the big things, to the people involved rather than just the principles at issue, and most of all, to the spontaneity required to respond to each new situation in new ways, all these things seem in PJ more a matter of character than of method. Which raises the question, can qualities of this kind be taught in an organized way?

But there are also questions about Theo’s practice, though at least he has a specific techne to pass along. The question in his case seems to be whether of not this techne is field specific. That is, do these technical methods change with a discipline’s specific approach to evidence, its unique mode of reasoning, and the degree of certitude in its governing principles?
If so, should Theo change costumes according to the needs of a particular discipline, which may or may not be feasible in the academy; and if not, how would a single course address the multiplicity of technical practice? Moreover, if Judgment studies are to be distributed across-the curriculum, would they include the critique of reason mounted by feminist and post-modern scholars; and if not, is our instruction in theoretical judgment actually indoctrination?

Provocative as these questions are, it seems to me that there are potential responses that would allow a pedagogy of theoretical judgment to proceed. Of course, we still don’t know if Theo and PJ can share the stage? But the question with which I will close deals with PJ and with our original notion that the process of judgment is “identifiable and systematic.” What happens if that is not the case; where do we turn for guidance? To this last question, at least, we are fortunate to have some help, for in the last two decades a number of admirers have taken up PJ’s mantle and rearranged it in new and interesting ways.

The inspiration for these writers comes most often from Aristotle, but Gadamer and Hannah Arendt also figure as influences on an emerging tradition of modern practical judgment. No modern critic has surveyed this tradition more fully than Joseph Dunne in Back to the Rough Ground, a work of special interest because Dunne also has a strong commitment to education. In his critique of pedagogy based on techne, he argues that an obsession with learning outcomes has aggrandized method and objectified teachers and students alike. Conversely, good teaching, he claims, remains deeply engaged with the subjects and contingencies of particular situations, a commitment only practical knowledge is prepared to address. As for nurturing such knowledge, Dunne admits that mature teaching comes with experience; but he does promote constant attention to the details of one’s teaching life and sufficient opportunity to reflect on this complex experience. Through this combination of engagement and reflection, teachers can find appropriate stimuli for the development of their practical and pedagogical judgment. Or so Dunne hopes.
A different dialectic is at work in Ronald Beiner’s book on Political Judgment. Like Dunne, Beiner follows Aristotle in claiming that practical judgment requires a thorough understanding of local contingencies. But he also appreciates the substantive contribution of general ideas to the practice of political decision-making. This practice is not rule-bound, but it does follow a logical contour in which particulars are classified under general categories in order to invoke shared standards and discriminate amongst options. The appeal to shared standards, says Beiner, makes judgment meaningful and societies cohesive. In turn, he argues that this practice can be taught by exposure to specific exemplars, individuals who manifest good political judgment. These personalized examples are important because political judgment is never abstract and so cannot be reduced to formula. We are “schooled” in effective practice by observing the best practitioners. How we represent these exemplars in class Beiner does not address.
A more definite pedagogy is on offer in The Abuse of Casuistry, by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, who direct their attention to a tradition of moral reasoning that reached its height in the 16th C. Like Dunne and Beiner, Jonsen and Toulim argue that no theoretical model can illuminate the practical problems of specific cases. They go on to outline casuistry’s appeal to general (as opposed to universal) principles. But since no principle is self-interpreting, casuistry proceeds by examining a series of cases related to the issue at hand, paradigmatic circumstances from which guidelines for future action can be extrapolated. Casuistry, then complements general ideas with what Aristotle called “universal particulars,” significant, related cases that don’t sacrifice the complexity and ambiguity of the problem at hand. One can imagine the adaptation of casuistic training to the rhetorical classroom, which has a long history of case study. The drawback of this approach is that case narratives are typically static and don’t render the progressive dynamics that distinguish practical arguments.

Finally, I would mention Donald Schön, Donald. The Relfective Practitioiner n’s The Reflective Practitioner, which promotes the kind of knowledge-in-action that expert professionals exhibit. Such knowledge is typically tacit and may not be teachable, admits Schön; but it can be learned because it can be modeled. So, like Beiner, Schön endorses the value of exposure to professional expertise, but he argues that this exposure works best when there is direct, tutorial contact between student and expert. Through this contact, the student can observe practical knowledge in action and build a repertoire of adaptable strategies. So, along with Dunne’s emphasis on experience, Beiner’s promotion of expert modeling, and casuistry’s study of paradigm cases, we now have master tutorials as a potential pedagogy of judgment. None of which I find particularly promising, or feasible; which is why I am suspending this prologue while we are still in the green room of theoretical critique and before our entrance on stage for an actual pedagogical performance.
What we can say in closing is this, that an argument is more than the invention of claims or positions, that judgment has been too long neglected, that pedagogy is not a puerile subject suitable only for supporting players in the profession, that there is a seductive clarity in technical method, that practical judgment must distinguish relevant from irrelevant particulars, and, most importantly, as Aristotle notes at the end of his Ethics, that virtue is a matter of making choices. For our students and ourselves, the process of making good choices is too important to overlook, even if good judgment may not be identifiable and systematic.

At the end of another work, Aristotle says, “I have had my say, I ask for your judgment.” In our case, PJ and Theo are at a café next door getting to know each other. So making any final decisions about our cast is out of the question. Luckily an experienced stand-in is available. Epoche, better know as “the suspension of judgment,” is waiting in the wings and should fill in admirably during rehearsal as we continue to work on the script and revise our syllabus. We may even find that her presence lends our ensemble new range and possibility.

References
Beiner, Ronald. (1983) Political Judgment (London: Methuen).
Black, Edwin. (1978) Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press).
Dunne, Joseph. (1993) Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press).
Jonsen, Albert R. and Stephen Toulmin. (1988) The Abuses of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Schön, Donald A. (1983) The Reflfective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. (np: Basic Books).

1. Proverbs and critical discussion 
Proverbs have many practical functions in every day conversations. According to the dictionary, a proverb usually expresses simply and concretely, though often metaphorically, a truth based on common sense or the practical experience of mankind. This description, of course, explains the meaningful characteristics of proverbs, but it is not sufficient for our purpose. We are going to focus on more practical uses that a proverb has especially in critical discussion.
Critical discussion is a type of discourse that purposes to resolve the differences of opinions about issues. In the process of critical discussion, argumentation is needed that is a verbal and social activity of reason aimed at increasing (or decreasing) the acceptability of a controversial standpoint for the listener or reader, by putting forward a constellation of propositions intended to justify (or refute) the standpoint before a rational judgment (van Eemeren, et al. 1996: 5). A proverb in critical discussion does not only express a truth but also justify the standpoint advanced by the participants.
One of the major precedent studies on proverbs as patterns of argument is Goodwin and Wenzel (1979). They turned their eyes to the strategic values of the proverbs in coping with some relatively common human problem or situation like Burke (1957). The proverbs and patterns of argument that they suggested are substantive argument (sign, cause, parallel case, analogy, generalization, classification, statistics), authorative argument, and motivational argument. Their classification is really invaluable in understanding the function of proverbs as kind of argumentative schemes, but they lacked the dialectical perspectives, which we can find plainly through the data they used, you know, they depended their research on a proverb dictionary.
In order to understand the move of argumentation, I analyzed the real television discussion transcripts. Television discussion is a sort of argumentative discourse, which deals with current issues to be resolved by the participants who have differences of opinions with each other. They sometimes use proverbs to justify their standpoints or persuade the opposites. I expect that the uses of proverbs can explain some practical and cultural aspects of critical discussion.

2. Pragma-dialectical approach to a critical discussion and topos
A topos is the “place” from which the attacker can get his arguments. Some translations of the word topos stress its “topographic” nature: “places,” “argument place,” “location,” “search formula.” A topos, however, is also a rule, law, or procedure, and this is what is stressed in other translations of the word ‘topos’: “argumentation scheme,” “argumentation schema,” “argumentation technique,” “procedure” (van Eemeren, et al. 1996: 38). They use the term “move” instead of topos including these two aspects. In this paper, however, I am going to use the term topos as having similar meaning with “places” and “move” in order to highlight the fact that they are kind of idioms registered on dictionary and that they function as premises in a critical discussion.
A pragma-dialectical approach purposes to evaluate argumentation, which purposes to resolve the differences of opinions, through the procedure of the discourse.  In order to evaluate argumentation, we have to reconstruct the argumentative elements and judge the soundness of the speech acts in ideal norms. We happen to meet the difficulty in managing the proverbs that function as topoi in presenting the analytical overview of argumentative discourse.

Traditionally proverbs are understood as expressions that have unquestionable truth accepted by the users, but in critical discussion it is not always the case.
1. A: … The introduction of a class action at the moment is untimely. …
P: I think every system in the world has some side effects. In this sense, the person who has negative attitude to the introduction of a class action at the moment is, I think, similar to one “who hesitates to make bean paste because of the maggot.”
(Is the movement of a class action a right or interference? 2001.3.8)

2. Topos: If something has necessities and side effects, necessities have to be considered preferentially in doing it.
-> “Who hesitates ever to make bean paste because of the maggot?”
Possible premises:
R1. The introduction of a class action at the moment is necessary but it has some side effects.
R2. It is more important that the class action system is necessary for the civic life.
R3. It is more important that the class action system has some side effects.
Conclusion: The introduction of a class action system at the moment is timely.

In the P’s utterance, the proverb “Who hesitates ever to make bean paste because of the maggot?” takes the role that selects R2 as a premise to support the conclusion, which is opposite to the A’s utterance. Even though the appearance of maggot could come true to its condition, making bean paste is necessary for a dietary life in Korea. So this proverb is a really strong warrant to the argument. By expressing the meaning metaphorically, it functions as a topos  “If something has necessities and side effects, necessities have to be considered preferentially in doing it.”
In the next section I will show some types that proverbs function as topoi whether they are generally accepted or not.

3. Argumentative moves of proverbs in critical discussion: an example
A proverb is not used indirectly as topos, which is different from the general topos. In order to evaluate whether the proverb is sound or not, we have to externalize the implied meaning of it. The following example shows it:
1. P: Most western economists who have been to North Korea say that the physical distribution of North Korea has to be changed and SOC, that is, Social overhead capital has to be equipped sufficiently in order to change it, without which no western country’s and our government’s supports are ‘to pour water down a bottomless barrel’[i]….
A: … I don’t think so. You said ‘to pour water down a bottomless barrel’, but it is very important to give some meals to the starving children, for it is a behavior to save their life.
P: Of course, that’s true.
(The relationship between South and North, how to resolve? 2001. 6. 4)

In this example, the protagonist used the proverb ‘to pour water down a bottomless barrel’ as a topos to support his standpoint as follows:
2. Topos: An economic perspective is superior to a humanistic one.
(¬>->->->) From an economic perspective, no fruitless work should be done.
¬— No fruitless work should be done.
¬ To pour water down a bottomless barrel)
Possible Premises:
R1. Most western economists said the same opinions.
R2. The system of physical distribution of North Korea has to be changed and SOC has to be changed sufficiently to change it, without which no western supports and our supports are fruitless.
R3. From an economic perspective, western countries’ and our government’s economic supports are fruitless.
R4. From a humanistic perspective, western countries’ and our government’s economic supports are not fruitless.

Conclusion: Western countries’ and our government’s economic supports to North Korea should not be done.
In order to support the conclusion, he used the topos in the highest level “an economic perspective is superior to a humanistic one”, which was unexpressed obviously, but we can see that he inferred or changed it from the proverb’s meaning. The topos then functions to select R3 as reason of the conclusion rather than R4.
In pragma-dialectical approach, fallacies are analyzed as incorrect moves in which a discussion rule has been violated. Especially related to the use of proverbs, the violation of rule 6, 7, and 10 were notable in discussions. Some proverbs were used in concealing a premise in an unexpressed premise (violation of rule 6), and some were 1) used as inappropriate argumentation scheme, 2) used incorrectly though it were appropriate argumentation schemes (violation of rule 7), and the others were used ambiguously (violation of rule 10).

4. Cultural aspects reflected in the proverbs as topoi
We can understand an argumentative culture of a language community by its topoi implied in proverbs. Korean proverbs reflect on its traditional thoughts, values, everyday life, etc. Of course, some of them are originated from Chinese, Japanese and Western language, but it is not my concern in this paper. I just want to point out the practically used proverbs in television discussions during the last year. They are like these:
–  To bell the cat (‘s neck) (18, Jan.):
1. To attempt something formidable or dangerous
2. To discuss vainly about something really hard to execute
* It had better not to discuss something impossible to execute.
– Repenting that it is too late (1, Feb.): Repenting of missing a chance
* (In most cases, it just describe the situation, but in some contexts it implies like this English proverbs:) Better late than never. It is no use crying over spilt milk.
– Do I have hateful hairs? (1, Feb.): I don’t know why, but that man rubs me (up) the wrong way.
* Sometimes, someone is disliked and rubbed up without proper reason.
– Don’t fasten shoestring in a melon field, and don’t fasten hat-string under the pear tree. (22, Feb.; 12, Apr.; 28, Jun.)
* Avoid every cause of suspicion though you can explain yourself.
– To correct a bull’s horns eventually to kill him (22, Feb.): The remedy is worse than the disease.
*It is better not to correct something wrong than eventually to destroy it.

– To exaggerate a small needle as if it is a big stick (22, Feb.): overstatement; make a mountain (out) of a molehill.
* If a statement is an overstatement, it is better not to accept it.
–  A dragon’s head and a snake’s tail (22, Feb.): a bright beginning and a dull [tame] ending; an anti-climax.
* It is not good to begin something brightly and end dully.
– Who hesitates ever to make bean paste because of the maggot? (8, Mar.):
* If something has necessities and side effects, necessities have to be considered preferentially in doing it.
– To pour water down a bottomless barrel (22, Mar.; 14, Jun.; 7, Dec.): Like filling a bottomless vessel; the beggar’s wallet has no bottom.
* No fruitless work should be done.
– A pear drops when a crow flies from the tree. (12, Apr.): It is just a coincidence that the two events have happened at the same time.
* We must not confuse the coincidence of cause and effect.
– Like a living fish in the cat’s hands (3, May; 27, Sep.): Don’t set a wolf to watch the sheep.
* Don’t entrust an important matter to the person that could do harm.
– If the monk can’t stand the temple, he should leave (17, May): If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
* If you can’t stand the place where you are, it is better to lever there.
– Ten persons don’t prevent a thief. (7, Jun.): Many persons’ effort can’t prevent one person’s bad thing.
* Anyway a bad thing may well occurs, so any effort is useless to prevent it.
– A clean downstream comes from a clean upstream. (21, Jun.): The fish always stinks from the head downward; Where old age is evil, youth can learn no good; As the old cock crows, so crows the young.
* It is more important for the person on upper position to set an example than the reverse.
– To flatter the world with perverted study (26, Jul.): To flatter the power with studies made with questionable intentions.
* It is undesirable to use disciplines in fulfilling private desires by distorting it.
– Even though I say ‘Badam-Pung’, you should say ‘Baram-Pung’ (26, Jul.)[ii]: Even though I do something wrongly, you should do it correctly.
* (Used ironically) It is more important for the person on upper position to set an example than the reverse.
–  A frog in a small pond (who has never been out of it). (23, Aug.): The frog in her bog; He that stay in the valley shall never see what’s over the hill.
* If one who is content with his current status, he never develops any more.
– Every affairs return to its right way. (6, Sep.): a corollary; Right will prevail in the end; Truth wins out in the long run.
* It is right that every affair eventually becomes right than false.
– ‘Choga’[iii] on every side (6, Sep.): The situation in which people are deeply depressed and feel helpless.
* (Mainly used to point out a situation, but it also could used to express following meaning): If someone has no one to depend on, he has to surrender unconditionally.
–  A lord who is satisfied does not know that his servant is hungry. (20, Sep.): He does what he likes regardless of other people’s feelings.
* (Used ironically) In doing something what he likes, it is better to consider other people’s feeling.
–  A licorice root in a drug store (The licorice root is included in almost every concoction of oriental herb medicine) (27, Sep.): a jack of all trades; a busy-buddy; a nosy parker; to stick one’s nose into something; to have a finger in every pie; to be nosy
* (Positively or negatively) A certain element should be in all places.
–  Like seeing a fire across a river (11, Oct.): Remain a (mere) spectator; stand by and watch; stand by idly.
* (Used ironically) Remaining a mere spectator is worse attitude than taking part in the event.
– Salt on a kitchen range is salty only when it is put in. (25, Oct.): Everything demands some work.
* Something that is valuable but unused is not better than normal thing.
– Only by comparing it can you determine which is long and which is short. (25, Oct.): It isn’t till it’s over; It isn’t over till the fat lady sings; He laughs best who laugh last; Do not hallow till you are out of the wood.
* If you get the correct size of two objects, it is better to compare them than just to see and guess it.
– To count on the fingers. (7, Dec.): Estimate by rule of thumb.
* It is worse to count incorrectly than correctly.
– To change the bones and to get rid of the amnion and the placenta (7, Dec.): a modification
* It is better to be changed positively than left unchanged.
–  A look to left and right (7, Dec.): looking around; irresolution; vacillation. being unable to make up one’s mind wondering how other’s opinions will be.
* It is worse to hesitate than to be confident
– A centipede that keeps spit in its mouth. (14, Dec.): A person who is tongue-tied
* A person is in a bad condition is worse than the opposite.
– He who is thirsty digs the well. (14, Dec.): He who really wants to get something makes an effort to get it.
* He who is in urgent need of something make the thing done.
– To drink the kimchi broth before eating kimchi[iv] (21, Dec.): to count your chickens before they’re hatched; catch your bear before you sell its skin; Don’t sell the skin till you have caught the bear; Don’t eat the calf in the cow’s belly; Boil not the pap before the child is born.
* It is not good to try to get the results before a work is finished.
These examples show that every proverb could be interpreted as topos in some context, but they just have different degrees of strengths.

5. Conclusion
The position of proverbs as topoi in critical discussion, let alone every day conversation, is flexible. We hesitate to use the proverb “It goes ill in the house where the hen sings and the cock is silent” because the time has been changed. Instead, the newly expression “An egg has been laid where the hen sings” is more generalized than the former. As you know in this example, historically the power of proverb as topoi has been changed.
On the other hand, some proverbs conflict to each other chronologically in their meaning and practical use. Next two proverbs are the examples: “Who hesitate to make bean paste because of the maggot” vs. “Don’t fasten shoe-string in a melon field”. This phenomenon is, of course, originated from the differences of discussants’ view or opinion. I couldn’t see this example in television discussion, through which I inferred that the discussants wanted to avoid the situation that they looked unserious on the issues or has problems to draw a proper proverb from their lexicon. Instead, a case was that they correct the meaning of the proverb from their own perspectives. A discussant referred to the proverb “If the monk can’t stand the temple, he should leave” and commented that he didn’t like it. His opinion was that if there was problem in the temple the monk should make an effort to reform it.”
According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca(1969), “loci are preferences of a particular audience which are of an extremely general nature and can, without any difficulty, serve as justification for statements made in argumentation addressed to that audience” (van Eemeren, et al. 1996:104). They said the arguer and the audience may disagree about the premises at three levels:
(1) the status of premises,
(2) the choice of premises,
(3) the verbal presentation of premises. Applying this point, the proverbs are mainly argued in critical discussion related (1) and (2).

From a pragma-dialectical perspective, these are sometimes kind of fallacies and hinder the procedures to resolve the differences of opinions. From the arguer’s view, it could strengthen or weaken the power of persuasion. So in order to get ideal argumentation, the participants have to discern the right use of proverbs from wrong use. In this point, we also have to turn our eyes to didactical application of this view.
First of all, the teaching of proverbs has to be done in discursive context to make an effect in argumentation not in the context that it is dealt as an isolated idiom. And the status of proverbs in critical discussion as topoi is to be learned and questioned compared to the context by learners. Another point is that proverbs are taught with pairs of topos and counter-topos.

NOTES
i. This means ‘like filling a bottomless vessel’ or ‘the beggar’s wallet has no bottom’.
ii. Badam-Pung is the wrong pronunciation of Chinese character ‘風’
iii. ‘Samyeonchoga (四面楚歌)’ !: It is originated from ancient Chinese history in which the army of Dynasty Cho was depressed with their hometown’ song sung by the enemies.
iv. Kimch is a traditional Korean dish of pickled vegetables.

REFERENCES
Barnhart, C. L.(ed.)(1957). The American College Dictionary. N.Y.: Harper and Brothers.
Goodwin, P.D. and J.W. Wenzel.(1979), Proverbs and practical reasoning: a study in socio-logic. The Quarterly Journal of Speech 65, 289-302.
Kennedy, G.A.(1991). On rhetoric: a theory of civic discourse / newly translated, with introduction, notes, and appendices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Min, B.G.(2001), TV toron damhwa-eui nonjeung bunseog(Korean)[Analysis of argumentation in TV discussion: an approach from a pragma-dialectical perspective]. Texteoneohag[Textlinguistics] 11, 73-106.
Van Eemeren, et al.(1996). Fundamentals of argumentation theory: a handbook of historical background and contemporary developments. Mahwa, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

According to an old cliché, the first casualty of war is the truth. However, when bullets start flying, dissent and debate often follow closely behind as early victims of military expediency. This is due in part to the fact that public debate is made possible by contingent norms that change with shifting circumstances. In peacetime, democratic nations identify with the processes of open argumentation and public dialogue as unifying notions that reaffirm the citizenry’s shared commitment to foundational principles such as free speech and popular sovereignty. Yet these commitments are often reassessed and deferred when war breaks out.
Numerous examples of wartime censorship reveal this as a routine phenomenon in U.S. history. Consider the Alien and Sedition Acts; the Truman administration’s loyal-security program; and information control during the Persian Gulf War (Schrecker, 1986; Moynihan, 1999; MacArthur, 1993). Each of these measures hushed war dissent by increasing direct governmental control over public discourse. In the terminology of Michel Foucault (1977), this type of overt censorship was leveraged by the “juridical power” of the state, with critical dissenters subjected to criminal penalties under the law. But for every muckracker punished under these wartime regimes of speech control there were probably hundreds of other potential critics who practiced self-censorship, holding their tongues in fear of being branded as unpatriotic or even traitorous.
In contrast to top-down forms of state-mandated censorship such as prepublication prior restraint or satellite “shutter control,” self-censorship results from tacit agreements between authority figures and potential critics that the “higher-order conditions” for argumentation do not obtain in a given milieu (see van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993: 32-3). From a Foucauldian point of view, self-censorship is thus an especially “efficient” form of wartime speech regulation, because it can be effected through circulation of “disciplinary power.” In contrast to the overt display of juridical power by the state apparatus, disciplinary power – here manifested in the ability to mobilize mass voluntary consent – is more discrete and diffuse, while also being more ostensibly consistent with norms of democratic governance.

While instances of overt government censorship in the current U.S. “war on terror” are relatively infrequent compared to previous wars, as the war drifts beyond Afghanistan, public argument is constrained by overwhelming polling data in support of the war effort and a deliberative straightjacket imposed by the Bush administration’s edict that the world sorts tidily into two camps – “with us or with the terrorists.” This dominant argument formation contributes to what Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1993) calls a “spiral of silence,” where pervasive self-censorship instills widespread quietism. Noelle-Neumann explains that poll-driven Western democracies experience spirals of silence when super-majority opinion survey statistics surpass their apparently neutral function as carriers of public opinion and become coercive tools of social control. The danger of voicing viewpoints outside a narrow band of acceptable consensus opinion grows. Private sanctions and penalties for dissent escalate. A hush of criticism is drowned out amidst a cacophony of agreement. Ruth Flower, director of public policy for the American Association of University Professors, contrasts this dimension of the current spiral of silence with chilling of dissent during the Cold War: “There are some things here that hearken back to McCarthyism. But this is different, because it is not the government telling the public what it can and cannot say. This is more a matter of public sentiment dictating behavior” (qtd. in Fletcher, 2001, October 30).

In this environment, the locus of censorship shifts from the state apparatus to private organizations and individuals who adopt tacit agreements not to “rock the boat.” Finns have word for this – ‘itsesensuuri’. Finnish journalism scholar Esko Salminen (1999) describes how the itsesensuuri phenomenon subtly yet powerfully controlled the tenor of public argument in Cold War Finland. At the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, Communist Party operatives assembled a large staff that sorted Finnish news articles into pro- and anti- piles. When Finnish journalists published material that ran against the grain of official Soviet propaganda, internal pressure was covertly applied. From 1970 to 1991, this caused slanted reporting in Finnish media on topics such as quality of life in Soviet Union, the health of Soviet premiers, the fate of political prisoners, and, in an eerie echo of the current case, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In Salminen’s account (1999: 89), “the opinions of the Finnish press were restricted, as if by an unseen hand, when the USSR intervened in Afghanistan… In just over ten years, even the Right-wing press had begun to treat aggressive Soviet foreign policy with kid gloves.” “Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ began to emerge” (Salminen, 1999: 172), creating a “locked public debate.” Finnish psychologist Kyösti Skyttä assesses Cold War itsesensuuri as a problem of “the rejected present,” explaining that “the Finnish people are realists, but their field of action is enclosed by invisible walls” (qtd. in Salminen, 1999: 9). Skyttä’s point raises a difficult methodological problem for those seeking to document itsesensuuri: “Self-censorship is very difficult to observe in practice. As a mechanism, it operates largely on a subconscious level, and is thus a devious tool in the hands of those in power” (Salminen, 1999: 176). As a distortion of the argumentative process, isesensuuri is similar to the ad baculum fallacy (appeal to force), which may not involve explicit arguments at all. This sub rosa dimension of ad baculum argumentation poses particular problems for scholars seeking to analyze discourse through reconstruction (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993: 57), just as the subtlety of itsesensuuri complicates the task of scholarly criticism.

The leverage for self-censorship in the Finnish case came from fear of Soviet reprisals. Finnish journalists were reluctant to publish articles critical of Soviet policy out of anxiety that such publications would prompt the Kremlin to repress Finland openly (perhaps even through a repeat of Prague spring in Helsinki). Today, a prevailing argument formation in the U.S. instills self-censorship by raising the private costs of war dissent. This essay explores American itsesensuuri by proposing a typology of self-censorship. According to the typology, three forms of American war self-censorship can be differentiated: Mothballing, mine dodging and patron pressure. Exploration of how each type of self-censorship responds to and shapes public discourse patterns may help elucidate deliberative dynamics of the “war on terror” and build upon scholarly analysis of the itsesensuuri phenomenon.

Mothballing
The violent erasure of the World Trade Center from the New York City skyline on September 11, 2001 prompted many in the entertainment industry to re-evaluate projects already in the pipeline for public release. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the suicide hijackings, industry officials modified or shelved completely film, posters and television shows that depicted the twin towers or used them in storylines.
A trailer for the movie Spider Man was pulled by Sony because it contained images of the World Trade Center, while the same company shot retakes of Men in Black 2 that put the Chrysler Building in place of the twin towers. CBS edited out views of the trade center in the television show Sex in the City (Hoberman, 2001, December 5). Suddenly, classic images of the New York City skyline became obscene symbols when juxtaposed with grim news of carnage across lower Manhattan. Yet curiously, even prescient Hollywood films that had anticipated the towers’ demise also fell under the censor’s knife. MGM mothballed Nose Bleed, with Jackie Chan starring as a window washer who foils a terrorist plot to blow up the WTC: “It represents capitalism,” one of the terrorists was to explain in the scuttled film. “It represents freedom. It represents everything that America is about. And to bring those two buildings down would bring America to its knees” (qtd. in Hoberman, 2001, December 5). One episode of the cartoon strip “Helen: Sweetheart of the Internet” that had been completed before the attacks was shelved by parent company Tribune Media because it depicted a character blacking out New York with the click of a mouse. “It didn’t have anything to do with a bombing,” Fred Schecker, editor of Tribune Media Services explained; “There were no planes involved. But it did turn out the lights in Manhattan, and we thought that was close enough” (qtd. in McTavish, 2001, October 20).

Perhaps these examples of World Trade Center self-censorship were manifestations of a post-traumatic stress response, with editors and producers sensing that prevailing standards of decorum required them to ease the mass pain of 9/11 by rewriting the past. But other examples of mothballing reveal how discursive restraint went further. The cooperative nature of self-censorship as a compound communicative act with interlocking elements of warning and response is vivid in the National Football League (NFL) example. There was no need for overt government censorship because the NFL’s corporate brass entered into a tacit agreement with announcers that certain words should be stricken from the NFL vocabulary. The NFL issued an advisory asking announcers to refrain from using play-by-play staples such as “blitz, bomb, draft, or trenches” (Sandomir, 2001, September 21). The NFL guidelines had an effect on New York Giants Coach Jim Fassel: “I’m more cautious of some of the things that normally come out of my mouth,” Fassel said when asked about battle analogies; “Because I don’t want to draw any references. Where our country is right now, I’d rather draw a fine line and not get into those terms” (qtd. in Sandomir, September 21).

Clear Channel, a consortium that delivers content to thousands of radio stations nationwide, asked affiliates to avoid playing some 150 songs including:
* Kansas, “Dust in the Wind”
* Carole King, “I Feel the Earth Move”
* Cat Stevens, “Peace Train”
* Peter Paul and Mary, “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”
* Bangles, “Walk Like an Egyptian” (see Leeds and Brownfield, 2001, September 18).

Fox suspended efforts to produce Deadline, a television series based on a hijacking theme (Hoberman, 2001, December 5). Gary Trudeau said he decided to withhold a number of already finished “Doonesbury” installments that were critical of the president because they no longer felt appropriate (McTavish, 2001, October 20). The decision to hold back work in progress because of an intervening event indicates something dramatic about the power of that event to control norms of public discourse. The 9/11 suicide hijackings froze a number of high-profile U.S. entertainment projects that either criticized government leadership or made references to key symbols in the attacks. In Cold War Finland, such self-censorship was also evident in popular entertainment, with songs and plays brought into the ambit of the “psuedototalitarian culture” (Salminen, 1999, p. 29) that deterred anti-Soviet discourse.

Is there significance in the fact that mothballing was so prevalent in the entertainment world? Perhaps producers felt that 9/11-related content was inappropriate to include in films in the immediate aftermath of the suicide hijackings, because it hit “too close to home.” Producer Robert Altman offered a more cynical and more ominous explanation, suggesting that post-9/11 cinema self-censorship was the manifestation of latent guilt harbored by Hollywood for inspiring the suicide hijackings with its visionary aestheticization of spectacular mega-violence: “The movies set the pattern, and these people have copied the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they’d seen it in a movie… I just believe we created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it” (qtd. in Hoberman, 2001, December 5).

Mine dodging
Roughly one month after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice held a remarkable telephone conference call with leaders of the major U.S. television networks. During this call, Rice successfully convinced the television executives to avoid airing videos made by Osama bin Laden. The president could have prohibited such broadcasting by executive order, but instead he chose to dispatch Rice to persuade television officials about the necessity of self-censorship. ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC acquiesced to the request that, according media ethics and law professor Jane Kirtley of the University of Minnesota, carried “the force of coercion if not the force of law” for companies operating in a regulated industry (qtd. in Media caught, 2001, October 12). Application of this disciplinary power reached beyond U.S. network television – The State Department warned U.S. Voice of America radio not to air quotes from a rare interview with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar (Media caught, 2001, October 12).
The response by network television chiefs to Rice’s request for self-censorship was almost uniformly positive: “After hearing Dr. Rice, we’re not going to step on the land mines she was talking about,” Walter Isaacson, CNN’s news chairman, told the New York Times (qtd. in Lobe, 2001, October 11). Isaacson’s minefield analogy captured aptly how the line differentiating journalists, soldiers, and Pentagon officials began to blur in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with public spheres of deliberation dotted with mines and the theater of war doubling as a nascent public sphere.

In an appearance on the David Letterman Show, CBS News anchor Dan Rather said “George Bush is the President. Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where and he’ll make the call” (qtd. in Mansbridge, 2001, September 21). Media magnate Rupert Murdoch seconded Rather’s sentiment, commenting: “We’ll do whatever is our patriotic duty” (Media mogul, 2001, October 11). CNN spokesperson Matt Furman committed unequivocally to a stance that granted government voices a place at his company’s editorial table: “In deciding what to air, CNN will consider guidance from appropriate authorities” (qtd. in CNN airs, 2001, October 11). The United Press International reported that by November, “all the major U.S. TV networks… agreed to a regime of self censorship in the face of pressure from the White House, agreeing to remove language the administration deemed inflammatory” (Chatfield, 2001, November 8).
This tacit agreement between government officials and media executives to suspend rules of critical argumentation in public discourse was facilitated by a particular “argument formation” (Goodnight, 1998). According to Goodnight, unique argument formations were critical in shaping the course of the Cold War: “The Cold War had a flexible grammar, a more or less stable set of categories whose representations mapped the terrain of enemies and allies and rendered intelligible events and acts of influence” (Goodnight, 1998). In the “war on terror,”a related, yet distinct argument formation sets precedents for public deliberation and controls frames of public understanding. Features of the prevailing argument formation are embedded in official texts that establish the acceptable parameters and tone of war discussion. These texts, including public addresses, press conferences and congressional testimony by Bush administrative officials, simultaneously provide an official lens for “rendering events intelligible” and signal to multiple audiences the boundaries of acceptable speech and behavior.

The September 14, 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing initial use of force in the “war on terror” not only gave a green light for military reprisals. It also delegated a presidential prerogative to define key terms – “he determines” the people who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.” This delegated authority extended to executive action “in order to prevent any further acts of international terrorism.” This language established long-term authority for the president to define terrorism and then to act on such definitions by ordering pre-emptive military strikes.
In his September 20, 2001 address to Congress, President George W. Bush (2001a) acted on this power by making an important definitional move. By using the word “harbor,” he extended the war to accessories and assistants supporting acts of terrorism. A map of how this argument formation structured subsequent discourse can be found in President Bush’s (2001a) extension of the “harboring” doctrine into a guilt-by-association formula with the declaration: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” The word “us” in this statement simultaneously presumed and called into existence a consensus, an agreement based on the assumption of a concluded discussion. This consensus was reinforced later when subsequent official discourse operationally defined “us” as the administration’s policy, then broadened the scope of “with the terrorists” not only to include foreign states that harbor terrorists, but also those persons critical of administration policy.

Definitional drift here snared foreign governments “harboring” terrorists and critics questioning administration policy in the same disciplinary net. Such drift was especially evident in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s (2001) testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where he said: “[T]o those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.” Some senators bristled at Ashcroft’s intimation that their tough questions about the USA PATRIOT Act were unpatriotic. At a press conference following Ashcroft’s testimony, Department of Justice spokesperson Mindy Tucker displayed the flexibility of the itsesensuuri phenomenon, denying official censorship in one breath, then issuing new veiled warnings in the next: “Anyone who reported this morning that he [Ashcroft] criticized anyone who opposed him was absolutely wrong and in doing so became part of the exact problem he was describing” (qtd. in Benjamin, 2001, December 7).

In a similar register, an American Council for Trustees and Alumni report (2002) quoted President Bush’s zero-sum framework to justify its indictment of “equivocal” dialogue in universities as the weak link in the war on terror. Most recently came Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, a Beltway lobby group formed by Reagan administration officials William Bennett and Frank Gaffney, joined by former CIA head James Woolsey. Early indications suggest that the purpose of this organization will be to chill war dissent, using Gaffney’s formula that the “second guessing, the questioning, the criticisms” are dangerous because such activity “emboldens” enemies (qtd. in Corn, 2002).
The “with us or with the terrorists” argument formation, laid out in President Bush’s September 20, 2001 address, and extended by these private lobby organizations, created strong incentives for media executives to err on the side of self-censorship. According to Daniel Hallin, political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, a spiral of silence has gripped network television executives: “The television networks are kind of running scared in the sense of being very cautious about putting anything on the air that’s controversial or that might be seen as unpatriotic by either their advertisers or a lot of their audience” (qtd. in Lobe, 2001, October 11).

Patron pressure
The case of Bill Maher, host of the ABC television show Politically Incorrect, illustrates dramatically how patron pressure drove a third type of American self-censorship in the early stages of the “war on terror.” On Sept 17, 2001, Politically Incorrect’s first night back on the air after the 9/11 attacks, Maher said: “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away, that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it. That’s not cowardly.” In response to Maher’s comments, Sears and Federal Express pulled advertisements and the ABC network affiliate WJLA in Washington, D.C. canceled Politically Incorrect.
On Sept 26, 2001, White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer was asked about Maher’s comments. Fleischer’s response carried the heavy weight of an ominous threat: “There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is” (Fleischer, 2001b). Fleischer’s words mirrored ealier “watch what you say and do” warnings issued in Cold War Finland (Salminen, 1999, p. 166), but in another curious layer of self-censorship, his comments were not included in an official written transcript of the briefing (see Fleischer, 2001a). The Maher incident “kind of set the mood for what was going to be tolerated and what wasn’t going to be tolerated,” says Gary Daniels of the National Coalition Against Censorship (qtd. in Jurkowitz, 2002, January 27). In this climate, editors came under strong pressure from their patrons to rein in radical reporting by retracting stories and firing journalists.

Journalist Dan Guthrie of the Oregon Daily Courier wrote a column on September 15, 2001 entitled, “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tender Turn Tail.” In it, Guthrie said President Bush “skedaddled” on September 11, flying on Air Force One to Nebraska rather than returning to Washington, D.C. “The picture of Bush hiding in a Nebraska hole,” Guthrie wrote, was “an embarrassment.” One week later, Guthrie was fired for the story, even though editor Dennis Roler initially signed off on it. Roler’s final statement of good riddance included an apology to readers for printing Guthrie’s piece in the first place: “In this critical time, the nation needs to come together behind the President. Politics, and destructive criticism, need to be put aside for the country’s good. Unfortunately, my lapse in judgment hurt that positive effort, and I apologize” (qtd. in Rothschild, 2002).
Reporter Tom Gutting of the Texas City Sun met a similar fate after he penned a story on September 22, criticizing Bush for staying away from the Capitol on 9/11. The day the piece appeared, the Sun’s publisher assured Gutting that his job was safe, but a few days later this editor also flip-flopped, firing Gutting and issuing a printed apology, saying Gutting’s column was “not appropriate to print at this time” (qtd. in The first amendment, 2001). On the other end of the political spectrum, National Review columnist Ann Coulter was fired for suggesting that the U.S. should crusade to convert all critics of the war to Christianity (Kurtz, 2001, October 2).

Similar examples of speech chilling took place in the entertainment world. Aaron McGruder’s cartoon, “The Boondocks,” was pulled from papers around the country for having characters say that the CIA helped train Afghan rebels like Osama bin Laden and that the U.S. funded the Taliban (Robinson, 2001, October 9). Todd Persche, cartoonist for the Baraboo News Republic in Wisconsin, was axed for drawing cartoons featuring captions such as: “When the media keeps pounding on the war drum… it’s hard to hear other points of view” (qtd. in Rothschild, 2002).
More subtle patron pressure has shaped content decisions in the television industry, where corporations employ “screeners” to evaluate the acceptability of program content in network television programming. “If the advertiser doesn’t want to be associated with a particular episode of a series, it’s easier for a network to pull  the show than to scramble for substitute sponsors” (Ostrow, 2001, August 21). There is little institutional momentum in the leadership of news organizations to counteract this patron pressure. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, believes that at a time of “decreasing circulation and decreasing ratings,” bottom-line pressures “rendered news organizations less willing to endure the slings and arrows of public opinion” (qtd. in Jurkowitz, 2002, January 27).

Conclusion
The typology of self-censorship explored in this essay shows how public deliberation in the early “war on terror” was structured by three distinct forms of discourse control. Mothballing involved the shelving of content completed or still being made before the 9/11 attacks. Mine dodging took place when loyalty-minded reporters steered discussion away from areas designated as minefields by administration officials. Patron pressure resulted in the direct termination of employment contracts held by critical journalists and also influenced programming content on network television.
Two net effects of this self-censorship were a homogenization of public dialogue and a slide in journalistic standards of reportage. A January 2002 study by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism showed minimal coverage of war dissent in the U.S. media and slippage of journalistic standards of reporting, due to the dearth of knowledge created by official information controls coupled with “spiral of silence” pressure to conform: “The study found that during the periods examined the press heavily favored pro-Administration and official U.S. viewpoints – as high as 71% early on. Over time the balance of viewpoints has broadened somewhat. Even then, what might be considered criticism remained minimal – below 10%” (Project for Excellence, 2002). The Columbia group also found that the lack of official information available has shifted journalistic work more in the direction of interpretation and speculation, away from factual reporting (see Project for Excellence, 2002).

According to Van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson and Jacobs, higher-order conditions for critical discussion are background conditions necessary for argumentation to get off the ground and for the force of better argument to guide the course of discussion. First-order conditions address access – parties to a dispute must have opportunities to issue arguments and respond freely. Second-order conditions speak to the psychological makeup of arguers, focusing on their motivations to engage in critical discussion (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993: 32-3). Widespread war self-censorship in the United States subverted these higher-order conditions by creating a situation where interlocutors were not physically or psychologically prepared to engage in the vigorous give-and-take of argumentation.
What are the consequences for public discourse when such higher-order conditions are under attack in a war-stressed nation? Current news analysis dwells on the arcane details of Homeland Security Office reorganization and CIA/FBI “intelligence failure.” However, an “accidental public” (Farrell and Goodnight, 1981) that only comes into existence in periods of grave crisis is vulnerable to a different kind of intelligence failure triggered by a suffocating shortfall of heuristic energy created by a lack of critical discussion in the public sphere.
Similar concerns that appear to have motivated CBS News Director Dan Rather’s recent reflections on the self-censorship phenomenon. The same Rather who stood ready in September 2001 to go “wherever [President Bush] wants me to” expressed grave reservations about self-censorship in a May 2002 interview with BBC Newsnight. Rather began by raising explicitly the topic of self-censorship: “What we are talking about here – whether one wants to recognize it or not, or call it by its proper name or not – is a form of self-censorship” (Rather says, 2002, May 17). The veteran CBS News reporter then made a startling analogy, comparing American self-censorship on the “war on terror” with the practice of “necklacing” in South Africa under apartheid:
It is an obscene comparison… but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tyres around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions, and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism (qtd. in Buncombe, 2002, May 17).

It is tempting to be reassured by explanations that wartime censorship is a temporary phenomenon that will dissipate once the war is over. Yet the value of such reassurance is lessened by the Bush administration’s tired mantra that the world should prepare for a lengthy, open-ended war with no exit strategy and no definitive end in sight. As civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate observes, “This is a situation where the enemy is among us… and there’s not going to be a surrender on the battleship Missouri” (qtd. in Jurkowtiz, 2002, January 27).
As citizens prepare for the “long war,” analysts increasingly concur that the most basic defense against terrorism is one that defuses it. As analyst Ivan Eland (1998) recommends, when it comes to protecting against terrorist attack, “The Best Defense Is to Give No Offense” (subtitle of his 1998 Cato Institute briefing paper). This strategy works to counter the resentments that breed hatred and terrorism, while also cooperating with other nations to stem worldwide trafficking in weapons-grade biological, chemical, and nuclear materiel. Apparently, this desire to influence world opinion was one motivation behind the Bush administration’s decision, on December 13, 2001, to release a videotape purporting to show Osama bin Laden implicitly acknowledging his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. President Bush stated that the video would be a “devastating declaration of guilt” for bin Laden.
However, skeptics in the Arab world and beyond discounted the veracity of the video, claiming that the Pentagon had doctored it. President Bush (2001b) answered that it was “preposterous for anyone to think that this tape is doctored,” and that such skeptics were making a “feeble excuse to provide weak support for an incredibly evil man.” Perhaps one factor accounting for skepticism in Arab public spheres regarding the veracity of the December 13 video was the fact that the Pentagon’s credibility had already been undermined there by an official propaganda campaign including air drops of propaganda leaflets over Afghanistan. Some leaflets included digitally manipulated images that were doctored to encourage Taliban and Al Qaeda defections and “win” the “battle for the hearts and minds” of Afghan peoples.
Pentagon propaganda leaflet AFD56b depicted Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders with skulls superimposed on their faces and ominous scenes of human hangings in the background. Pentagon propaganda leaflet TF11RP03 showed bin Laden with his beard removed, dressed in Western clothing, coupled with the following caption: “Usama bin Laden the murderer and coward has abandoned you” (see Friedman, 2002). These clear instances of digital image manipulation for propaganda purposes may help explain skepticism of American claims in Arab public spheres and beyond.

Asked during a January 4, 2002 press conference about the credibility problem these doctored leaflets might present, Secretary Rumsfeld first responded that he “had not thought about it” (2002). Then he went on to imply that such lying and deception might be justified because everything that Osama bin Laden does is “premised on lies.” Perhaps Rumsfeld was close here to repeating his statement in a September 25, 2001 press conference that in wartime, “truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies” (Rumsfeld, 2001), echoing Winston Churchill’s famous dictum that “In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
Although Rumsfeld asked, even pleaded with reporters not to quote his recitation of Churchill’s rationale for strategic deception, it only took a whiff of trickery to trigger a torrent of media skepticism about the veracity of Pentagon statements. Of course, deception in wartime has long been accepted as a legitimate military strategy. However, expanded deception programs designed to manipulate domestic and allied public opinion raise their own set of unique dilemmas.

While deception strategies may be effective as military levers deployed to complicate enemy planning (witness Operation Barbarossa, Operation Bodyguard, and of course the Trojan Horse), they are less useful as “weapons of mass communication” propaganda tools designed to influence public opinion writ large. Such a propaganda strategy is built on the foundation of skewed communicative norms, with U.S. government officials positioned as dominant information sources, using top-down communication infrastructure to transmit manipulated images and patronizing propaganda to passive recipients. This is a Madison Avenue model of communication in practice, not a framework for equal deliberative exchange. With receivers of such messages positioned as passive and inferior communicative actors, it is understandable why this communication model might sow anti-American resentment and alienation. A recent report by the Inter American Press Association further points out how American self-censorship undercuts the credibility of U.S. statements made on the world stage: “This self-censorship sends the wrong message to the Muslim nations about the values of openness and press freedom that the United States and its allies uphold and denies the American public the right to be fully informed” (qtd. in America’s press, 2001, October 17).

It is difficult to see how the Bush administration can build the global trust necessary to defuse terrorism when it secretly creates disinformation factories like the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). Tasked with the job of persuading the world about the rightness of the war, funded out of the $10 billion “blank check” war appropriation from Congress, and headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, this Pentagon office envisioned using a mix of phony e-mails and press releases to influence foreign media (Dao and Schmitt, 2002, February 19). After existence of the office was leaked to the press, the ensuing firestorm of worldwide criticism caused Secretary Rumsfeld to backpedal and shut down the office. OSI may be gone, but it is not forgotten – the simple revelation that such an office existed was enough to stimulate worldwide skepticism about the veracity of U.S. claims and cause many to wonder whether, somewhere deeper in the Pentagon basement, there are other secret propaganda offices still churning out disinformation.
The Bush administration might improve its strategy to defuse terrorism by “winning hearts and minds” if it embraced a different vision of dialogue, perhaps one closer to Iranian president Mohammed Khatami’s (2000) proposal for a “dialogue of civilizations.” Khatami’s address to the United Nations in 2000 suggested that individual citizens have the power to avert Samuel Huntington’s tragic “clash of civilizations,” by pursuing reciprocally respectful dialogue across national, cultural, and religious boundaries. Such patterns of communication have the potential to percolate upward, energizing and informing government-to-government diplomacy in a way that enhances collective security by improving mutual understanding. In developing a theory of international relations that highlights the constructive role of public sphere dialogue, political scientist Marc Lynch (1999) notes that “shared understandings and communicative action – rather than an artificial isolation and silence – could produce different patterns of identity formation and [state] behavior” (pp. 15-16).
Another recommendation comes from David Hoffman (2002), president of the Internews Network. Since anti-American sentiment on the Arab street can be fanned by propaganda published by centralized (and often state-owned) Arab media outlets, Hoffman (2002) calls for U.S. assistance in supporting independent and locally owned media in the Arab world. However, Hoffman (2002) cautions that this approach is exclusive with the OSI propaganda model, because the United States “will appear duplicitous if it tries to support independent news outlets while simultaneously manipulating information or engaging in counterpropaganda” (p. 95). A more judicious deliberative posture is suggested by Harvard terrorism scholar Jessica Stern (2001): “[T]he United States has to learn to dictate less and listen more” if it wants to fight the scourge of terrorism, which is “now spread, in tiny packets of fury and pain, around the world” (p. 357).

REFERENCES
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