ABSTRACT
Central to the study of argumentation and rhetoric is the opposition between positivist and discursive views of reason and rationality. These different conceptions of rational discussion – a positive view of progress through procedural rationality and the discursive expression of diversity, opinion and local practice – underlie the bourgeois and oppositional conceptions of the public sphere respectively. Rationality is also central to relations between the public and private: what persuasive, educational and rhetorical processes connect ordinary people with bureaucrats, experts and politicians and how are conflicts between private individuals and institutions played out through public debate? We argue that audience discussion programmes express not one or other of these views of rationality but the oppositional tension between them. Similarly, they do not express one relation between the laity and the experts, or the life-world and the system, but rather they problematize their mutual interpenetration. If the audience discussion programme represents at least a candidate for the public sphere – and after all, even though the place is odd and the conditions strange, people still turn up to participate and to argue – then we must ask what kinds of arguments are held within them. More generally, we can ask what place there is for rational discussion in the mass media.
