The proposition advanced by media critics John Fiske and John Hartley, that television provides the experience of "defamiliarization" (the demand that viewers "negotiate" a response to the ideological frameworks that television presents), is considered by the Russian Formalist critics and the structuralists who elaborated and refined their ideas as being the distinctive effect of art. In general, symbolic discourse provokes either aesthetic or rhetorical experience; and whether the aesthetic or the rhetorical mode obtains depends upon the interaction between the features of the discourse and the orientation of the recipient. Kenneth Burke's conception of rhetoric supports the distinction that while aesthetic experience is defamiliarizing and transcategorical, with its essence being awareness of the processes of perception and categorization, rhetorical experience is familiarizing and categorizing, with its essence being the confirmation or modification of schemata and of perceptual and ideological categories. The idea that television viewing generates the aesthetic experience of defamiliarization stems from a failure to distinguish between these two modes of experiencing discourse. By presenting ideological frameworks toward which viewers negotiate a response, television invites rhetorical response, making it not an art, but a variety of discourse. (FL)