THE ORIGIN OF TELEVISION AS CIVILlZATlONAL EXPRESSION

Reification of television images is facilitated by the western bias of logocentrism which itself is an attitude born of the modern mental-rational, perspectival consciousness structure. Before proceeding further it is useful to clarify what is meant by "logocentrism", and "perspectival consciousness". This paper proceeds in three stages; first an investigation into logocentrism, second a clarifying of what Jean Gebser (1949) means by perspectival consciousness, and finally an expansion on the claim just made, a claim that is crucial to the understanding of the civilizational expression known as television. First,logocentrism, as defined by Derrida (1967: 12), is the western "metaphysics of presence", itself defined as the immediate presence of consciousness· to itself resulting in a simple, irreducible foundation of apodictic knowledge. There have been a variety of "isms" which have claimed the status of transcendental ground to whi"h all dis-courses can be reduced. These include psychologism, biolog-ism, mate~ialism, and of course historicism. For instance, Marxist historicism is revealed by Nietzsche's deconstruction to be, "convinced of its power to escape the figurality of language and achieve a perspective atop all the figurality of meaning" (Norris 1982: 86). By contrast, the literature that is called "history", by Nietzsche's standard of mortality, involves a surrender of the privileged claim to knowledge once entertained by the sovereign consciousness. Following the Nietzschean suspicion of transcendental consciousness manifest as method, Foucault argues that it is no longer, " ... a question of judging the past in the name of truth which only we can possess in the present (rather the question is one of) ... risking the deconstruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge" (Foucault 1977: 164). We find similar analyses of history as rhetorical strategies in the struggle for interpretive power and domination in the works of Edward Said (Orientalism) and Jeffrey Mehlman (Revo[ution and Repetition).