Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates the need for a new theoretical framework for interpreting television texts and for limiting relativism in the interest of reliability. Being an exploration of the antinomies between structural determinism and genetic freedom, this project traced the debate to Kant and Hume. Several schools of interpretive thought were critically investigated for a possible solution to relativism including; de Saussure's semiotics, Jakobson's formalism, Levi-Strauss' structuralism, Chomsky's transformational grammar, Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger's Dasein analytics, Wittgenstein's logical analyses, Gadamer and Ricoeur's respective versions of philosophical hermeneutics, Apel and Habermas' theories of communicative pragmatics, Barthes' global semantization, and Derrida's grammatology. Aspects of these approaches that offered some potential for limiting the crisis of conflicting interpretations and illegitimation were synthesized for the first time with Gebser's pluralistic phenomenology and McLuhan's theory of electronic media. Several advertisements were analyzed in order to illustrate the problem. Gebser's phenomenological analysis of multiple consciousness structures was demonstrated to be a partial solution to the absurd nihilism of unchecked skepticism. Gadamer's theory of self-critically presenting prejudices in the Heideggerian tradition of authentic being was shown to have a powerful convergence with Gebser's notion of "presentation." The valuable insights of these two approaches to relativism were tempered by an analysis of their respective logocentric biases. The goal of this dissertation was to demonstrate that relativism can and must be limited in the interest of all communicative and scientific projects, that a distinction can be made between blind and enabling prejudices thus defeating the determinism of hegemonic communicative strategies. Gebser's radical temporalization of genetic ontology was shown to be in accord with Husserl's analyses of internal time-consciousness, and a complement to Gadamer's notion of the fundamentally temporal nature of effective-historical consciousness. The linguisticality of world was grounded by Husserl's phenomenology and developed to accommodate a limited, rational pluralism by the application of Gebser's work. Thus an intelligible pluralism is offered as a solution to the absurd infinite regression postulated by Derrida and the intolerant paradox of Foucault's claim to absolutely know that one cannot know.