Exploring the Carnival Culture

Where entertainment and commerce are the paradigms of communication, discourse inevitably will combine with intercourse. After all, sex appeals and sex sells. Pornography (whether the soft porn of television or the hard porn of explicit videos) represents the commodification of sex, and like advertising generally, trades the essence of the person herself for a money­making image. The popularity of pornography is one index of the discourse valued in today's culture. Pornography is largely a disingenuous form of communication: It promises to make the unattainable attainable. ¹⁶

Of course, mass communication in modern America exists in still other arenas. And it is precisely the object of a cultural approach to the First Amendment to identify and evaluate all other such major environments. ¹⁷ In the arenas we have identified thus far, the operative logic abounds in contradictions: A proposition can be at one with its opposite; something can assume the attributes of something else merely by visual association; a point can simultaneously be understood yet misunderstood; and, a fact can be real and unreal at the same time. An examination of this logic of contradictions, so much a part of the "visual logic" of TV talk, is central to a cultural approach to the First Amendment.

If our scholarly stripes were more traditional, we would review Rodney Smolla's new Free Speech in an Open Society ¹⁸ or Lucas Powe's The Fourth Estate and the Constitution. ¹⁹ We might even examine the history of suppression as ably set out in Margaret Blanchard's Revolutionary Sparks: Freedom of Expression in Modern America. ²⁰ Better still, we would discuss John Garvey and Frederick Schauer's The First Amendment: A Reader, ²¹ which includes many First Amendment perspectives but nowhere mentions a cultural perspective. But since we are not that traditional, we prefer to soil the ground a bit by examining the popular culture of communication with an eye to what it may teach us about the First Amendment. To that end, we start with a review of James Twitchell's Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America.