Entertainment vs. Enlightenment

Those who engage in a cultural approach to the First Amendment understand that entertainment, more than enlightenment, provides a key rationale for protecting the commercial mass media. They also will disregard Justice Felix Frankfurter's admonition: "It must never be forgotten ... that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment [and that behind] the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of reason ...." ¹⁰³ Frankfurter's concept of reasoned discourse, with its referent point in a knowable reality, is clearly no longer what the guarantee is generally about.

The Carnival culture tends to replace logic with anti­logic. This "logic" assaults linear thinking by breaking down the logical connection between one proposition and another and allows quantum leaps between them. This system is particularly visible in the mass advertising and popular television arenas, where associative thinking reigns. ¹⁰⁴ That is, something becomes "true" largely through its association with something else. In televisual logic, a blue­blood president associates with country­western singers­creating a down­home image of a blue­collar kind of guy. On the same day, the same president introduces a docudrama on the Persian Gulf war that imperceptibly interweaves fictional performances with factual footage­creating a larger­than­life image of a statesman. ¹⁰⁵ Similarly, the televisual logic of mass advertising allows a fast­food chain or a cola company to equate Olympic athletic prowess with consumption of its products. ¹⁰⁶ It is not as important that these particular examples be believed, as it is that they represent a popularly accepted method of discourse.

Essential to associative thinking, Jean Baudrillard might suggest, is "the exaltation of signs based on the denial of the reality of things." ¹⁰⁷ This is a symbolic discourse in which the relationship between a word and its real­world referent is broken. In this discourse, the real­world referent is replaced by other signs (e.g., words or images). For example, when a car becomes a "Jaguar," both words lose their real­world referents, and their meaning becomes dependent on reference to each other as symbols. This amounts to a "misappropriation of meaning": "everywhere there is, in lieu and in place of the real, its substitution by a 'neo­real' entirely produced from a combination of coded elements." ¹⁰⁸ An unanticipated byproduct of this misappropriation may be a certain skepticism about language itself, since "[n]othing seems to be exactly what it is said to be; words are not tied to anything concrete." ¹⁰⁹

Another example may further clarify the general point. In an indictment of "family values" in America, former Vice President Quayle referred not to real individuals and situations but to a television character, a fictional unwed mother named "Murphy Brown." ¹¹⁰ In this carnivalesque world, there need not be any difference between an actual Murphy Brown and "Murphy Brown." It is enough to trade one sign for another, "family values" for "Murphy Brown." In fact, such "TV images are not only trusted; they are given more credence than real­life experience." ¹¹¹

In addition to understanding the influence of associative thinking in our society, a cultural approach to the First Amendment would recognize the core value of the "symbolic speech" doctrine. Despite Chief Justice William Rehnquist's censure, flag burning (and arguably draft card or cross burning) must not be condemned simply because it is "the equivalent of an inarticulate grunt or roar." ¹¹² Rather, this imagistic act must be elevated precisely because it exchanges symbol for symbol, bounding over the linear progressions of Justice Frankfurter's reasoned discourse. In the vernacular of the pop culture, jurists might take a lesson from the Twin Peaks film director David Lynch: "Fire walk with me." ¹¹³ Such symbolic speech generates more heat than light, and that's exactly what the First Amendment's worth in the Carnival.