Discurso i violencia: la 'fantasmización' mediática de la fuerza

Abstract

Violence is a social and cultural resource which is available as a last resort in order to determine human action. In politicised societies, the exercise ot force appears to be centralised in the hands of the State, such that only the legitimate people can apply it in the way they consider pertinent and legitimate. The media's representation of violence, whose function is to remind us of its availability as a radical form of human interaction, implies a certain disrespect towards this use of force for political purposes, The discourses which express concern about the dangers ofexcessive exposure of the public to images of violence come from a political desire to suppress the possibility of force, even in the field of representations which take place in the collective imagination, supplied in this case by the mass media.