ABSTRACT
The collective nature of violence can perhaps be seen most clearly in cases where individuals allow themselves to be swallowed by a crowd and are drawn into a violent confrontation. In practice, violence is often hurried, difficult to describe, and nowhere near as prolonged as popular culture would have us believe. Depictions of violence in films, books, or games may be so technical and harrowing that it appears to be a completely central part of people’s thoughts and actions, which can serve to rob violence of its exceptional quality. Violence may, for example, function as a background expectancy in an authoritarian political regime, as a self-evident fact of life. Violence may be represented and symbolised, inter alia by means of threats, shouting, gestures, and vandalism. Fictional violence – in books, plays, films, and games, or in playful interactions between people – constitutes a special case of symbolised violence, that as a rule makes no attempt to be threatening.
