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Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of beauty and the moral value of art. The aestheticization of violence is the process of making the act and the product of violence appear attractive.

The power of art

High culture has the capacity to aestheticize violence into a form of autonomous art. "If any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder. And if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist — a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction." Joel Black (1991: 14). An example might be the character Hannibal Lecter, a fictional cannibal and aesthete created by Thomas Harris and then portrayed by Anthony Hopkins on screen. In the films Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Hannibal (2000), directors Jonathan Demme and Ridley Scott, respectively intentionally generate excitement and anticipation when Lecter is about to kill (and eat) a victim.

Aestheticization through art

Plato proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic because he feared that their aesthetic ability to construct attractive narratives about immoral behaviour would corrupt young minds. Today, the power of the mass media to package ideas is the same problem but on a different scale. This is mitigated by the fact that many people resist novelty, preferring their lives to be routine and predictable. When something new does occur, the signs and symbols are integrated into memory as part of the Kelllian cognitive map (sometimes known as the semantic map). In his Personal construct psychology, George Kelly proposes that an individual constructs a lens of meanings through which he or she perceives the world. Everyone has the freedom to choose different meanings for whatever he or she wants, prefers or likes. The map both allows individuals to anticipate events that might threaten currently held interpretations and meanings, and presents coping strategies to avoid unpleasant emotions. As a medium of communication, art has the capacity to present issues in unexpected ways. It exploits the many shades of meaning in literal and figurative language to introduce subject matter not normally considered acceptable for public discussion through inference and metaphor. By challenging conventional boundaries of mapped meanings indirectly, the audience may be seduced into considering taboo issues. This can be a profound shock and many consider such art a threat to their ideological territory.

It is therefore necessary to consider whether society benefits from confronting socially sensitive issues involving violence. The culture industry mass produces texts and images about conflict and war. Consequently, the once sporadic release of individual stories has been consolidated into genres, innovative narrative choices are now predictable conventions, characters are stereotyped as heroes or villains, and symbols and metaphors have become clichés. This material uncritically depicts difficult behaviour in an unthreatening context. But, when a new element is introduced into the mass media, it may reveal whether the commonly held cognitive maps are misleading, and provide a possible basis for a revision of those maps. The televising and reporting of Peace Commissions represents a form of drama in which a nation's construction of history can be explored. All stakeholders are allowed the opportunity to be heard. At an individual level, the participants may receive forgiveness and catharsis through reconciliation. But the audience is also empowered through greater knowledge to move away from indisputable truths towards a communal construction of experience and thereby to the acceptance of a more open society. So whether as art or art exploited for political purposes, a series of key questions arise:

• Are all acts of creativity depicting violence a public good?
• Is it appropriate for some works to carry warning labels as pornography or merely "adult"?
• Should more extreme works be criminalised as an incitement to further violence or hatred?
• In the event that censorship should be imposed, what are the criteria of acceptability, and what procedures should be put in place to ensure that only those examples of creativity found to be acceptable are displayed in public?

First step towards an answer

When the audience views a painting, photograph or cartoon, this is a static image; and although each person's interpretation may change through analysis and reflection, there is a certain dispassionate quality about the experience, a sense of distance between the artist/audience and the content. But technology changes the process. Through the destruction of uniqueness, those who deal in moving images have the capacity to fragment a scene into its components and then to reassemble them in whatever format serves their purpose. Thus, a photograph may be a representation of reality, but a film cutter may produce a sequence of images that is anything but realistic and which forces the audience to interpret those images according to a different set of semiotic rules. Charles Peirce (1839-1914) suggested that there were three classes of sign:

• the symbolic where the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary;
• the iconic where the signifier resembles the signified; and
• the indexical where there is a direct connection between the signifier and the signified.

Paintings or photographs will resemble what they represent. An unedited photograph may also be an index, but digital technology is eroding the viewer's confidence that the image is an objective representation of reality.

Semiotic rules in action

A stills photographer may capture a police officer's struggle to arrest a criminal. The denotative meaning might be, "law enforcement in action", but the connotative meanings might range from, "a heroic fight to subdue a dangerous terrorist about to release sarin gas", to "an excessive use of force by a racist police officer in arresting a man of another race who can be charged with only a minor offence". The attribution of the subtext is left to the caption writer, the commentators and the audience. But if the arrest is captured on a video camera, the mise en scène and non-verbal signs become much more explicit and enable the audience to make a better informed attribution of meaning (assuming that the recording has not been modified in any way). What is the value of this video as a signifier? This will be determined by its relations to the other signifiers in the system. Thus, if it is included in a reputable television news programme, it will acquire a greater claim to be indexical and its status is more likely to be considered reliable "evidence" of real world events. In semiotic terms, the words spoken by the television presenter will be symbolic, and the images will have both iconic and indexical qualities. But the medium of the system is not neutral and the value of the video will change if it is transposed into a polemical or satirical programme. These substitute contexts form modality indicators, i.e. each class of programme offers clues as to the plausibility, credibility, or truthfulness of the content. Hence, the violence shown can be aestheticized either by the values of the symbolical signs used by the news presenter, or by the relations with other signifiers in the same programme.

Similarly, should a film or television director stage a similar scene, the audience will be predisposed to consider it less "real" because the scenario is being filtered through the film-maker's sensibilities and the outcome will reflect the director's motives. Hence, the lighting, make-up, costumes, acting methods, cutting, and soundtrack music selection will combine to inform the audience about the film maker's intentions. Whether the final product is accepted as 'realistic' depends on an aesthetic code. Over time, certain styles and conventions of shooting and editing are standardised within a medium and genres. Some tend to naturalise the content, to make it seem more real. Others deliberately breach convention for the effect intended by the director. As to the content itself: if the consensus among the audience is that the director intended to stigmatise or comment constructively on the behaviour, then its portrayal might be acceptable. But, if the use of violence is gratuitous and exploitative, then, at the very least, we may consider it unaesthetic art.

An example

In The Accused (1988), Jonathan Kaplan stages a detailed rape scene so that he can consider the moral and legal quality of the spectators who, while not engaging in sexual intercourse, nevertheless shouted encouragement to those that were. Many who saw the film were offended by the brutality of the scenes of the assault. Indeed, in a different type of film, such scenes would have constituted hardcore pornography. But the majority of those who saw The Accused accepted that the violence was contextualised and necessary to reinforce the social and political subtext of the script. Are there any theories that can clarify the issues?

• A film such as The Accused could be considered an example of sensitisation, a form of reverse modelling in which the audience is invited to react strongly against some extreme example of realistic violence so that they are less likely to imitate it.
• There may also be a catharsis. Seymour Feshbach (1955; see also Feshbach & Singer 1971) has argued that fantasy violence can have a cathartic effect on the audience, defusing latent aggression, and reducing the possibility of aggressive behaviour.

Such outcomes would suggest that the depiction of realistic violence can be a public good and that its display should not be limited.

• But, in his "Theory of Disinhibition", Leonard Berkowitz (1977, 1986), proposes that while some people are naturally aggressive, they are usually able to repress this tendency. An obsessive interest in violent imagery in the cinema or on television may weaken their inhibitions and lead to a feeling that the release of their aggression is acceptable.
• This is allied to the "Theory of Desensitisation" which proposes that the consistent viewing of violent imagery gradually conditions viewers to accept violence as normal, i.e. it dulls their sensitivity to aggressive behaviour in everyday life.
• Social learning theorists propose that some individuals learn aggressive behaviour by observing a role model. Charismatic film and TV characters are, by definition, role models and suggestible people may imitate observed behaviour if they identify and empathise with the characters, and if the characters' behaviour is presented as justified. Hence, for example, explicit warnings of the danger of imitation are given before World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) wrestling shows because the narrative context for the action emphasises the good guys and provides vicarious reinforcement; i.e. the acceptability of the violence is reinforced by being shown as benefitting the good guy as the aggressor. Such reinforcement is less likely in shows where the violence is shown as punished or unproductive.

This confusion as to whether there are potential justifications for depicting violence aesthetically should lead us to the conclusion that it would be difficult to compose any set of criteria for judging acceptability in a censorship system. If censorship is nevertheless introduced, its operation would be uncertain and arbitrary, and subject to politicisation and manipulation by interest groups.

References

• Berkowitz, L. (ed) (1977; 1986): Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vols 10 & 19. New York: Academic Press
• Black, Joel (1991) The Aesthetics of Murder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Feshbach, S. (1955): The Drive-Reducing Function of Fantasy Behaviour, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 50: 3-11
• Feshbach, S & Singer, R. D. (1971): Television and Aggression: An Experimental Field Study. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Vol. I, II. Norton, New York. (2nd printing: 1991, Routledge, London, New York)
• Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931-58): Collected Writings. (Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, & Arthur W Burks). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

See also

• Aestheticization as propaganda
• The art of murder
• A Clockwork Orange
• Graphic violence
• Ultraviolence
• Martial Arts

• Aesthetics
• Semiotics
• Violence