Media violence as a form of the social

The author examines historical transformations of the “social” through a prism of dominating subjective types. Social progress is explored as a move away from the subjective, which is expressed mostly through the collective unconscious, towards the subjectiveness of a sovereign identity. In this historical context, mediaviolence (as violence that reaches each separate person through media) can be seen as a steady form of the “social” only under conditions that affirm an autonomous individual. Certain conditions apply: an appropriate technological level of the media sources, the appearance of media institutes, the cultural maturity of the perception subject, etc. Therefore, the starting point of the study is placed in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras. Signs and features of the future information society began taking form at the beginning of the classical worldview formation -when information began to actively adapt and acquire market qualities. At the same time, the prerequisites for the accelerated social subject differentiation also began to appear. The author finds three types of the subjective vital to the discussion topic. Having first appeared in the early modern period, today they have reached their “limit values”. In the course of the rational and empiric subjectiveness development, the media violence market began to be formed and institutionalized. Fear-mongering and manipulative governance that uses anxiety and stress-factors are currently upheld by advances in neurolinguistic programming and psychiatry. The “mystical” subjectiveness appears as a staged dramatization of mystical terror and plots that popularize magic practices. The totality of today’s media violence stems from media-subjectiveness that has been turned into a blindly acting mechanism; it is placed within the logic systems of social form development, which are in turn borne out of classical metaphysics. The latter, in the author’s opinion, does not have the potential to bring about a humanitarian resolution to the problem at hand. The possibilities of a heterological perspective that reaffirms nonaggressive thought and new event sociability are explored from this point of view. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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