Representations of violence are not intrinsically senseless & can even aspire to beauty; violent media are able to represent, by way of implication, deeper truths about the nature of the universe & our human interrelationships

Beautiful Violence: Polemos, Responsibility, and Tragic Wisdom. Jeffrey Ventola. Academia Letters, Feb 2021. https://www.academia.edu/45093421

Introduction

I will argue in this paper that representations of violence are not intrinsically senseless and can even aspire to beauty. They may evince more or less responsible portrayals of conflict. As I will justify and valuate representations of violence I wish to define my scope to avoid misinterpretation. I believe that violent media are able to represent, by way of implication, deeper truths about the nature of the universe and our human interrelationships. This applies most relevantly to visual, fictional, narrative media such as television and films. I believe what these representations can uncover, when properly deployed, is Heraclitus’s Polemos. While typically translated as “war”, Claudia Baracchi warns against such a strict interpretation. She convincingly argues that Polemos and Logos itself are very closely bound. Polemos is then the conflict necessarily implied by our existence and not “the human exercise of warfare”(Baracchi 268).

In order to demonstrate an aesthetic connection between this interpretation of Polemos and violent media, I will reference Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as he argues that tragedy and indeed all art is produced from a kind of conflict that is, at once always changing and part of a larger unity. I argue that due to their structural similarities art can demonstrate or imply Polemos, revealing an aspect of Logos that may typically be beyond our comprehension. Due to its inclination to entertain as well as philosophize, many forms of media typically represent conflict through violence. I do not believe this is necessarily bad. There can even be artistic and pragmatic effects from viewing responsibly constructed violent imagery.