Society of the Spectacle and Symbolic Violence: New Forms of Violence in Media Discourse

This article presents the results of theoretical research in which the concepts of society of the spectacle (Debord, 1967) and symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Fasseron, 1970) are correlated, concepts considered fundamental for knowing and interpreting some contemporary social and cultural phenomena, particularly old and new forms of the media discourse on violence. To illustrate such concepts and their relationships, the study recurs to the phenomena called excess of representation and neo-narcissism (Finol & Finol, 2008; Finol, 2014), understood as concrete expressions of the society of the spectacle, which are also based on symbolic violence, practiced predominantly in the advertising and communications media. Finally, the article proposes a classification of the relationship between fiction and reality and among these, mass media and the new narratives that cross through media discourse.