Social order thus creates the framework for the social trust in the predictability and routinisation of social lifeworlds which is an important resource for processes of socialisation. In line with Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the social contract, Wolfgang Sofsky even considers the experience of violence as the initial reason for the foundation of society.²

Émile Durkheim has shown that retribution for crime creates solidarity among those who condemn it.³ In this perspective, violence and crime contribute to maintaining the moral order, although and because the criminal action questions it. “The transgression does not deny the taboo”, Georges Bataille says, “but transcends it and completes it.”⁴ A moral and social order that cannot be violated is unimaginable. As a phenomenon of the extraordinary, violence can be both constructive and destructive. The distinction between construction and destruction is also reflected in concepts of power and sovereignty, especially when it comes to the question of the legitimate and illegitimate use of violence. While the legal use of violence is mostly thought of as the prerogative of the state, the illegal use of violence implies ideas of aggression and cruelty that are deemed to be unreasonable.⁵

Most founding myths and collective identities of societies or communities are based on the notion of either being a victim of violence or making use of it.⁶ In this respect, we can regard violence as something both extraordinary and absolutely “normal”. Although we do not expect to be victims of violence in our daily routines – at least in pacified, Western societies – we are not in principle surprised by any acts of violence that happen to others.⁷

Therefore, violence remains an immanent part of modern society, usually integrated into the symbolical as well as the practical framing of social normality. Although the violent act is certainly not regarded as “normal” from the perspective of perpetrators, victims and bystanders, society and the media try to find strategies and social mechanisms of “normalisation”. “Normalisation” in this sense does not mean that violence is morally accepted. Instead, “normalising” violence means (re-)constructing causes and motives and embedding the disturbing incident in a narrative. As a result, the act of violence becomes integrated in a comprehensible framework, in which it appears to be motivated by a rational cause (for example, being the victim of discrimination or having financial worries). In addition, the normalisation and rationalisation of the violent act could also be considered as ways of coping with contingent circumstances. If society is successful in normalising and rationalising the violent act, it manages to define the performance of violence as a social practice as unnecessary. As a consequence, social individuals perceive its absence as the very normality of their lifeworlds. However, there are violent acts that transcend the social and moral order in such a way that they cannot be classified as acts of “normal violence”. Terrorist attacks, school shootings or acts of torture seem, to a certain extent, to resist strategies of normalisation. Transgressions of this kind eliminate any connection to the social realm, undermining the very possibility of societalisation.⁸

These forms of violence that we call “excessive” are the topic of this book. The use of “excessive” here refers not to the quantitative magnitude of violent events – for example, the number of victims – but to the transgression of interpretative frameworks, as well as to excess in the sense of a meaningful category for making and normalising judgements (as indicated, for example, by the phrase “excessive police force”, where the idea of excess indicates the limits of legitimised violence). The meaning of excess unfolds within the discursive currents that attempt to normalise disturbance ex post facto as well as in the emotional dynamics at the level of the individual and smaller groups. These two layers are crucial to the understanding of excess as it is understood in this book: the emergence of violence is limited by the emotional, interactional and corporeal particularity of the situation, which is its micro-context, as well as by the preparative (which means scripted) and reconstructive narratives that frame violence in the macro-context of culture. The latter narrative processes of sense-making might differ depending on their specific cultural context. However, in response to the rise of international news media and shared narratives in cinema, TV and video games, they interact across disciplines and countries.

Many theories of violence have little to say about the problem of “excessive” violence as outlined above, but they regard violence as a product of – social, economic, emotional – deficiency or as a simple means to an end, and fail to recognise the interplay of both their micro-contexts and corporeality, on the one hand, and their cultural scripts and narrative frameworks, on the other. Following Michel Wieviorka, political and social science comes up with three different approaches concerning the analysis of violence: the first approach considers violence as a response to a deficiency, a situation that the actor can no longer endure. The second one is a more instrumental explanation for violence, in which “the actor is defined by calculations, personal or collective strategies”.⁹ The third influential approach explores the reason for acting violently by focusing on the historical and cultural circumstances that serve as breeding grounds for violent or authoritarian predispositions. Claiming that most theories of violence ignore the connection between subjectivation and violence, Wieviorka pleads for processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation to be taken into account.¹⁰ This is important insofar as it includes both the productive and the destructive aspects of violence, instead of overemphasising violence as something negative. An interesting approach stems from the literary scholar Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who distinguishes three phenomenological types of violence according to their different relation to the body, the last of which, “autotelic violence”, is the one closest related to the notion of excess.¹¹ Autotelic violence is completely asymmetrical and leaves no option of avoidance. It merely seeks to destroy the body without any further goal. Reemtsma argues that “autotelic violence disturbs us most, for it’s the one that most escapes understanding and explanation.”¹² Autotelic violence cannot be interpreted as a “normal” example of transgression, for it questions the very order that restricts the excess. In addition to Reemtsma’s concept of autotelic violence, Wolfgang Sofsky tries to embed violence systematically into the order of modernity by connecting Hannah Arendt’s analyses of totalitarianism and Heinrich Popitz’ sociology of power. While violence in Max Weber’s definition of power and sovereignty is just one possibility among others, Sofsky argues against Weber’s definition and points out that absolute power establishes violence as normality which does not necessarily need to be legitimised, but is purely and simply an end in itself.¹³ While Sofsky defines violence as the only opportunity to gain absolute power, Étienne Balibar argues that extreme violence could never legitimise power, but might be able to maintain it for a certain time. For Balibar, extreme violence questions the possibility of politics and is thus connected to “the idea of the intolerable”.¹⁴ Moreover Balibar emphasises that we need “to consider thresholds of the intolerable as manifestations of the element of inhumanity without which even the idea of humanity is meaningless”.¹⁵

Even Bataille, who usually speaks of excess in the context of rituals, admits that there must exist a notion of “transgression without limits”: “It can happen that violence over-reaches the bounds of the taboo in some way. It seems – it may seem – that once the law had become powerless there is nothing to keep violence firmly within bounds in the future.”¹⁶ In his reading of Bataille, Michel Foucault differentiates between “transgression” and “negation”. While transgression “incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration”,¹⁷ Bataille’s “transgression without limits” destroys the line, being a “satanic denial”.¹⁸ The denying of the limit itself – and by implication of society – is often interwoven into a narrative of absolute “evil”. Precisely because the perpetrators regarded as “evil” are excluded from moral society, the “myth of pure evil”¹⁹ itself becomes “productive”. To Roy Baumeister, “the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it.”²⁰

The normalising of violent events is achieved by integrating them into narrative frameworks through their plot-like reconstruction, which includes motives, roles and causal structure. Such processes of sense-making can be observed, for example, in the mass media and courtrooms,²¹ as a central part of memorising and witnessing, but also strategically communicating, the interpretation of the events in question. Those narratives in turn become operatively productive in legal judgements as well as mediating cultural identity: for example, in the context of truth and reconciliation commissions. However, the concept of narrative presupposes certain properties – for example, their sequential order as a base structure – and therefore runs the risk of imposing them upon the reality they are aiming to reconstruct.²² From a pragmatic point of view that regards narrative as a necessary way to make sense of violent events, the concept competes with such terms as “script”, “frame” and “schema” – all of them at the intersection of literary studies, social sciences, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence research. Though all of those terms can signify cognitive frameworks, they also show varying syntactic properties and semantic differences depending on the disciplines they have migrated to. In addition, though with the exception of “schema”, which has a stronger footing in the history of philosophy, they also point beyond literature to theatre and the visual and performing arts, and thus to the inter-media or profoundly comparative dimension of narratives.

The methodological application of the terms “frame”, “script” and “narrative” outside literary studies reached a first peak in the 1970s, with narrative being claimed as a central concept by William J. T. Mitchel in 1971, the republishing of Gregory Bateson’s famous frame concept in 1972 and Erving Goffman’s frame analysis in 1974,²³ as well as the appropriation of the idea of “frames”, “cultural scripts” and “social scripts” as conceptual devices for research into artificial intelligence by Marvin Minsky in 1974 and Roger Schank and Robert Abelson in 1977.²⁴ However, the syntactic properties of narrative that were introduced for the literary realm by narratology²⁵ are rarely applied to the same extent in an analysis of non-fiction in the social sciences. Rather, it seems to be the pragmatic dimension that enables narrative to become a fruitful addition to the social sciences’ toolbox, through its problematisation of the concept of truthfulness: in this sense narratives describe world-building exercises and are measured by coherence and verisimilitude rather than falsification.²⁶ They are accompanied by rhetorical strategies that might increase or diminish social trust in their probability or “narrative necessity”.²⁷ Certainly, narrative strategies of reconstruction are not only applied for coping with (excessive) violent events, but it is here that their capacity for filling the gaps becomes most striking for claims of responsibility or for normalising what would otherwise remain indigestible.

Narrative’s function of filling gaps is considered essential in narratology and was specifically attributed to schemata and scripts.²⁸ However, according to Schank and Abelson, both schemata and scripts are used for stereotypical situations²⁹: they can only exert their guiding function in generic rather than extraordinary situations. An archetypical example is the “restaurant script”, which makes subjectivities such as waiter and guest as well as practices such as paying and serving immediately recognisable even when only perceived in fragments. In contrast, the concept of narrative in literary studies also includes the creative application of a breach with conventional and generic modes of storytelling. But when narrative is applied to “real” violent events outside the realm of fiction, the term is more often used in the sense of script and schema, suggesting a rather stable template for the unfolding of events.

Furthermore, while “narrative” tends to be applied to the reconstruction of an event and thus refers to the past, the term “script” signifies behavioural patterns that might be used for future actions. In addition, “script” implies a goal-oriented temporal structure. In relation to violence, the term “script” has been applied in psychology to account for the learning of behavioural scripts through the repeated reception of violence in video games, TV and other media.³⁰ In addition, script theory places great importance on the accessibility of scripts. According to L. Rowell Huesmann, when scripts are routinely rehearsed or enacted, some become more available and accessed in future situations, while others decline or are overwritten, especially during children’s development. In those accounts the media environment is viewed as analogous to, and as having similar effects to, the social environment made up of peers and family: “a perso...