The 2011 UK riots were unusual for their apparent pointlessness. The significance of the riots was in fact their lack of obvious significance. Although critical theory is often disparaged for being unduly esoteric, recent exponents like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek are shown to be highly useful at reaching a political understanding not present within mainstream journalism. Objective and subjective violence are concepts used in order to argue that an under-acknowledged form of violence in our society is one committed by a media that systematically displaces the deeper, underlying political causes of violence through excessive focus upon merely symptomatic outbreaks.
