Writing about violence in popular culture tends to be structured around a paradox. Most consumers of the latest blockbuster film or TV show are, on the whole, further away from life-threatening danger than at almost any other point in human history. But, these consumers have, because of the ubiquity of images, more opportunities to witnesses human pain, cruelty, and suffering than perhaps any other generation. Generally, this insight has provoked little more than pearl clutching from the anxious and boring who, throughout the aughties, got off on decrying the latest video game, television series, or film.

Now that the dust has settled, there seems to be very little capable of shocking anyone. The socially conservative, having made peace with the proliferation of obscenity, content themselves with bemoaning to an audience of the like-minded in the pages of the right-wing press. There one can find the National Review’s Armond White grumbling eloquently about the “feminist myths” of privileged victimhood in Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s film depiction of a bulimic and self-destructive princess. But beyond this little world, who still worries, or even thinks critically, about depictions of self-harm and violence?

Philippa Snow, a brilliant British film, TV and art critic, who has made her name writing about popular culture, has most recently turned her attention to this perennial question. Her first book, Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, is a slim volume divided into four sections. Their focus is the difference, or lack thereof, between the performed goofball violence of Johnny Knoxville and his gang of Jackasses and its high-culture counterpart in the work of figures like Marina Abramović, the Serbian performance artist.