Olympic Ceremonialism and The Performance of National Character

From London 2012 to Rio 2016

R. Tzanelli

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137336316
• eBook ISBN: 9781137336323
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover to Rio 2016 as articulations of national and cosmopolitan belonging. The ceremonial performances supported imaginative travel and created a tornadóros: an ideal form of 'human' that manipulates audiovisual narratives of culture and identity for global audiences.

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The Olympic Industry: Slow and Fast Mobilities

Abstract: This chapter argues that Olympic ceremonies are situated between slow and fast mobilities – or, national histories and the history and principles of Olympism on the one hand, and ideas of travel and tourism on the other. This is developed through foundational concepts in tourism theory, such as that of tórnos that allows for connections between work/labour and leisure in Olympic industries in general and ceremonies in particular. The model of the tornadóros is used to analyse how ceremonial directors and Olympic artists use various digital, audio-visual and embodied technologies to communicate with audiences. These artistic tornadóroi are compared with athletes, who are supposed to conform to special types of ‘human’ that promote the principles of Olympism.

Tzanelli, Rodanthi. Olympic Ceremonialism and The Performance of National Character: From London 2012 to Rio 2016. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137336323.

1.1Introducing the project

Since their modern institution, the Olympic Games experienced a number of structural transformations in their delivery, performance and political concerns. Encoding national, regional and cosmopolitan concerns about the political development of host cities (e.g. their cultural beautification, tourist growth or global projection of multi-cultural aspirations), the post-war summer Olympiads also acted as narratives of national agendas. The opening and closing ceremonies in particular frame the event, constructing one of the ‘public faces’ of the host in the event (De Moragas et al., 2002). As mediatised images of ethno-cultural essence gained more in global circulation, marketability and malleability, ceremonial Olympism began to place more emphasis on the host’s self-presentation. The present book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies as artistic sources of national and cosmopolitan belonging. Looking at connections and disconnections of Olympic images from their production contexts, the project builds on Appadurai’s (1990) thesis on interconnected ‘scapes’ or symbolic meeting points of humans, ideas, technologies, finance and images.

The synergy of embodied performances with projected simulations on big flat screens in the stadium produced an ‘artscape’ (Tzanelli, 2012a, p. 284), a technological transposition of emotive landscapes and a visualisation of material cultures. ‘Art’ is understood here as a by-product of communicative democratisation – the craft of communication (the material of everyday life) and its high aesthetics (as in fine arts). There is a cautionary note attached to such democratisations in so far as artistic performance always strives for concrete definitions of popular commonality (see for example Couldry, 2006; Hesmondhalgh, 2007a). The ceremonies draw upon the athletic ideas of embodied wellbeing and unrestrained flourishing but also the – yet unresolved – debate on national and cosmopolitan belonging that guides the production of individual Games and the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) ethical agendas. The adjacent development of the Olympic Games into consumption nodes, in which host cities operate as ‘global financial articulations’ (Sassen, 2001; Urry, 2008), connects the book’s thesis to the commercialisation of the arts. I therefore treat London 2012’s art system as an example of new mobilities (of ideas, art, images, music and more).

Research on such ceremonies often emphasises the organisational and institutional aspects of mega-events such as the Olympic Games. However, this sheds more light on media policies, as well as the politics of the Olympic creative industries. Such processes would naturally link back to the creative labour that supports Olympic mega-events and which is constitutive of global human flows (Caves, 2002; Hesmondhalgh, 2007b). The present monograph only touches upon this debate to acknowledge the disorganised collaboration of state agents, Olympic institutions and capitalist networks that partake in the organisation of the event (see Lash and Urry, 1987, chapter 1 on ‘disorganised capitalism’). Placing more emphasis on the content and cultural context of the opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympiad, the artistic directors and participants’ biographies and their relation to the host’s urban profile, it discusses how the ceremonies actualise utopian travels for the benefit of native and global audiences. Given the cosmopolitan makeup of these shows, I also provide some observations on the handover ceremony for Rio 2016 in a separate chapter. However, I do not want to reduce such intangible and tangible artistic products to specific individual actors’ intentions or their social positions and identities (see however Garnham, 1990 on negotiations of power in cultural industries). Although such a stance illuminates the universalisation of value claims in any polity, I recognise that societies preserve a vastly complex network of values that pluralise understandings of taste but proceed to argue against the reduction of aesthetic judgement to ideologies hooked exclusively on social variables. Thus, my focus is on the ways artistic narratives acquire the value of national and cosmopolitan self-narration in a context which is defined by post-national abstractions based on intersectionality and dialogical positioning (for other analyses see Hogan, 2003; Silk, 2001; Tomlinson, 1996; Tomlinson, 2005; Tomlinson and Young, 2006; Tzanelli, 2008b and 2010a).

I mobilise a selection of instances from the three ceremonies to examine the ways nations are placed in a global realm of ‘travelling cultures’ in which fixities of custom and character are performed for global viewers. The British instance is noteworthy for more than one reason: not only has the country been the genetic locus of the Industrial Revolution, it also provided a post-industrial model of creativity for cultural industries globally. I am not interested in examining how the post-industrial mode defines those industries’ political economy in structural terms – this is a theme in its own right. Instead, I look at the ways this novel model of artistic creativity incorporates ideas of imaginative travel and turns tourism into a marketing tool. As various scholars have suggested, unlike the film industry, it is rather difficult to define tourism as a uniform industry (Cohen, 1996, p. 59; Lew, 2011; MacCannell, 2012, p. 184). The ‘heterogeny and disarticulation’ characterising it resembles the structure of other multi-industrial conglomerates that constantly expand into new areas (Hesmondhalgh, 2007b; Tzanelli, [2007] 2010b). My project examines global projections and embodied performances of the ‘British economy of thought’ in a ceremonial context. I argue that the idea of ‘Britishness’ crafted by various creative agents (directors, volunteers, actors) retained a revisionist feel we encounter in post-modern travelling cultures.

This ‘economy of thought’, to which I refer throughout the book, dates back to the demise of pre-industrial ‘pure’ reciprocities within and between human communities (Mauss, 1954; Sahlins, 1972). The onset of industrial modernity replaced such allegedly disinterested acts of giving with economic transactions (Polanyi, 1944). This model found an extension in intercultural and international relations in Europe and elsewhere, suggesting that whole groups owe to other groups historical debts (see Tzanelli, 2008a; Argyrou, 2013, forthcoming). The timeline of such debts has been documented by social theory, which tends to historicise the present in order to produce utopian imaginaries of humanity (Hviid Jacobsen and Tester, 2012, pp. 1–2). The industrialisation of the globe, which was based on travel and discovery, is a turning point in the globalised European economy of giving. I contend that Olympic ceremonies treat giving, travel and industry as a unity and a globalised ‘civilising process’ in which scholars and other analysts see the corruption of nature and human nature (Argyrou, 2005). The handover to Rio paralleled London’s ceremonial motif while drawing nevertheless upon local or regional cultural registers impossible to be decoded by outsiders in their specificity but accessible as tourist narratives. Such ‘travelling cultures’ (Clifford, 1992) – mobile ideas of industry, reciprocity and travel – are both idealisations of fixities (of ethnic character) and programmatic statements of mobility and fluidity (Bauman, 2000; Urry, 2008). The ideal of crafting national characters in motion involves a great deal of embodied and digital manipulation. Rather than introvert versions of collective selves, these models are co-produced through London’s and Britain’s (as well as Rio’s and Brazil’s) encounters with the world. Their creators and audiences actualised a model of tourism and post-tourism on which I elaborate through tourism, art and social theory.

Recent research has taken great strides to move away from the cult of methodological nationalism that views the nation-state as pivotal in productions and manipulations of identity (Beck, 2005; Sassen, 2006; Walby, 2009; Bailey and Winchester, 2012). Understandably, an analysis of the structural conditions under which any Olympic ceremony is authorised on behalf of a host city cannot avoid the vocabulary of nation-building altogether. As Bauman (1987) reminds us, we need to investigate who actually acts as an interpreter in such cultural conjunctions. It goes without saying that the Olympic Games operate as part of a globalised economy, connecting various cultural flows that look outside the national domain or ‘ideology’ (Giddens, 1985; Sampson and Bloor, 2007). But the globalisation of what I term an ‘Olympic industry’ is a topic of specialised concern and merits separate consideration. Suffice it to mention that my understanding of the ‘Olympic industry’ refers to a cultural industrial multiplex bound by constellations of ‘signs’ whose meaning is delimited by various Olympic actors (sponsors, TV networks, music and other companies) (Tzanelli, [2007b] 2010b, Chapter 1). Any definition of the ‘Olympic industry’ follows a similar pattern: modern economies are consumption based, and ‘social technologies that manage consumption derive from the social and creative disciplines’ (Cunningham, 2005, p. 293; see also Billings, 2008). The present book is more concerned with global ideational formations propagated by artistic agents of the Olympic spectacle – otherwise put, ideals we cannot reduce to concrete human situations that nevertheless serve as the practical base for them. Not only do such formations envelop national fixities in global cultural mobilities, they also lead to their dilution. Elsewhere (Tzanelli, 2010a) I suggested that, in Olympic ceremonies, national self-narration takes place simultaneously in different expressive/visual modes, enabling the co-existence (and communication) of the ‘symbolic’ with the ‘material’, in what I termed the ‘allegorical imperative’. This imperative, a miniature of the Olympic discourse on human dignity, is constitutive of the anthropopoetic project, the making of human.

1.2Allegorical and categorical imperatives in Olympic art

We will follow this trend for a while, as it will lead us to the next important connection – namely that the ideal type of human crafted in ceremonies is cinematic-like fiction. This fiction centres on narratives of a being in motion we encounter in discourses of cosmopolitan travel and tourism. The very philosophical trajectory of the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’ bears testimony to this theoretical convergence: from Kant to Rousseau and from Durkheim to Meinecke, any ‘cosmopolitan’ respect for human diversity that promotes solidarity on a global scale is viewed as a condition that cannot be achieved solely through formalised agreement, as it also demands the development of moral sensitivity for specific cultural contexts (Tzanelli 2008b, p. 195). Should we then consider ‘Olympic art’ as the maiden of the nation-state, the moral guardian of cultural specificity? My own answer seeks to unveil a complexity that does not allow us to provide simple, affirmative answers. Every Olympic event enacts a tension between localised (national) self-knowledge and its universal application, actualising what is known as a ‘diatopical hermeneutics’ of difference based on processes of reciprocal learning in cross-cultural encounters (Dallmayr, 2001, p. 61). This simply refers to interpretations of human specificity in context, or, as the term denotes through (diá) place (tópos). One group of scholars would argue that place is defined by those who inhabit and control it – nations and nation-states. The equation of the individual with the national is as old as Herder’s deliberation on the socio-cultural formation of our humanity and its linguistic articulation – a point guiding his suggestion that every national Geist (spirit) has unique, human-like, qualities and a special mission to carry out in the world (Bhatt, 2000). Just like humans, nations are unique; and just like them, they can be further abstracted by governors who want to regulate them.

I explained that today nations have given way to global flows. However, the ontological confusion of humans as individuals with nations as collectivities finds artistic expression in Olympic events for a global audience through certain universal motifs that ‘sketch’ an agreeable European/Hellenic civilisational model, the locus of ‘high culture’ (Jenks, 1993, p. 9), but apply native touches to it (Eagleton. 2000, p. 32). On initial consideration this recycled drama seems to mirror the Aristotelian polítis (the citizen of pólis) that Kant coupled with a socially constructed kósmos to produce an abstraction of the cosmopolitan subject (Delanty, 2006). But a literal meaning of kósmos (from kosmõ: to make beautiful) introduces an aesthetic (cultural) dimension to it. Pedagogy, aesthetics and politics converge now behind the concept to suggest a method of ‘knowing’ through visual enactment and bodily performance. This model of cosmopolitan aesthetics, which informs the Olympic cultural enterprise, selectively borrows from the Kantian sensus communis, the moral universe of human solidarity and togetherness, and the literal meaning of kosmopolítis as the subject that inhabits the space of the aesthetic (Delanty, 2000, p. 134). On the one hand, the model promotes the host to an ‘aesthetically reflexive’ (Beck, 1992; Beck et al., 1994; Lash and Urry, 1994, pp. 5–6) agent that monitors the social world rather than accepting a pre-determined place in it. The Olympic staging of national self-narration packages the host’s heritage and history, creating long-lasting brands of emotional appeal, and integrating a culturally specific milieu into a global one (Albrow et al., 1997, pp. 30–1; Lury, 2004; Tzanelli, 2007b, pp. 77–81). On the other hand, the hosts’ obstinate investment in a struggle to appropriate the European-Olympic heritage unveils the essence and function of the ceremonies as a reproduction of what they set out to contest (Guttman, 2006, pp. 72–3).

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) uses the term ‘display interface’ to analyse the context of performance through its mediation, detachment and re-contextualisation as ‘heritage’ for the tourist gaze. I argue that Olympic ceremonial mobilities capitalise on the aesthetic repositories of sport heritage and global tourism. First of all, the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ (Moralität) that guides the IOC’s discursive mantra of universal morality (togetherness, peace, fair play and athletic excellence) also informs the host’s allegorical imperative (of excellent delivery, efficiency, and an impeccable public image built at the expense of internal difference) (Wilson, 1996). Category and allegory become good friends and bad enemies in Olympic events, when and if the need arises so as Olympic artists can produce a uniform style for the ceremonies of specific Games. I do not prioritise such artistic styles as a way of thinking at the expense of their organisational, if not institutional, aspects (Tomlinson and Young, 2006, p. 3). However, in the stead of an analysis of the institutional production of style (the emergence of a capitalist ‘node’ for every Summer Olympiad) I examine the modes of collective knowledge the ceremonial Olympiad voices (Becker, 1982; DeNora, 2000). I also do not confuse aesthetics with art and artistic style: my leap from aesthetics to artistic style suggests a socio-political reading of sensory experience and expression. With an eye to Mannheimian readings of ‘artistic volition’ (Mannheim, 2003), I view the modes of collective being and their artistic expression in relation to dominant views of the social world – the patterns of knowledge that find expression through styles (Mannheim, 1968 [1936], pp. 292–309; Witkin, 2005; de la Fuente, 2007, p. 413).

Of course, imperatives change with time and through human agency. This is more evident in today’s art that can be post-national and post-modern (see Delanty, 2000, chapter 1). Nations as political and cultural formations are here to stay, so I cannot ignore their territorial and semantic claims over history and heritage altogether. At the same time, the present study focuses on the dialogic game artists play with fixities, hooking and unhooking them from the storerooms of national experience. In this respect, the host’s allegorical imperative may be articulated in Olympic art loosely through successive re-encounters with rooted histories whose meaning – hence interpretations – is never exhausted (on Bloch and music see Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000, p. 47 and p. 58 [ftn. p. 124]).The aesthetic genre of the Olympic ceremonies, the host’s allegorical imperative, suggests that nation-building is an interpretive process just as art remains a socially informed process (Schechner, 1988; DeNora, 2003). Inversely, master narratives of culture with global applicability are constantly relocated in the national domain, generating new cultural grammars or reinstating the old European economy of thought (Honneth, 1992, p. 119). Markedly, ‘Allegory’ comprised the section of the Athens 2004 opening ceremony that mourned the burden Hellenic heritage creates for modern Greece and the country’s inability to break free from this ‘scarce resource’ (Appadurai, 1981) of historical origins. Here unique narratives join global art markets as ‘allegories’, challenging old ideas of reciprocity, as they enter give-and-take economic circuits.

Allegories are community orations (agorévõ from agorá as the ancient market) that take place elsewhere (alloú), public speech with private meaning through intercultural encounters that support creative ventures in arts. This model of allegory as performative expression follows other similar arguments and concepts that tie the production of identities and subjectivities to place, space and culture. In a similar vein with Foucault’s heterotopias (héteron: other, tópos: place) allegories involve intentional misplacement of time-levels, enabling human actors to re-arrange experience and re-conceptualise phenomena (Foucault, 1986, pp. 16–17). Allegories can also be conceptualised as a form of di- or multi-foría (double- or poly-transference), twin or multiple ambivalence in identity. This phenomenon assists in performative enunciations of identity followed by slippage in meaning across different interpretive plains. Elsewhere, I examined the interpretative potential of ceremonies in terms of diforia as the activation of the performative aspects of national identity, ‘resulting in a separation of the private (internal) and public (external) worlds’ (Tzanelli, 2008b, p. 491). Sport globalisation research would also propel us to see in Olympic allegories a process of ‘arrogation’ whereby national values ‘are inevitably reshaped while being claimed as preserved’ (Tomlinson, 1996, p. 590). Hence, I suggest that in Olympic art we experience a peculiar co-existence of mobility and immobility for good reasons: in modern and post-modern theory, mobility and any idea of a world-in-process (the grand narrative of modernity Olympic Games propagate) stand beyond the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Olympic Industry: Slow and Fast Mobilities
• 2  The Opening Ceremony: Structural Nostalgia and Pop Pastiche
• 3  The Concluding Show: Music and the Self-Creating Cycle
• 4  Struggling with the Other: Embodied Styles as Tourist Articulation
• Bibliography
• Index