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On being left behind : the haunting legacies of London 2012

November 10, 2022 by philco

This is the text of a talk I gave to a conference examining the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics ten years on, organised by University College London in September 2022. The talk was accompanied by a Powerpoint.

As evening drew on we went to what was left of Tower Bridge to watch ‘The Post-Olympic Dream’, marveling at  the  flickering figures as they vaulted over the sandbagged parapets.   Our  gaze  was   inevitably   drawn   downriver   to the famous motto Amplius, Charius, Colossicus, written in neon lipstick  against the city’s darkening rim. It was time to visit the Olympic Park and sample   the remaindered glory of the games. We  hired a gondola at the Isle of Dogs and     as we approached the site were overwhelmed by the awesome spectacle of the Orbital Tower, now leaning more crazily than ever Pisa’s did, with noxious weeds from foreign parts clinging to its superstructure creating a veritable hanging  garden  of  London Babylon.

We disembarked at a pontoon where in happier days the late Sir David Beckham had handed the Olympic torch to Bradley Wiggins, fresh from his triumph in the Tour de France. Little did either of them dream of the disaster to come. As we made our way across the deserted walkways toward the tower we were dismayed by the signs of neglect and decay all around: broken railings, park benches vandalised, drought-withered gardens, a derelict open air café where only a few tables bolted to the ground remained as mute witness to the conviviality they had once entertained. And everywhere the hidden hand of the graffiti artist mocking the ambitions the 2012 tag had once evoked – ‘Live the nightmare’ … ‘Everyone’s a loser’ … ‘Betray a generation’ – and other, cruder, slogans were blazoned in dayglow colours on wall after crumbling wall.

This is how my book of the London 2012 Olympics begins. Now why should a book which documents the response of East London’s diverse communities to the advent of the Olympics on their doorstep, and  tries to understand that response through a deep ethnography of their changing forms of livelihood,  life  style and life story telling since the 1960’s why should such ao project begin with such a  bleak dystopian vision of the post Olympic city, where even  the once famous  Games mascots are reduced to panhandling in order to make a living

The reason has a lot to do with my vision of the Olympics as a tragi-comic enterprise : comic in its vainglorious ambition to remake the city in its own image   and the  absurd public expectations this arouses.   Tragic in its failure to deliver on  its promises , for the  idealistic rhetorics  about living the dream of a world in which  social divisions and inequalities are magically suspended inevitably  founders against the hysterical  materialism which shapes the  fabrications of its legacies on the ground..

How appropriate then that London 2012 should be presided over by a mayor whose own career so richly embodied these same comic and  tragic qualities  and was remarkable  chiefly for its increasingly hollow triumphalism.

When I told the group of local residents with whom  I have been working over the past 15 years , that I was going to talk at a conference about  the 2012 legacy, they laughed and said ‘what legacy?. I tried to explain that this conference was about trying  to understand why the legacy never happened, at least not for people like them in whose name and for whose  benefit the whole thing was supposedly being organised. How can there be a legacy which actively disinherits the people who are supposed to be its beneficiaries? In existential terms a legacy is supposed to be something left behind for those who have been left behind by the end of a life or a project, it is a gift from the dead to the living,  with or without strings  and which entails something gained,  as compensation for a loss.  In legal contractual terms a legacy entails the free transfer of a material and/or symbolic asset ( property, money, goods) from a donor to a recipient  and  is accomplished through a declarative statement  which it  is binding on the trustees. Clearly the legacy statements issued by the Olympic authorities  were never that, they were only ever pseudo-performative . And ashas been frequently pointed out  legacy is the absent centre of this particular regeneration discourse.  But could there be a post- Olympic legacy that  substantially compensates ordinary working class East Londoners for the  sense of loss and dislocation  many  have experienced as a direct or indirect result of the 2012 Games . Is a truly reparative legacy still possible   and if so  what form could it take?

Legacy values tournament

The Olympics is often described as a values tournament,  a clash   of sporting cultures , civilisations or political  ideologies – certainly it was that during the old cold war and may will be once again if present geo-political trends continue. But what legacy values are in play here.

The following schema tries to identify the different paradigms, which in a variety of strong and weak combinations  characterise the construction of   post Olympic  discourses  and the transformation of legacy into inheritance :

 

  • GIFT LEGACY Heritage          Heirloom             (Moral Economy)
  • PAYBACK LEGACY Dividend          Endowment         (Market Economy)

Gift legacies are conveyanced within the framework of  a moral economy, the beneficiaries are identified in terms of their claims to moral entitlement. Within this frame   we can distinguish between an heirloom asset, something  which is regarded as being held in trust by both donor and recipient , who are its guardians rather than its owners and whose mission is to preserve it intact, to hand it down unaltered fro m generation to generation. In contrast a heritage asset is held  in common ownership , with the aim  not simply to preserve but to enhance its value , it is always transformed in the process of its  transmission.

In contrast payback legacies operate within the discursive frame of market economies of worth and   in two distinct modes : As dividends of various kinds issued to stakeholders who have made a  substantial investment in the Olympic enterprise  or  as endowments given to social or institutional  actors who are thereby committed to  make a continuing  contribution to the legitimation of the Olympic enterprise going forward  . Each of the four  thus has a  distinctive time sdignature.

We can look as particular instances to see how various trade offs and compromises between the market and moral economies  works . Take for example the Olympic Stadium. Located within a structure of conveyancing designed to maximise payback, the  stadium can only be ‘sold’ as an investment opportunity, and a source of future dividends . Yet   it is also a heritage site and potentially a popular lieu de memoire. Inscribed within the conveyance of a gift legacy it  could be offered as  a public endowment to various community   stakeholders but in the event it took some persuading for Hammers fans to claim as an heirloom in exchange for Upton park. Lets also  note here that gift legacies can be negative as well as positive- the famous poisoned chalice.

Another example would be the generational  contract which was such a central feature of the 2012 legacy discourse and the social compact with the host community in East London . As we have heard , whether it is a question of educational attainment, job opportunities or housing or the ,so called health dividend,  the proposition that the life chances of  the next generation of local children  would be the same as those born in more affluent areas, was only secured  by ensuring that many of the new age cohort were the offspring of middle class gentrifiers  moving  into the area.

This brings me to my second main point. The brutal binarism that governs official talk about legacy, the distinction between so called hard and soft legacies is an ideological fiction that works to split and mystify  public perceptions of what is at stake. In fact these two are always already entangled. As we saw under lockdown the city of stone remains haunted by the city of flesh , even and perhaps especially  in its temporary absence.

(  When I talk of the Olympic Park  as a site of unacknowledged haunting, I am not just referring to the fact that those who made all those extravagant legacy promises about levelling up may be suffering from a bad conscience  for having deceived  so many people or  having  believed their own propaganda . It is just as much about t the de-materialisation of a positive legacy for so many of its putative legatees  which has had such a powerful impact on their everyday lives ,including their mental health .In fact I am talking about  a constitutive feature of all  regeneration  projects, centred on mega events which arises from an inbuilt principle of dislocation between the event trajectory and its  afterwardness ..

Legacy is the ghost part of the Olympic enterprise, the part that is indispensable to achieving a successful bid and outcome , but  whose materialisation can never be guaranteed , and whose presence/absence  continues to haunt the project long after its supposed conclusion .  The Post  Olympics, has a   peculiar chrono-topography – for of course we are dealing with the always unstable  relation between  a site specific  and time delimited event that is no longer (the Games) , haunting   something that has not yet  and may never happen  ( the promised legacy outcomes).

From this perspective, the Post Olympic city is  a city haunted by  counter-finality , by the ghosts of buildings and places   that  might have been , by projects which might have made a difference , if only ,  if only,  . The Olympic movement itself  is a shadow  of what might once have been a progressive  force ;indeed today   it is less a movement than a series of discrete, compulsively repeated ritual moments decentred around civic  nationalisms.

Post Olympic Hauntology is thus a complex phenomenon. Here I can only deal with one or two of these aspects..

TIME BOMBS AND AFTERWARDNESS

The uncertainty principles I just mentioned were directly present in the recurrent threats of unexploded bombs and  environmental hazard that punctuated the  building out of the Olympic Park and have continued up to the present.  These time bombs, created by capitalism’s war against nature as well as by  the attack from the air on the populations of East London ,   came to represent  the unpredictable irruption of a  hidden , forgotten history , a return of the repressed in all its phantom materiality.

In the recent re- interviews I have done with those who worked on the dig, design and demolish phase in 2007/8 and  those who lived  near the site , I have identified three broad attitudes or positions towards the afterwardness of London 2012 .

Those I call the revenants  have occasionally revisited the site and each time found that what was once so intimately familiar   has become more and more strange. As they walk around the Park they have become connoisseurs of the Uncanny. Hammer’s fans for whom the Stadium represents  a dramatic uprooting  from their familiar home from home at Upton Park , have also found themselves populating this new and still  largely vacant memoryscape with the ghosts of  Bobby Moore, Trevor Brooking, John Charles ,Billy Bond Geoff Hurst and Clyde Best

A second group I have called the nostalgics , drawing on the important distinction between its restorative and reflective forms made my Svetlana Boym in her book The future of nostalgia:

What they have in common: The Olympic Ideal as a Home for imagined community

  • Restorative nostalgia: Recreation of the ambiance or spirit of Games Time  through commemorative  events  and re-unions – the twenty twelvers
  • There is also a diffuse longing to return to a more optimistic future associated with an imagined past  . Remembering  the  opening and closing ceremonies as exemplifying  the dream of an enchanted island  nation or race once more sovereign and at peace with itself  or Once upon a time in Brexitland
  • More reflectively there can a  reading of the ceremonies  as about the  renewal of shared heritage and  the re-invention 0f home grown multicultural  traditions

Finally there are the disenchanted whose voices are rarely heard above the din created by  the celebratory  proclamations of the Olympophiles  and the denunciatory  rants of the Olympophobes.

The revenant , the nostalgic and the disenchanted are three different   responses to a profound and generalised sense of dislocation between the no longer and the not yet, between what has been left behind and who has been left behind . Its a structure of feeling which has intensified over  the last ten years.  It is this sensibility we have sought to  address and  render more articulate in Groundbreakers, our immersive guide and trail to the back story of the Olympic Park ,’ from the Bronze age to the Digital Age’.

The Groundbreakers is a  stab at creating a reparative legacy as a common and inclusive inheritance. It seeks to bring the dead back to life as bearers of a history which has been largely forgotten, repressed , erased or rendered invisible by the Higher, Faster ,Stronger vision of mega- event led regeneration which  takes its inspiration from the Olympic  motto and continues to leave its mark on the landscape.

For those who worked on its creation over the last ten years, this project has been a way of leaving something behind from our various endeavours over many years. It has been a way for all of us of staying with the trouble .

It is of course intended for every visitor to the Olympic Park who is interested in what was there before ,and what might yet be there in the future. But it is especially addressed to those who feel left behind by what  the . It is, an attempt to reanimate  the wings of Walter Benjamin’s’ Angel of History so that out of the wreckage of hope  called Progress created by the hungry ghosts of capital,  a rather different imagination of the past , present and future , might emerge and  take flight.

On being left behind PowerPoint – Click to download

Filed Under: East London and Post Olympics

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