TOTW: Olympics, Bacchanalia, Saturnalia

Aug

11

2024

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The 2024 Paris Olympics came and went, uninterrupted by several counts of sabotage by various actors. There’s been a diversity of complaints about its content, cost, and impacts.

It's one more example of bread and circus that puts nationalism on steroids which, like beauty pageants, reinforces the outlines of national and gender identities, and bolsters jingoism. In another instance of war by other means, nation-states are pitted against each other. The Apollonian millimetric measurement of performance, and eugenic scrutiny of athletes at the microscopic level, predominates over the Dyonisian bacchanal of athletes from all over fucking, an imaginary which scandalizes the public, as made-up rumors about cardboard beds meant to dissuade sex, and of condoms running out, become popular. Beyond the backstage enjoyment of bacchanal, its mere portrayal on stage was also subject of controversy.

Let's consider concerns over the Olympic's budget being an excessive expenditure on non-essential luxury at the tax-payer's expense, in contrast with support for funding anti-immigration policies, police, and military budgets:

"According to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war, or in former ages as destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatens the prevailing system."

In principle, anarchists are opposed to states and governing bodies of all sorts, and they don’t need a committee to regulate the throwing of a ball or the jumping of hurdles. But, at least in principle, they aren’t opposed to sports or disruptive sumptuous celebrations. In its day, Bachanalia came to be seen as a scandalous threat, so it was reformed and controlled. During the festivities of Saturnalia there was also a temporary overturning of norms "masters provided table service for their slaves as it was seen as a time of liberty for both slaves and freedmen alike". It also influenced what came to be Christmas traditions, like the appointing of a Lord of Misrule/Abbot of Unreason, now a custom in decline, since it was abolished as it was deemed disruptive. Many of the customs regarding the Lord of Misrule have been incorporated into modern-day Carnival and Mardi Gras celebrations.

What are the differences between games and festivities that the state views as a threat, and those that are state-sanctioned? What are the merits of disrupting latter, versus partaking in them in way that turns them disruptive? How were once disruptive festivities recuperated? What would ontologically anarchist Olympics, Bacchanalia, and Saturnalia be like? What are collective and individual ways to expend the accursed share anarchically?