Olympic Volunteers: Rise of the Super-Citizen

Abstract

The figure of the Olympic volunteer to which this chapter is devoted signifies for the argument of this book a culmination of the process of transformation in the conceptualization of the democratic urban subject, from beneficiary to producer of culture and of the city, from critical of to consensual with power. A new form of citizen participation was found in them, a particularly convenient one for the institutions as it separated engagement from conflict or dissent, channeling the social virtues of citizen participation to the benefit of hegemonic powers. The Olympic volunteer was the distilled, purest form of tamed subjectivity under democratic local hegemony, the greatest evidence of its success in producing a democratic subject in full agreement with, and indistinguishable from power: a subject willing to invest his/her skills and affects in the service of the hegemonic view of Barcelona.