The Discursive Construction of Modern Olympic Histories

Abstract

The function of this chapter is to provide an overview of the historical context within which the modern Olympic movement has developed, and an evaluation of the nature (and of the different descriptions and explanations, or different histories) of what changes took place within the movement itself. Such an exercise involves drawing on competing historical discourses. Of course given the approach we have adopted in this book we do not simply draw on neutral accounts of historical fact. In a Foucauldian understanding of discourse, representation and meaning as well as knowledge and ‘truth’ are historicised. Claims about specific phenomena are given a specific meaning and are ‘true’ only within a specific historical context, or more accurately within particular discursive constructions of a particular period. Olympism is thus not a neutral phenomenon with a common meaning for all. It was only within a particular set of discursive formations that the object, ‘Olympism’, could develop as a meaningful construct. Olympism in that sense, like all social phenomena is ‘constituted by all that was said, in all the statements that named it, divided up, described it, explained it, traced its development, indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own’ (Foucault 1972: 32).