From UoWiki
Walking the Olympic Sacrifice Zone
Saturday 12 December 2004, Bromley-by-Bow to Stratford.
A Sacrifice Zone is any area of land whose speculative value is outweighed by the costs of capitalizing on that value, ie. it costs more to make it saleable than would be gained by selling it. When a space achieves this state, it becomes a sacrifice zone. What is then necessary for it to be made valuable again is a sacrifice of value: energy, time, money, human life.
The Sacrifice is the production of speculative value in a way that expects no economic return or direct exchange, and which actually harms the producer. This is a sacral act, based on faith and collective imagination, a religious act of making something precious sacred by destroying it.
George Bataille calls this expenditure 'The Accursed Share', that portion of energy and human life that must be expended in order for the system that creates that value to maintain its structure. By his logic, Aztec mass human sacrifice maintained a sufficiently slow population growth rate to make it too costly for tribal wars to continue.
The construction of the pyramids were, according to Bataille, also an expenditure of the 'accursed share', a non economic investment of slaves energy in the production (or destruction) of value that allowed the structure of Egyptian society to survive its imperial growth. He considers the second world war to be an example of what can happen when that value is not expended; industrial production suddenly causing a terrifying expansion of value, and of the capacity for value creation, that then required an equally catastrophic expenditure of that value in two world wars.
This is what is proposed for East London in 2012. The 'accursed share' in this case is the overproduction of value of the London property markets. The sacrificial zone is the proposed site of the Olympic park, east of Bromley By-Bow, out along the Lea Valley to Stratford, and the sacrifice will be made by the UK State plc. on behalf of its people. Their work, energy, life, money and crucially their attention will be demanded and expended in a the production of a huge and purposefully wasteful spectacle: the Olympic Games 2012. This public sacrifice will open up the Olympic sacrificial zone to the private 'investment and return' model of value creation that produced its accursed share in the first place.
Speculations about the anatomy of the zone, that its voluptuous design is the intentional legacy of a rogue druidical landscape architect have been propagated by the same counter-subversives who gave temporary credence to the Temple/Monroe/Thatcher familial connection during the construction of the first Docklands imperial complex. This 'earth mother' theory distraction is compelling, because it purposefully insinuates a pornographic projection of the proposed Olympic landscape on top of the collective premonition of its post-apocalyptic topography (see below). Aerial photographs taken from orbit will pick out the unmistakable outline of a sheila-na-gig, giving birth to the Lea through the submerged labial curves of the collapsed stadium.
hack the bid! do not text 'accursed share' to 82012
