A study in the history of meaning-making: Watching socialist television serials in the former Czechoslovakia
Abstract
The aim of this article is to map out and analyze how the viewers of the communist-governed Czechoslovak television understood the propagandist television serials during the so-called "normalization", the last two decades of communist party rule after the Prague Spring. It strives to show peculiarities of the research on television viewers' capabilities to remember the meanings and details of hermeneutic agency which took place in the past.
The article argues - in contrast to the mainstream historiography which claims full depoliticization of Czechoslovak people as a consequence of post-Prague Spring disillusionment - that the uses of popular culture provided niches in which the political could be experienced. The role of reproductive memory in remembering the viewers' experience buried under the grand socio-political switchover is also illuminated and used to coin the concept of "memory over dislocation".
The existing conceptual apparatus of audience studies derives predominantly from the research that was done on media audiences in democratic, liberal, capitalist circumstances. It is exactly political freedom and market operations which allow scholars to assess the audiences either as citizens or as consumers.
The audiences in undemocratic conditions were never made part of this narrative. The article takes effort in filling in this void in the audience research by reconstructing how television programs were actively used by the audiences in state-socialist Czechoslovakia in defiance of the strong propagandist discourse.
The research discovered ways in which the socialist television serials catalyzed viewers' sense of the political in the Czechoslovak society. Political themes in the serials represented an opportunity to contemplate the ideal social and political order or - much more often - to be reminded about the anomalies of life in an undemocratic society.
This awareness is today only very rarely remembered as a product of cognitive activity. Yet it is also evidenced that the denial of cognitive processing of the socialist serials, especially their political scenes, is likely to follow from the way the collective memory of the socialist past was manufactured by the new neo-capitalist order.