A study in the history of meaning-making: Watching socialist television serials in the former Czechoslovakia

Audiences’ agency and popular hermeneutics under the non-democratic conditions

Ideologically charged television serials were introduced into the programming of Czechoslovak Television after the collapse of the liberation process in 1968 and the advent of the so-called normalization. It is this category of television drama that was used as an object and artefact in the memory-inciting interviews presented in the second part of the article. Normalization is a name commonly given to the period of 20 years between 1969 and 1989 which followed the Prague Spring. It was characterized by the restoration of the communist party rule prevailing before the reform period led by Alexander Dubček.

The period of ‘normalization’ is a rather unlikely choice for a study that wishes to explore people’s agency. This study focuses on audiences’ hermeneutical agency, that is, viewers’ capability to read the socialist serials autonomously and generate interpretations and uses which significantly deviated from the intended propagandist meanings. Normalization, which brought about the re-establishment of an unadulterated totalitarian regime, is overwhelmingly studied in terms of specifying the power of the state-socialist structures. Human agency is overlooked as a quality which naturally atrophied under the pressure of the tyrannizing structures. Moreover, it does not fit into the post-socialist grand narrative, which assumes the totally stupefying effects of the domineering socialist structures at its centre. Looking for the indices of autonomous hermeneutic agency within the conditions of normalization brings a new stimulus into academic writing on non-democratic audiences which has been for a long time preoccupied with the power of structures and indoctrinating effects of propaganda (Fidelius, 1998; Jareš et al., 2012; Kabele and Hájek, 2008). A rare example of an enquiry into the historical audiences within a government-controlled media system is a study by Meyen and Nawratil (2004) who interviewed spectators from the former German Democratic Republic about their viewing habits in the past. The authors, however, almost neglected the impact of the memory work on the accounts provided by the narrators.

The research presented in this article studies how television viewers used politically blatant programmes (socialist television serials) to connect to the publicly relevant themes and to understand the existing political order in the private corners of their existence, in their television rooms. The main goal is to find out whether the socialist television serials inspired the viewers to reflect on existing political reality and whether they functioned as stimuli in a meaning-making process. We subsume all these activities – reading popular culture texts, understanding them, interpreting them and using the experience as input in a process of assessing reality – under the concept of popular hermeneutics: the methods and results of understanding popular texts by ordinary people in an intuitive way. (The similar concept of ‘ordinary hermeneutics’ was applied in the research on lay people’s interpretations of the Bible by Andrew Village, 2007.)

Obviously, the totalitarian, undemocratic character of the social conditions impacted extensity and intensity of popular hermeneutics in reading of the political meanings. Yet, it would be inaccurate to judge the non-democratic audiences as automatically passive because production of meanings is relevant even if it does not feed into immediate social action. Practices of popular hermeneutics performed by non-democratic audiences thus further question the canonical distinction between active and passive audiences – they especially show its inadequacy as a singular dimension of audience assessment. On one hand, non-democratic audiences are active because they are involved in the processes of popular hermeneutics; on the other hand, they cannot be classified as publics. According to Sonia Livingstone (2005), ‘public refers to a shared understanding or inclusion in a common forum’ (p. 17), and these forms of collectivity hardly existed outside of oppositional circles in Soviet-bloc countries. The paradox of active audiences who are still not publics can be more suitably addressed with a two-dimensional model by Nancy Fraser (1992) who differentiated ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ publics depending on the potential for opinion formation and decision-making (p. 134). Totalitarian audiences are weak as far as they do not have any space for political decision-making, but some opinion formation in terms of making of political meanings (e.g. inspired by popular television) is possible (although circulation of the opinions is restricted or deformed).

Memory over the dislocation

The overall methodology of this research could be defined as the sociology of the past based on life-story research. It analyses the extracts of life stories that respondents produced when they were invited to talk about memories of their watching political scenes in the socialist serials.

The most disturbing concern of the studies grounded in life-story methodology is the one about memory work. This type of research has been notoriously criticized for working with something as biased and unreliable as memory, although memory studies scholars tend to anticipate potential criticism themselves. Alistair Thomson lists multifarious doubts about memory as a data-mining tool. According to him, memory deteriorates in old age, gets affected by nostalgia or influenced by the narrator’s and interviewer’s personalities – and, above all, it gets replaced by reconfigured versions of the collective or retrospective memory (Thomson, 2011: 79). Jerome Bourdon (2011) in his account of memory as ‘the double agent’ also stresses that ‘memory is reconstructive; it constantly re-elaborates the past’ (p. 63).

Distortions and reconstitutions of memory are, by and large, accepted as indisputable facets of the memory work which apply to all remembering subjects in all circumstances. Nonetheless, this research still requires a more nuanced perspective which allows us to understand that intensity of reconstructive tendency is crucially connected to discontinuity/continuity of memory. The discontinued memory which has to handle a transformative rupture, dividing the life course into incompatible parts, is necessarily even more reconstructive, and certainly it reconstructs the past in a specific way. Such a memory can be defined as a memory over the dislocation. It is exactly this type of memory which is dealt with in this research. The past of which narrators talked is separated from the present by the political and social switchover in 1989 – in other words by ‘dislocation’. Jakob Torfing (1999) defines it as a total fracture of all familiar social dimensions, as ‘a destabilization of a discourse that results from the emergence of events which cannot be domesticated, symbolized or integrated within the discourse in question’ (p. 301). Memory is even more fragile and agile if it stretches over dislocation, and such specificity has to be taken into account in the phase of interpretations.

The second methodological challenge of this research originates in its focus on the history of meanings. It constitutes an issue of memorability of meanings and reliability of these ‘hermeneutic’ memories. Can people reconstruct what they were thinking in the same way that they reveal what they were doing? And how does the researcher work with memories which cannot be verified with the help of complementary archives? Life-story research is usually event-based; it collects life stories or narrations of particular historical moments which revolve around specific events – and its records can therefore be checked. To give an example, oral history developed formalized ‘guidelines to assess reliability of recorded memory’ (Thomson, 2011: 79). On the contrary, research into the hermeneutic dimension of historical audiences strives to reconstruct meanings which used to be in people’s heads. Working with this type of memory is an exceptionally precarious assignment because the researcher is dependent on one category of sources and has little to corroborate what the narrators claim. Although these challenges are rather novel and they do not have any systematic solution, an auxiliary technique of assessing the remembered meanings was tried in the course of this research. It was preceded by an awareness that the reliability of memory of meanings can only be scrutinized with the logic of falsification. We can never prove that the narrator remembers correctly (i.e. that there is minimal impact of the particular dislocation), but we can pin down the signs that he or she is replacing memory with a dislocation-affected construct. There are two categories of the warning signs that were applied throughout this research: contradictions in narrators’ claims and uses of ahistorical language.

Cognitive reactions

In the memories of the narrators, watching socialist serials was totally devoid of any cognitive processing. Watching these serials is remembered as a thing that occurred automatically, without reflection, as an element of an everyday routine. To watch or not to watch was not the dilemma for the majority of narrators; they watched it automatically, but minimized intellectual involvement. Josef’s account is a good example of this prevailing reaction:

I wasn’t thinking while watching the serials because it simply didn’t interest me. It is like having something else in your head. I paid no attention to the scenes from political meetings where the Bolsheviks decided that this cow has to give more milk.

The two main arguments that narrators used to explain their cognitive absenteeism in watching the serials referred to the socio-political background. The first one can be labelled ‘political anaesthesia’. The narrators revealed that staying tuned into the flow of the regime’s persuasive communication was difficult because it thoroughly penetrated all social communication. The result was lowered capacity (not speaking about desire) to perceive the messages, inability to discern separate arguments within the surfeit of propaganda and general insensibility of the political discourse. Karel explained how he perceived the political messages:

Outright agitation, the same slogans rubbed in over and over again – this was simply our everyday reality. And you know what is interesting? In those days I took it to be normal; it did not leap in front of my eyes so much.

This was also confirmed by Marie: ‘Ideology was not the issue to think about because it was everywhere around us’. ⁴

The second reason mentioned was the feeling of having no control over things, a sense of powerlessness. Incogitant viewing was connected to the awareness that a thoughtful focus on the political sequences would not make any difference; creating opinions was useless activity as there was no ‘market’ for people’s opinions. This subcategory can be framed as ‘deficit of agency’. Míla described feelings of powerlessness, when she said, ‘It was better to watch it this way, better than letting it eat you, better then feeling sad and hurt. Because … we could not do anything about it, it was the way it was’, and Milada mentioned similarly: ‘When I saw the things on television I was thinking that I will not change it anyway and consequently did not give it a thought’.

Some, mainly female, narrators mentioned their life stage as a reason for withdrawal from reflecting on political issues in the serials and in the society. They referred to their focus on starting families and raising children who were small during early normalization. Family was the most important locus within normalization privatism (Havelková, 1993). The early years of normalization saw a remarkable baby boom, which was a demographic sign of a retreat into the private sphere. The total fertility rate in 1974 was the highest since the postwar years.

The only departure from the general denial of cognitive involvement was the use of propagandist sequences in the serials as an analytical material. Some narrators recalled that they watched the serials as a way of ‘studying the enemy’, that is, the Communist Party, the ruling establishment. They tried to make their own private analysis of propagandist techniques and protect their notion of the divide between reality and its ideologically distorted version. Pavel was one of those who revealed purposeful uses of cognitive functions: ‘I watched, as I say, only for study purposes. But some of them were simply too repulsive even as study material’. Jan gave a more detailed account of the same motivation:

Talking about The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, ⁵ I was interested to find out how they shape the reality, how they present it to the audiences. Before 1968, my dad was a head of the psychology department at the university and I wanted to figure out how these people think. So I watched it carefully and learned a lot about the world we lived in.

The third narrator who mentioned this approach was Mikuláš: ‘At least 80% of the population watched these serials and I was simply interested in the method of their propagandist work, how they form these people’. All those who mentioned the study reasons for some intellectual involvement in watching the serials had an oppositional attitude towards the political regime, and one was a member of the dissident circles.

Non-cognitive reactions

The narrators gave a list of other forms of viewing practices in relation to the socialist serials. However, they did not classify these practices as intellectual activities nor agreed with this interpretation when it was offered to them in the fashion of a ‘devil’s advocate’ question. Therefore, these reactions, which the narrators excluded from cognitive reflection, were grouped together within the category ‘non-cognitive reactions’.

Narrators fluently revealed emotions which they felt as a result of watching the socialist serials: predominantly sadness, irritation and hatred. Václav responded to this topic: ‘Watching it was suffering, a bit, sometimes … The piece about collectivization of the lands, I do not remember the title; it was difficult for those who lived in the countryside’. Sváťa’s account is also a case in point:

I can give you an example from the serial Woman Behind the Counter. My mammy worked in the supermarket in those days. When they showed these opulent, rich stocks in the serial’s supermarket, we were all laughing – and she cried. She kept saying: I can’t look at it; I can’t see these lame lies.

The negative emotions which the serials raised had different intensities, from mild annoyance to open hatred. The feelings of open hatred (which was even translated into aggressive behaviour in one case) were, as well as ‘studying the enemy’ in the category of ‘cognitive reactions’, typical for the viewers with oppositional attitude. Mikuláš provided an intense example of hatred:

I played in the band. Once we were at some festival and we met Kaiser and Lábus there, the two actors who played in Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, in the episode about hijacking the plane. I felt real hatred to these actors so I came down from the stage, came near and gave them a kick. All the guys then did the same thing, it was crowded and we were stealthily kicking their asses and shins.

As the serials unreeled, people used to talk about the newly broadcast episodes in their conversations. Talking about new episodes of the serials was one of the general everyday routines throughout various social groups and environments. Conversations related to the serials occurred in family circles or at work. Some narrators confirmed that talking over the episode broadcast in the previous evening was the first thing they did after they arrived at work. Narrators who worked as manual workers reported less self-censorship in discussing the political sequences of the serials, as compared to the narrators who worked in administration. Antonín, who was a member of the communist parliament during normalization, remembered that his colleagues gave him the nickname Plateník after the main character of the regional Communist Party Secretary from the serial The District in the North. He said,

The guys from the factory used to give me a hard time. When I came in the morning, they gathered around me and snapped at me: What a silly thing your comrades did in the last episode again … But I almost looked forward to these moments.

Suppressing the political sequences and focusing on the newest developments in the romantic parts of the plots was however, a much more obvious practice. It was summarized by Anna:

It was normal gossiping. One came to work and the debate started: what about the main heroine last evening and what about him, what kind of bollocks somebody said, if she looked pretty or impossible, and so on …

Very often the narrators mentioned laughter as their reaction to propagandist sequences in the serials. They described the laughter as ironic, and in some cases laughter was combined with ironic comments to the television. (Laughter here overlaps with conversations – ironic talking back to the television is the intersection of the two practices.) Milada contributed to this issue: ‘It was malicious, ironic laughter. Sometimes my husband added a comment to the plot, like: Now you really explained it, thank you. It was a way of diminishing the tension’. Laughter was either a compensatory or surrogate practice helping the viewers to eliminate tension or replace a less desirable alternative. The narrators noted that laughing helped them avoid becoming angry. Ironic laughter associated with watching the socialist serials is nonetheless different from ironic viewing which was diagnosed by Ien Ang (1985) in the case of Dallas audiences. In the case of viewers of the socialist serials, laughter was an emergency practice, which they did not enjoy.

A couple of times narrators rehearsed explicitly oppositional practices (a protestant priest who said he preached against the propagandist serials in the church) or practices of excorporation defined by John Fiske (1987) as the ‘process by which the powerless steal elements of the dominant culture and use them in their own, often oppositional or subversive, interests’ (p. 315). Both examples of excorporation were inspired by watching The Woman Behind the Counter. Olga said that the morning after the first episode was aired she and the group of her friends went to their local supermarket, asked for a Customers’ Book and (in a joking manner) wrote a written complaint saying that this supermarket should be supplied as well as the one on television. Marie remembered that the exterior of the television supermarket was located at Praha-Smíchov, and on the way back from a bar she and her friends banged on the door and yelled, ‘Let us in, here you have everything and other places have empty shelves’.

Unthinkable thinking

When asked about forms and intensities of reflection on the political parts of the serials, the first choice of answer in the absolute majority of cases was ‘But we did not think about it back then’. The denial of any cognitive involvement was the golden thread unreeling throughout the research. It soon emerged that it is mainly the signifier ‘thinking’ which functions as a stopper of further musing.

The dichotomy of cognitive versus non-cognitive reactions became the central categorical pair feeding in more nuanced subcategories, as shown in Figure 1. Cognitive reactions encompassed either cognitive denial or – solely in the case of narrators who had an oppositional attitude to the communist establishment – employment of cognitive functions to study the socialist serials as a source of knowledge on the methods the regime used to communicate with its citizens. The category of ‘non-cognitive reactions’ encompassed all other reactions the narrators revealed after they had refused cognitive processing of the political scenes in the serials. They retrieved their emotions (mostly negative), conversational references to the serials within the everyday situations, moments of bitter, ironical laughter and scattered excorporations in carnivalesque style.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Typology of narrators’ reactions.

It is absolutely indispensable that the interpretation of the results takes into account potential traps and pitfalls of the narrators’ remembering of the socialist past, specificities of remembering the past stored behind the socio-political rupture and supposable reconstitution of the memories under this influence. This methodological step is visualized by the past–present divide in Figure 1. As was explained earlier, memory is always reconstructive – it mediates over time and suffers from all distortions that any mediation involves (and a few of its own). Nonetheless, in this research we want to narrow our attention to the modifications brought about by the dislocatory impact of socio-political change in 1989. From this perspective, signs of dislocation-affected reconstruction of memory accumulated mainly around the category of cognitive denial. These signs – contradictions in storytelling and uses of ahistorical language – appeared mostly when the narrators talked of their cognitive disengagement.

Contradictions refer to discrepancies in narrators’ account of reasons for abandoning cognitive response as a possible reaction to the socialist serials. They mentioned loss of sensitivity to the political rhetoric caused by a surfeit of clichés in the public space (labelled as political anaesthesia) and loss of motivation to develop opinions caused by their detachment from any decision-making acts (labelled as agency deficit) as the main reasons. Simultaneously, narrators easily admitted that they joked and talked about the serials and laughed at them. In other words, they retrieved activities (labelled as non-cognitive reactions) which necessarily also involved some level of cognitive processing, but narrators would not mention them when asked about cognitive processing directly. Emotions, too, were totally detached from any cognitive accompaniment in the narrators’ accounts. Nonetheless, Liesbet Van Zoonen (2005) collected evidence based on neuroscience’s theory of affective intelligence proving that emotionality is inseparable from rationality (p. 65).

Another sign of narrators replacing memory with its adjusted counterpart affected by dislocation was the use of ahistorical language, that is, the language containing lexical units which were not part of standard vocabulary in the past they were talking about. These are the examples of the symptomatic language: ‘it was a regular call for collaboration’ (Mikuláš), ‘the ideology was everywhere’ (Anna), ‘I was an anti-communist rebel, you know’ (Sváťa), ‘of course, the serials were conformist to the regime’ (Josef) and ‘I was kind of sorry when I saw people who were enthusiastic about the regime’ (Pavel). When giving reasons for their political lethargy, the narrators used vocabulary showing the analytical distance from the totalitarian conditions which they simply did not have when it was in a full swing. The language indicated they had been revealing what they think now, not how they experienced the reasons for withdrawal from political thinking in the days of normalization. Dana Gabl’asová (2009) in her research on linguistic attributes of life-story interviews covering normalization arrived at the same experience and recorded one of her narrators confirming this theory: ‘Communist regime, … it is not the way we put it back then’ (p. 97).

Uncovering the phenomenon of cognitive denial is the principal finding of this research. Nonetheless, it is even more important to ask the question when the denial occurred. There are signs that dislocation-affected memory intruded on the way that the narrators rendered their cognitive relations to the serials more than other subcategories. It is likely that the socialist serials received more cognitive attention during their screenings in normalization than the narrators confessed to in the present moment. The idea that the socialist popular culture might ever have been worthy of thought seems to be utterly unthinkable in the present day. The category of cognitive denial is very likely to be shaped by a retrospective re-evaluation of the past. This memory figure may follow from retrospective negative judgment of the political situation of the time and a sort of ‘retrospective shame’. In the case of denying cognitive involvement in the socialist serials, narrators substitute parts of their memory with a reconfiguration compliant with the new neoliberal hegemony which takes reprobation of the socialist past as one of its defining characteristics.