Spaces of becoming and being: the nature of shared experience in Czech society from 1918 to 1989

In approaching an analysis of revolution there are a variety of theories from which to draw on including rational action, cultural functionalism, and material structuralism. While each theory offers its own legitimate perspective, it is through a combination of such theories that one arrives at a more holistic understanding of the ways in which collective identities and solidarities are restructured over time. The origins of a revolution can be found within the dominant forms of shared experience that characterize the historical memory of a particular society as well as the cultural objects and social networks through which they move. The dramatic changes brought about during the course and in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia provide an apt case-study for the exploration of the relationship between forms of shared experiences and the expression of revolution. The Velvet Revolution as a collective expression of social and political dissent by a national community cannot be separated from the nature of print capitalism and cultural production between the years 1918 and 1989, particularly in the forms of samizdat literature and the television serial. These mass forms of shared experience reflected and created certain ways of being in the world within Czechoslovak society that exemplified the dialectic between the normalization project of the totalitarian political system and the parallel polis of dissent moving in the underground of society that would eventually shape the organizational structures of the revolution in its effort to realize new ways of being in the world