ABSTRACT
How do archivists do theory? The frequent use of the word ‘theory’ as a catch-all phrase to describe the whole range of new philosophical and critical approaches which have emerged since the Second World War gives the misleading impression that they comprise a single homogenous philosophy which can be readily grasped and exploited. This impression is reinforced by references to the ‘application’ of theory. This phrase conveys the idea that the new theoretical insights are a toolkit containing a range of critical spanners, screwdrivers and wrenches which, once mastered, can be used to dissemble texts and reveal the hidden cogs within them. The unhelpfulness of the suggestion that theory can be ‘applied’ is illustrated by the use made of the work of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Among Bakhtin’s most influential works was Rabelais and his World, which explored the cultural history and significance of the carnival, presenting it as a time when hierarchy was suspended and new aesthetic and cultural alignments forged (Bakhtin 1984). Bakhtin’s work has been ‘applied’ to a enormous range of subjects from medieval misericords to vaudeville and burlesque. The theories of Bakhtin are frequently cited or described at second hand and there is a limited engagement with his original work. Bakhtin, who was a challenging and provocative scholar, has become domesticated and familiar, prompting a group of Bakhtin specialists to comment:
That domestication, although it has been resisted in some quarters, persists in more: carnival, dialogism, heteroglossia, and the rest continue to roll off the tongues, and out from under the keyboard-caressing fingers of scholars and graduate students who find in them a useful analytical framework which does not in itself need to be interrogated … At the very least, ‘using’ or ‘applying’ Bakhtin has become difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from ‘exploiting Bakhtin …’ (Barta et al. 2001, 10).
The case of Bakhtin emphasizes the enormous diversity of theory. Bakhtin worked in the Soviet Union long before the development of many of the major strands of modern literary theory: ‘Bakhtin was certainly not a feminist, a deconstructionist, or a poststructuralist (though he was a post-Sausurrean). Such labels represent cultural anachronisms and ideological impossibilities in the world of Soviet life and thought’ (Barta et al. 2001, 2). The use of the term ‘theory’ is convenient precisely because the range of new theoretical approaches and insights is so widespread and diverse that it is impossible to find any other single term to refer to them. If we adopt for, example, the term ‘postmodern’, as does Callum Brown in his Postmodernism for Historians (2005), there is a risk of excluding key figures such as Bakhtin and of misrepresenting others such as Foucault who declined to label his work as postmodern. In such a confusing terminological situation, it is not surprising that the Wikipedia entry on postmodernism currently (April 2008) carries a banner lamenting that ‘This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject’.