Paper short abstract:

Mikail Bakunin has been characterised as advocating for the revolutionary destruction of documents. Through a discussion of the Nechayev affair, involving a friend of Bakunin, light can be shed on vernacular theories of state bureaucracy as material media, and the historical shadows they cast.

Paper long abstract:

There is a phrase in Matthew Hull's magisterial Government of Paper (2012). The phrase is 'naïve Bakuninism'. Hull refers with it to a position Weber attributed to Mikail Bakunin. According to this position as described by Weber, destruction of material documents (the burning of files) is necessary to revolutionary emancipation along anarchist lines. Weber considered this idea naïve in that, he felt, bureaucratic forms of organization would continue even if the documentary records (of the administration of the state, population, credit and debt etc.) were destroyed, because the rationalised form of life is a habit or 'settled orientation' alongside the material infrastructure of the bureau.

Many people in different contexts could be said to have shared Bakunin's 'vernacular' media theory about the materiality of administration, given that the destruction of documents is widespread in times of crisis and unrest. Close readings of Bakunin, and of Weber, can also be conducted to show that Weber's attribution of naivety is in some sense misrepresentative. An appreciation of Bakunin's position on documents is important to an understanding of how the state has been conceptualised, not least because of the long shadow cast on radical political movements by the Marx-Bakunin dispute and Bakunin's subsequent expulsion from the International. One way into such appreciation is to consider the 'Nechayev affair', a notorious case involving an associate of Bakunin, where the use of and especially the orientation to documents highlights other vernacular theories, about texts and textuality, and about incompatible ideas regarding political violence.