The Revenant Archive, stewarded by Olchar E. Lindsann, attempts to chart and provide the materials for the detailed reconstruction of 19th and early 20th Century avant-garde communities--a long, rich, and complex history that has been almost effaced from the communal memory of today's Eternal Network of avant-garde counterculture. This DIY micro-archive is assembled, maintained, and designed to function as a co-ordinated part of the ongoing evolution of this alternative community--unfunded, idiosyncratic, and without institutional ties or resources.
Its sister project, Revenant Editions, publishes English translations of works by this same matrix of communities, many of those texts drawn from the archive itself. The journal Rêvenance publishes texts and translations from the archive alongside historical research, translations, and experimental historical engagement by living avant-garde historians and writers around the world.
The archive is also based upon a strong pedagogical foundation, and has been used for lectures and presentations at schools, festivals, galleries, and bibliographic societies, on topics including the practice of micro-archiving, the history of underground publishing, French Romanticist subculture, the history of avant-garde bibliography, and "practical bibliomancy".
Its sister project, Revenant Editions, publishes English translations of works by this same matrix of communities, many of those texts drawn from the archive itself. The journal Rêvenance publishes texts and translations from the archive alongside historical research, translations, and experimental historical engagement by living avant-garde historians and writers around the world.
The archive is also based upon a strong pedagogical foundation, and has been used for lectures and presentations at schools, festivals, galleries, and bibliographic societies, on topics including the practice of micro-archiving, the history of underground publishing, French Romanticist subculture, the history of avant-garde bibliography, and "practical bibliomancy".
The archive began as a working research library, from the practical necessity of exploring a community, most of whose work has gone unprinted throughout the 20th Century. It grew out of a long-term project to re-evaluate the early history and evolution of avant-garde, subversive social and cultural practice. This research is anchored in the seminal avant-garde collective of 1829-33 known variously as the Bouzingo, Bousingot, Jeunes-France, and Petit-Cénacle, the first self-declared collective whose members are known to have referred to themselves by the term "avant-garde". Though the archive focuses on artifacts relating
to the 19th Century avant-garde, Frenetic Romanticism, and related
phenomena, it also draws in
related communities, individuals, and traditions from both intellectual
and mass culture: Micropublishing, Gothic subculture, Feminism, mainstream Romanticism, Socialism, Decadence, Libertinism,
Anarchism, Civil Rights, Weird Fiction, Satire, children's literature, etc.--whatever represents
an alternative current or disjunctive intervention into the dominant
stream of culture during the consolidation of Bourgeois power during the
19th Century.
The archive currently contains 633 catalogued relics:249 Books
194 Issues / Compilations of Journals
114 Lithographs
24 Letters
17 Etchings
4 Folios of Sheet Music
4 Metal Medallions
3 Literary manuscripts
3 Pencil Drawings
3 Promotional Adverts (2 w/subscription cards)
2 Ink Drawings
2 Unused Bookplates of avant-garde archivists
2 Newspaper clippings from previous archivists' flat-files
2 Magic Lantern Slides
1 Set of Educational Acetone Slides
1 Educational study aid
1 Private death announcement
1 Transcript of a review, typed by its author
1 Calling Card w/handwritten note
1 Postcard w/handwritten note
1 Book invoice from a 19th Century Avant-Archivist
1 Anonymous, hand-written fair copy book
1 Carte-de-Visite photograph
1 Photoglyptie Poster
1 Typesetting Sort with Seal of the NAPA
At least 144 items in the archive were previously owned by other identifiable writers, intellectuals, activists, archivists and historians of counterculture, in addition to many copies owned and marked upon by anonymous or forgotten members of avant-garde and intellectual communities.
Altogether, nearly 25% of the items in the archive are traceable to a specific, identifiable individual involved with marginal subculture.
Approximately 150 additional items await cataloguing.
Manifesto on Archiving, Reading, Necromancy, and Nurturmancy
The physicality, the embedding in real space, the dead weight of the book which, object that it is, is so unapologetically oblivious to the virtuality of Thought, renders the very notion of consciousness more palpable—and simultaneously, more fundamentally impossible—than any virtual, digital, or more exclusively visual text could do. The age of the old book, its persistence through a span of time longer than any human life, the traces of those lives, and the consciousness itself (whose impossibility is thus even more disturbingly revealed) of its age, make imminent a relationship to time and subjectivity that underpins the notion of 'existence' as such.
To hold and read such a book, with the care and delicacy and even the small risk that it entails, cradling it in one's hands as the boards stretch always a bit farther away from the spine, physiologically enacts a gesture of reverence, a physical recognition of the precarious thread by which the notion of humanity, not to say being, is suspended in its own void: a thread so thin as to vanish at the very moment it becomes apprehensible.
Take into your hands a book well-worn, scuffed, bent, dented and rubbed away with the love of a century of reading, and open it: fit your fingers to the depressed edges of the boards, where the fingers of the dead have left the imprint of their habitual grasp; rest the spine along your palm at the very spot where the deads’ palms have supported, for countless hours, the dead weight of the book.
Allow your own spine, your arms, your neck, your head, your lungs, to settle into the position implied by these marks of habitual use: you have become the dead. Your body, with your brain, is a vessel for the dead.
Now read. Read the pages marked with pencil pen, dog-eared or parted with pressed flowers, as you retain the posture of the reader who has disappeared. What forms does Thought take on within your brain, emerging from the matrix of the printed page and the repeated posture of the reader, or readers, who are dead? What incipient present emerges from the past that has slipped between the fibers of your consciousness?
Now bid the dead goodbye for a spell, and read the book yourself; mark it in pen or pencil, hold it in the way you hold a book. You are reading your death, and writing what, and who, shall come to read when you, too, and all that you shall ever think will have died and passed into text.
A well-directed archive is like Perseus' mirror: looking toward the past, we advance toward the future. Staring at ourselves, we approach what we intend to destroy.
The physicality, the embedding in real space, the dead weight of the book which, object that it is, is so unapologetically oblivious to the virtuality of Thought, renders the very notion of consciousness more palpable—and simultaneously, more fundamentally impossible—than any virtual, digital, or more exclusively visual text could do. The age of the old book, its persistence through a span of time longer than any human life, the traces of those lives, and the consciousness itself (whose impossibility is thus even more disturbingly revealed) of its age, make imminent a relationship to time and subjectivity that underpins the notion of 'existence' as such.
To hold and read such a book, with the care and delicacy and even the small risk that it entails, cradling it in one's hands as the boards stretch always a bit farther away from the spine, physiologically enacts a gesture of reverence, a physical recognition of the precarious thread by which the notion of humanity, not to say being, is suspended in its own void: a thread so thin as to vanish at the very moment it becomes apprehensible.
Take into your hands a book well-worn, scuffed, bent, dented and rubbed away with the love of a century of reading, and open it: fit your fingers to the depressed edges of the boards, where the fingers of the dead have left the imprint of their habitual grasp; rest the spine along your palm at the very spot where the deads’ palms have supported, for countless hours, the dead weight of the book.
Allow your own spine, your arms, your neck, your head, your lungs, to settle into the position implied by these marks of habitual use: you have become the dead. Your body, with your brain, is a vessel for the dead.
Now read. Read the pages marked with pencil pen, dog-eared or parted with pressed flowers, as you retain the posture of the reader who has disappeared. What forms does Thought take on within your brain, emerging from the matrix of the printed page and the repeated posture of the reader, or readers, who are dead? What incipient present emerges from the past that has slipped between the fibers of your consciousness?
Now bid the dead goodbye for a spell, and read the book yourself; mark it in pen or pencil, hold it in the way you hold a book. You are reading your death, and writing what, and who, shall come to read when you, too, and all that you shall ever think will have died and passed into text.
A well-directed archive is like Perseus' mirror: looking toward the past, we advance toward the future. Staring at ourselves, we approach what we intend to destroy.
Archival Ethic and Mandate
Although most of the objects collected in it are products of intellectual and artistic activity, the archive's mandate, like the understanding of the 'Avant-Garde' implicit in its goals, is not aesthetic but social. It is conceived of neither as an investment in precious objects, nor as an ossuary for nostalgic orisons; it sets out to be an archive of a particular community, or network of communities, with a common mode of living, of which the books, images and other objects collected here are relics and tools. We do not hesitate to call it "our" archive, not an archive of an impersonalised dead past, but a committed act of memory in the service of a collaborative present which continues to unfold. Among other roles, the archivist is a kind of Griot or Scop, a vehicle for the collective memory of the community, warden of its potential pasts, wisdoms and follies. The archive aspires to play an active role in the present and future of the avant-garde, as we enter a period that is sure to be fraught with massive uncertainty and change. An archive of the avant-garde community has the responsibility to keep in constant dialog with the contemporary community which it serves: its role is to give the dead a voice in the present--not to preserve them, but to continue to allow them to grow, to contribute, by not only collecting objects, but operating within a broader historiographic context that responds ethically and sensitively to the demands of today's and tomorrow's intellectual countercultures. An archive must preserve for the living the companionship of the dead--not only to find themselves within the dead, but to learn how we differ from the dead, and how we must continue to change. Between the past and the present, we cultivate our futures; let us keep the soil rich.
The archive has therefore been approached not as an 'art collection' or 'rare book collection' but as an archive of relics of communal activity. It is naturally, therefore, interdisciplinary in scope. If it consists so far primarily of 'works' of art/literature/music, this is simply because these were the relics designed by the community to last, to be passed on. Few other relics have come to my notice so far; some have been catalogued under "Personal Artifacts" and "Ephemera". Although the archive is subject to tight financial restrictions, many networks of creative relationships among these communities in question are already indicated in the relics here, with many names reappearing in the catalogue in multiple and sometimes surprising contexts, in various webs of direct or indirect collaboration.
Because its focus is on the social, communal, trans-generational activity of the avant-garde, this archive does not fetishize objects in pristine condition--i.e. books that
have never been read, prints that have never been exposed to
view. The materials in this archive derive their value not from the market
nor exclusively from the name attached to them, but from the fact that as objects they bear the tangible traces of use,
the material remains of the roles they have played in the lives of
other avant-gardists and readers over more than a
century. They are direct links to these other individuals, about whom we
often know little or nothing else. So, naturally, many are worn, tattered,
with loose signatures or detached covers, torn pages, etc., not to mention marks, marginalia, dog-eared pages, and corrections. This
evidence of the love that these specific objects have facilitated make them worthless to 'collectors'. All the better for us.
Purposes of the Archive
The proposed purposes of the archive are manifold. In one dimension, it is intended as a resource and encouragement for the research outlined above and other, intersecting, projects. Though many of these texts are available online (and the entries in this catalogue will eventually contain links to digitized versions), some of the most interesting and important texts have not been digitised; and if--as archiving must teach us to do--we are to think in the long-term, physical copies may have as good a chance at survival across generations as the complicated, global set of relations that must remain in place indefinitely in order to maintain digitised material, while the globe is poised for massive and possibly catastrophic shifts of climate, scarcity, and power. Co-relative to this point is the fact that, due to its historiographic marginalisation, few people are proactively attempting to preserve this material, let alone to maintain it within its broader social-intellectual context; the very lack of legitimation that makes the archive possible to assemble on a small budget is also a symptom of the precariousness with which the historical recoverability of the first century of self-declared 'avant-garde' activity is balanced on the edge of oblivion.
As noted above, beyond the information contained within these books, a physical archive can serve as a vehicle for the more intimate interaction of the present and the past, between the living and the dead; objects serve as touchstones, bearing the scuffs, marks, damage, alteration, and decay imprinted by generations of readers, usually within earlier evolutions of our own community. The past becomes more tangible through our contact with these relics, and our understanding of our own place in the historical process is made more personal and nuanced. This direct contact with the imprint of a particular past has pedagogical implications as well, and the archive has served as a resource for both high school and alternative-model classes, lectures and exhibitions.
The Revenants Archive is quite emphatically a vehicle for original research and interpretation, an exploratory archive which, though guided by the work of a handful of earlier historians and archivists, is working in territory largely unexplored by academia. Only through original research is it possible to determine what the archive ought to contain, and sifting through the digital version of the dollar-bins of auction sites and European booksellers often turns up an unexpected discovery that has evaded the grand-narratives, and even the notice of our few predecessors. Often, the historiographic significance of a text is only discovered after it has been acquired.
The archival and bibliographic process is thus inseparable from research, is in fact a unique form of research in which specific material objects are taken as both the basis and expression of historiographic reconstruction. The archival or bibliographic catalogue (such as this one) should be therefore seen as a particular form of historical account, in which the charting of a complex, topographical web of associations, discourses, debates, collaborations, influences, and related projects takes precedence over a narrative synthesis of consecutive events, and in which conversations can be seen to emerge regardless of chronological distance.
Finally, there are kinds of histories--those which are most intimate and most grounded in everyday life--which cannot be traced through essentialised 'texts' or 'images', but can be conveyed and activated only by individual copies of early-edition books and prints. The ways that readers alter their books, intentionally or otherwise, can allow us to discern how these books were used, what roles they played in the lives and thought of intellectual communities. Inscriptions, marginalia, custom bindings, indexical marks, text corrections, notes and items tipped in between pages--all furnish subtle but important clues about the continually-evolving avant-garde lifestyle, the forms of consciousness and sociality which it created, and the practices of reading that have sustained it.
Practical notes on Micro-Archiving
The proposed purposes of the archive are manifold. In one dimension, it is intended as a resource and encouragement for the research outlined above and other, intersecting, projects. Though many of these texts are available online (and the entries in this catalogue will eventually contain links to digitized versions), some of the most interesting and important texts have not been digitised; and if--as archiving must teach us to do--we are to think in the long-term, physical copies may have as good a chance at survival across generations as the complicated, global set of relations that must remain in place indefinitely in order to maintain digitised material, while the globe is poised for massive and possibly catastrophic shifts of climate, scarcity, and power. Co-relative to this point is the fact that, due to its historiographic marginalisation, few people are proactively attempting to preserve this material, let alone to maintain it within its broader social-intellectual context; the very lack of legitimation that makes the archive possible to assemble on a small budget is also a symptom of the precariousness with which the historical recoverability of the first century of self-declared 'avant-garde' activity is balanced on the edge of oblivion.
As noted above, beyond the information contained within these books, a physical archive can serve as a vehicle for the more intimate interaction of the present and the past, between the living and the dead; objects serve as touchstones, bearing the scuffs, marks, damage, alteration, and decay imprinted by generations of readers, usually within earlier evolutions of our own community. The past becomes more tangible through our contact with these relics, and our understanding of our own place in the historical process is made more personal and nuanced. This direct contact with the imprint of a particular past has pedagogical implications as well, and the archive has served as a resource for both high school and alternative-model classes, lectures and exhibitions.
The Revenants Archive is quite emphatically a vehicle for original research and interpretation, an exploratory archive which, though guided by the work of a handful of earlier historians and archivists, is working in territory largely unexplored by academia. Only through original research is it possible to determine what the archive ought to contain, and sifting through the digital version of the dollar-bins of auction sites and European booksellers often turns up an unexpected discovery that has evaded the grand-narratives, and even the notice of our few predecessors. Often, the historiographic significance of a text is only discovered after it has been acquired.
The archival and bibliographic process is thus inseparable from research, is in fact a unique form of research in which specific material objects are taken as both the basis and expression of historiographic reconstruction. The archival or bibliographic catalogue (such as this one) should be therefore seen as a particular form of historical account, in which the charting of a complex, topographical web of associations, discourses, debates, collaborations, influences, and related projects takes precedence over a narrative synthesis of consecutive events, and in which conversations can be seen to emerge regardless of chronological distance.
Finally, there are kinds of histories--those which are most intimate and most grounded in everyday life--which cannot be traced through essentialised 'texts' or 'images', but can be conveyed and activated only by individual copies of early-edition books and prints. The ways that readers alter their books, intentionally or otherwise, can allow us to discern how these books were used, what roles they played in the lives and thought of intellectual communities. Inscriptions, marginalia, custom bindings, indexical marks, text corrections, notes and items tipped in between pages--all furnish subtle but important clues about the continually-evolving avant-garde lifestyle, the forms of consciousness and sociality which it created, and the practices of reading that have sustained it.
Practical notes on Micro-Archiving
It has been stated that the archive is the product of an underground, countercultural community, and it is largely determined by that
circumstance: unfunded, unacknowledged outside that community, without institutional or financial support. It has been
assembled on the disposable income of manual labour and low-end service
jobs over several years, more recently on a high-school teaching salary. The total cost of assembling the archive over seven years has run around $2,000. Indeed, a subsidiary function of the archive is to demonstrate the feasibility of archiving on this level, if the subject of the archive exists within or across historiographic lacunae to make them more or less invisible to 'market value'.
By the same token, the market's understanding of 'Condition' often works in the favour of an archive with a mandate such as this one. To be sure, an object that is far from deterioration has a genuine value for preservation and research; but in each specific instance this quality must be weighed against the other values which, as explained above, accrue from marginalia, inscriptions, indexical marks, and other symptoms of actual human use which the market categorically brands as de-valuing blemishes on a volume's Condition and market value--making it possible to acquire relatively cheaply.
Olchar E. Lindsann.
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