Mario Wimmer
I help run the Collegium Helveticum, the joint IAS of ETH, University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts. I am also responsible for its academic program and coordinate our fellowship and scholar at risk program.
I am a historian of modern Europe specializing in the history of intellectual and administrative work as well as the history of media and culture. From 2017 to 2022, I taught history and theory of media in the Department for Arts, Media, Philosophy at Universität Basel and coordinated the academic program of the research group "Media of Exactitude" as senior researcher. Previous to that, I taught cultural and intellectual history in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. After receiving my PhD in modern history from the University of Bielefeld in 2010, I was an ETH Fellow in Michael Hagner's history of science group. In 2010, I was a visiting professor at ECNU Shanghai and have been a fellow or guest at the German National Literature Archives, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg Konstanz, the IFK Vienna, the Departments of German and History at UC Berkeley, and the Walter Benjamin Kolleg. During my time in Berkeley I was a member of the Big Data working group, the inflictions working group, core faculty of the Center for Science, Medicine, Technology, and Society as well as the Center for European studies. At Basel, I was a member of eikones. Center of the Theory and History of the Image and served as founding and managing editor of BMCCT.
On and off I continue working on a book titled "Ranke's Blindness" and continue to pursue my interest in the history of the human and social sciences. The trajectory of my work is towards an historical epistemology of the modern human and social sciences in context.
Address: Collegium Helveticum
The joint Institute of Advanced Study of ETH Zurich, University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts
Schmelzbergstrasse 25
8092 Zurich
I am a historian of modern Europe specializing in the history of intellectual and administrative work as well as the history of media and culture. From 2017 to 2022, I taught history and theory of media in the Department for Arts, Media, Philosophy at Universität Basel and coordinated the academic program of the research group "Media of Exactitude" as senior researcher. Previous to that, I taught cultural and intellectual history in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. After receiving my PhD in modern history from the University of Bielefeld in 2010, I was an ETH Fellow in Michael Hagner's history of science group. In 2010, I was a visiting professor at ECNU Shanghai and have been a fellow or guest at the German National Literature Archives, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg Konstanz, the IFK Vienna, the Departments of German and History at UC Berkeley, and the Walter Benjamin Kolleg. During my time in Berkeley I was a member of the Big Data working group, the inflictions working group, core faculty of the Center for Science, Medicine, Technology, and Society as well as the Center for European studies. At Basel, I was a member of eikones. Center of the Theory and History of the Image and served as founding and managing editor of BMCCT.
On and off I continue working on a book titled "Ranke's Blindness" and continue to pursue my interest in the history of the human and social sciences. The trajectory of my work is towards an historical epistemology of the modern human and social sciences in context.
Address: Collegium Helveticum
The joint Institute of Advanced Study of ETH Zurich, University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts
Schmelzbergstrasse 25
8092 Zurich
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Books by Mario Wimmer
Reviews: Historische Zeitschrift (Norbert Finzsch); Neue Politische Literatur (Philipp Müller); H-Soz-u-Kult (Achim Landwehr); Mitteilungen des Insituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Jakob Wührer); Das historisch-politische Buch (Andreas Becker); Scrinium (Joachim Kemper); NCCR Mediality Newsletter (Isabelle Schürch); Auskunft: Zeitschrift fur Bibliothek, Archiv und Information in Norddeutschland (Rainer Unruh); Jens Dobler: Mitteilungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft (2018) 61/62, S. 94-95 . Der Standard (Klaus Taschwer).
Representative Publications by Mario Wimmer
I understand Meisner’s observations of everyday life through the lense of bureaucratic logic as ethnography avant la lettre. After introducing Meisner and his pioneering work on the modern diplomatics of files, I give a close reading of his own private copy of the Aktenkunde that he first published in 1935; I show that the way he organized information followed the very symbolic and material logic of bureaucratic administration he set out to describe, acknowledging the basic concepts, such as the »principle of provenance«, which he defined and discussed throughout his book.
The historically contingent logics of archival administration and everyday life are incommensurable. Each is a relatively closed, but scattered terrain with its own emergent and internal logic. In that sense they can be considered black boxes within a model of double contingency. As it becomes clear with the case at hand, these relatively autonomous spheres are not separated from the politics inside and outside the archive. Examining the everydayness of state institutions, and intellectual and administrative practices, as well as the forms of paperwork that keeps them going, allows for a new perspective on the history of bureaucracy. Ultimately, I argue for an historical anthropology that acknowledges the epistemic violence and politics of inclusion and exclusion in bureaucracy in order to arrive at an historical anthropology of reason that does not deny, but instead attempts to think through its unequal terms.
sources was a common and even self-evident practice
in most areas of philological and historical study. In
1906 an enthroned statue of Kastalia, a Greek nymph
associated with the sources of truth and wisdom, was
installed upon a fountain in the very center of Vienna
University, which had been rebuilt from 1873 to 1884
(fig. 1). She embodied both historical and mythological
thought: a real wet source, a variation on the oftendry
historical sources of the scholars, supplemented
by references to wisdom, inspiration, and truth. Taking
the arcaded courtyard of Vienna University as its stage,
this paper considers the academic and intellectual
dimensions of this commission and points to the
structural violence and political implications of an
epistemological aporia, namely, the question of how
history might be “determined by its mythology,” to
paraphrase Ernst Cassirer. Before returning to postwar
interpretations of World War I, we will explore the
wet and dry aspects of source criticism in historical
scholarship.
Drafts by Mario Wimmer
Papers by Mario Wimmer
Reviews: Historische Zeitschrift (Norbert Finzsch); Neue Politische Literatur (Philipp Müller); H-Soz-u-Kult (Achim Landwehr); Mitteilungen des Insituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Jakob Wührer); Das historisch-politische Buch (Andreas Becker); Scrinium (Joachim Kemper); NCCR Mediality Newsletter (Isabelle Schürch); Auskunft: Zeitschrift fur Bibliothek, Archiv und Information in Norddeutschland (Rainer Unruh); Jens Dobler: Mitteilungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft (2018) 61/62, S. 94-95 . Der Standard (Klaus Taschwer).
I understand Meisner’s observations of everyday life through the lense of bureaucratic logic as ethnography avant la lettre. After introducing Meisner and his pioneering work on the modern diplomatics of files, I give a close reading of his own private copy of the Aktenkunde that he first published in 1935; I show that the way he organized information followed the very symbolic and material logic of bureaucratic administration he set out to describe, acknowledging the basic concepts, such as the »principle of provenance«, which he defined and discussed throughout his book.
The historically contingent logics of archival administration and everyday life are incommensurable. Each is a relatively closed, but scattered terrain with its own emergent and internal logic. In that sense they can be considered black boxes within a model of double contingency. As it becomes clear with the case at hand, these relatively autonomous spheres are not separated from the politics inside and outside the archive. Examining the everydayness of state institutions, and intellectual and administrative practices, as well as the forms of paperwork that keeps them going, allows for a new perspective on the history of bureaucracy. Ultimately, I argue for an historical anthropology that acknowledges the epistemic violence and politics of inclusion and exclusion in bureaucracy in order to arrive at an historical anthropology of reason that does not deny, but instead attempts to think through its unequal terms.
sources was a common and even self-evident practice
in most areas of philological and historical study. In
1906 an enthroned statue of Kastalia, a Greek nymph
associated with the sources of truth and wisdom, was
installed upon a fountain in the very center of Vienna
University, which had been rebuilt from 1873 to 1884
(fig. 1). She embodied both historical and mythological
thought: a real wet source, a variation on the oftendry
historical sources of the scholars, supplemented
by references to wisdom, inspiration, and truth. Taking
the arcaded courtyard of Vienna University as its stage,
this paper considers the academic and intellectual
dimensions of this commission and points to the
structural violence and political implications of an
epistemological aporia, namely, the question of how
history might be “determined by its mythology,” to
paraphrase Ernst Cassirer. Before returning to postwar
interpretations of World War I, we will explore the
wet and dry aspects of source criticism in historical
scholarship.
Ausgehend von anschaulichen Beispielen analysieren die Beiträge zur Enzyklopädie der Genauigkeit Herkunft, Kontexte und Konjunkturen jener Begriffe, die Praktiken, Vorstellungen und Ideale von Genauigkeit in Kunst, Sozial-, Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften verkörpern. Dabei wird deutlich, wie Methoden und Medien des Recherchierens, Lesens, Urteilens, Deutens, Beschreibens, Korrigierens, Produzierens, Narrativierens und Überarbeitens in ihrem Vollzug auf spezifische Vorstellungen von wissenschaftlicher Genauigkeit zurückgreifen und diese mitunter auch prägen. Die Bei- träge klären dabei nicht nur grundlegende Konzepte und Begriffe, sondern widmen sich auch der Frage, wie Ideal und Versprechen von Genauigkeit die Arbeitsweisen in verschiedenen Disziplinen und Forschungsbereichen bestimmen. Nicht zuletzt geht es ihnen darum, die Methodenbildung der Disziplinen selbst zu reflektieren und Fragen nach der politischen Brisanz und epistemischen Gewalt von Idealen, Praktiken und Dar- stellungen von Genauigkeit in den Blick zu nehmen.
Mit Beiträgen u.a. von Monika Dommann, Verena Halsmayer, Alexander Honold, Markus Klammer, Markus Krajewski, Helmut Lethen, Malika Maskarinec, Katja Müller-Helle, Oliver Simons, Ralph Ubl und Rahel Villinger.
Louis Althusser/Étienne Balibar/Roger Establet/Pierre Macherey/Jacques Rancière, Das Kapital lesen. Vollständige und ergänzte Ausgabe mit Retraktionen zum Kapital hg. v. Frieder Otto Wolf unter Mitwirkung von Alexis Petrioli übersetzt von Frieder Otto Wolf und Eva Pfaffenberger, Münster (Westfälisches Dampfboot) 2015, 764 S., 49.90 Euro.
Louis Althusser/Étienne Balibar/Roger Establet/Pierre Macherey/Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, London (Verso) 2016, 576 S., £30.00.
Ulrich Raulff: Ideen sind bei mir in der Regel lektüreinduziert, d.h. ich brauche einen Anstoß von außerhalb, um einen Schritt oder Halbschritt weiterzukommen. Dieses Haben von Ideen, urplötzlich, zwischendurch, spontan, bei Tag oder bei Nacht, ist bei mir die Ausnahme; in der Regel inspirieren mich Lektüren: Dann kann es vorkommen, dass ich innerhalb kurzer Zeit mehrere Ideen habe. Ansonsten würde ich es mit Erwin Panofsky halten, der sagte: Ich habe alle sechs Wochen eine Idee, und zwischendurch arbeite ich.
M.W.: Ich möchte zwischen zwei konkreten Modi unterscheiden: dem Modus, eine Idee zu haben und einem nachträglichen Modus, bei dem die Idee längst vor einem da war; mit anderen Worten eine Unterscheidung von mehr oder weniger flüchtigen Einfällen und Konzepten von Dauer. Untersuchen Sie in der Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte vorzugsweise den Modus des Ideenhabens oder geht es Ihnen verstärkt um die Analyse von Ideen mit gewisser Dauer?
U.R.: Ich würde zunächst sagen, dass mir das eine sehr schöne, auch ästhetisch schöne Beschreibung der zwei vielleicht wichtigsten Seinsweisen von Ideen zu sein scheint: zum einen die Idee empirisch, oder sagen wir ontisch, betrachtet, zum anderen eine ontologische oder transzendentale Betrachtungsweise. Empirisch betrachtet ist die Idee ein Gedankensprung, ein Funke, eine Konnexion, ein Synap-sen-Sprung, eine überraschende Verbindung von zwei Dingen, die vielleicht vorher schon gewusst oder geahnt waren, die irgendwo im Zentrum des Bewusstseins oder an dessen Rändern schon präsent waren, aber noch nicht verbunden. Die gehabte Idee ist für den Ideenhaber diese überraschende Verbindung, also der Einfall. Das ist eine legitime Weise der Betrachtung von Ideen, die auch für Philosophen akzeptabel ist. Dieter Henrich 1 zum Beispiel untersucht bzw. protokolliert seit Jahren diesen Ablauf eines Einfalls. Er kann mittlerweile sagen, welche Zeitdauer ein Einfall hat, wie er sich ähnlich einem Blitz verzweigt und dann ausläuft und verschwindet. Es ist interessant, diesen Prozess zu beobachten. Er hat sehr viel mit kreativen Vorgängen zu tun und ist von daher ein legitimer Gegenstand der Untersuchung.
International Conference
Universität Basel
Organized by Lisa Cronjäger, Markus Krajewski, Antonia v. Schöning, Mario Wimmer
on behalf of the research group Media of Exactitude (www.genauigkeit.ch)
Venue
Eikones Forum
Universität Basel
Basel, Rheinsprung 11
Thursday, 4 October, 2018
13:30h-14:00h
Welcome
Markus Krajewski (Basel)
Introductory Remarks
Antonia v. Schöning (Basel)
Panel One: Literature and Exactitude
Chair: Christoph Hoffmann (Lucerne)
14:00h-15:30h
Literariness and Exactitude in the Human Sciences
Oliver Simons (New York)
Genies der Wahrnehmungen. Der Militär als Mathematiker und Künstler im Denken des 18. Jahrhundert
Andrea Albrecht/Tilman Venzl (Heidelberg)
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
Panel Two: Pedantry and Precision
16:00-17:30
Chair: Lea Bühlmann (Fribourg) tbc
The Pedant and the Practices of Fault-Finding
Markus Krajewski (Basel)
Precision Abroad: Marianne Schmidl and the Debate on African Numbers
Anna Echterhölter (Vienna)
17:30h-18:00h Coffee Break
18:00h-19:30h PM
Round Table: Exactitude in the Sciences
Omar Nasim (Regensburg), Aleks Scholz (St Andrews), Barbara Koch (Freiburg)
Moderator: Bruno Strasser (Geneva) tbc
Followed by Apéro riche
Friday, 5th of October
9:00h-9:30h
Introductory remarks
Monika Dommann (Zurich)
Panel Three:
9:30h-10:30h
Chair: Antonia von Schöning (Basel)
Differing Degrees of Exactitude in Planimetric Drawings
Tom Steinert (Berlin)
Negotiating Precision: Measuring, Categorizing, and Sensing Color in Beer Tasting Sessions
Lorenza Mondada (Basel)
10:30h-11:00h
Coffee break
11:00h-12:30h
Chair: Malika Maskarinec (Basel)
Grasping the elusive tertium comparationis. Challanges of exactitude in practices of comparative viewing
Joris Corin Heyder (Bielefeld)
Exactitude in Paranoid Epistemologies in the Human Sciences Since c. 1903
Mario Wimmer (Basel)
12:30-13:30 PM
Lunch
Panel Four: Visualization and Calculation
13:30-15:30 PM
Chair: Monika Wulz (Zürich)
The Limits of Calculation in the 1980s
Jimena Canales (Cambridge, Mass.)
Between Exactitude and Aboutness: The Photographic Image as Data
Estelle Blaschke (Lausanne)
Films of Flows: The Camera as a Measuring Device
Mario Schulze (Zurich)/Sarine Waltenspül (Zurich)
15:30h-16:00h Coffee break
16:00h-17:30h Genauigkeit in der Kunst (in German and English)
Hanspeter Giuliani (Basel), Hanna Hölling (London), Kathrin Resetarits (Vienna)
Moderation: Noemi Etienne (Berne) tbc
18:00-19:30
Keynote Lecture
Precision in Paris
Lorraine Daston (Berlin/Chicago)
Moderation: Markus Krajewski
Program
10:00-10:30
Introduction
Mario Wimmer (Universität Basel)
10:30-11:30
“Ice, ink, ash, and dried flowers: how-to writing around 1900”
Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
12:00-1:00
"The hands of the engraver: Albert Flocon encounters Gaston Bachelard"
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
2:00 PM-3 PM
"Major and minor cosmograms, or how to do things with worlds"
John Tresch (UCL, The Warburg Institute)
3:30 PM-4:30 PM
"Blind trust: working with the hands and eyes of others"
Mario Wimmer (Universität Basel)
Final Discussion
Throughout the semester, we will discuss how historical consciousness and historical have changed over the past three centuries. We will take a close look at premodern as well as modern, non-Western and Western classics in the writing of history and analyze the rhetorical and intellectual practices of the writing and representation of history.
The aim of the course is to develop a critical understanding of historical representation, engage with theoretical as well as historiographical texts as well as with practices of making historical knowledge.
How has the shift from orality to literacy changed our thinking? How did the emergence of this difference pertain to shape historical discourse ever since then? How do anthropology, folklore, historiography, philology, and the study of myth deal with this very distinction between oral and written cultures? Finally, what are the differences and similarities between the two major transformations in the history of media technology: from orality to literacy, and from analog to digital?
We will start with a couple of introductory texts in order to have a shared vocabulary for our discussions before taking a close look at the first rupture in the history of media technologies, the shift from oral to written tradition (reading some classics like Walter Ong, and Eric Havelock), and end with talking about how digital technology and culture has not only changed the ways how we think about writing but created a new form of illiteracy (Vilem Flusser). Along this long historical arc, we will discuss a range of issues related to the history of orality and literacy, in particular the relations between myth and history from the 18th to the 20th centuries, engaging with the works of Giambattista Vico, Bernard Fontenelle, Friedrich Wolf, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jack Goody, or Rene Girard.
Rhetoric 176
Professor Mario Wimmer
e-mail: wimmer@berkeley.edu
Office Hours: Wednesday 2:30-4, or by appointment
M-W-F: 1-2, 30 Wheeler Hall
Are archives worlds within worlds that allow us to relate to the remote past, or rather spaces of the administration of power? Are they agencies of a dominant interpretation of the past as history, or do they allow for a subversive reading of the colonial past?
The course will look at the history, theory, and material culture of archives in such different fields as bureaucracy, art, science, and literature both long before and after the digital revolution. We will explore the archives as theoretical concept and depository of actual material as well as the organizing fantasies underwriting the bureaucratic administration of the past and the principles of classifying and processing data. The course explores the archive as an heterotopic space, a concrete and material space of the Other within or own culture, but also as a set of media technologies of transmission between the past and the present. We will also pay attention to the administrative and intellectual practices in the archive, its atmosphere, or the “aura” of archival objects.
Requirements: Attendance is mandatory; you will be dropped from the class if you are not present during the first two weeks. Unexcused absences will result in a lower grade. You are required to present at least one of our readings to the class (20%), to write 3 responses papers (1-2 pages) to our readings (30%), and write a 5-7 page final paper (50%).
We will make several field trips to different archives, and throughout the semester build our own collection of archival things. Readings for the course will consist of historical manuscripts and sources, texts on the history and theory of archives, and historiography. Articles and book chapters will be posted on bspace. In addition, the following books are required and will be available in the bookstore.
Jacques Derrida: Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press 1998.
Arlette Farge: The Allure of the Archives, Yale University Press 2013.
Michel Foucault: The Archeology of Knowledge, Pantheon 1982.
Cornelia Vismann: Files. Law and Media Technology, Stanford University Press 2008.
By the end of the 19th century, the concept of the unconscious had become not only an interpretive model but a world view that changed the place of the subject in modern culture. The course will explore the history of the unconscious and its early beginnings (Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hartmann et al), to the emergence of a psychoanalytical unconscious (Charcot, Freud, Jung, Lacan, Legendre, de Certeau et al), paying particular attention to intellectual (e.g. hypnosis, talking cure, cultures of collecting) and cultural practices (the couch, early film, bureaucracy and legal culture) related to it. We will look into the relations between history, rhetoric, and the psychoanalytical unconscious and their temporal structures, since thinking about the history of the psychoanalytical unconscious seems to be a contradiction in terms: by Freud’s definition the psychoanalytic unconscious was considered ‘timeless,’ i.e. it had no connection to time at all.
The course combines lectures and seminar sessions with readings of primary sources, such as Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Hartmann, Charcot, Freud, Jung a.o."
Marios Chatziprokopiou, ‘We Are the Persians’: Re-Inventing the Mourning Voice of Ancient Drama
Eleonora Vratskidou, Winckelmann in Kassel: the Birth of Art History per documenta 14