Mario Wimmer
The project on Cultures of Timelessness is part of my interest in a history of the 'historical sense', i.e. a new way of thinking and perceiving the world as subject to permanent change. Specific notions of timelessness, I want to argue, are a function of the emergence of a modern 'historical sense' around 1800. Yet timelessness seems to be one of the blind spots of historical thought that may keep historians from coming to terms with phenomena that are arguably 'beyond time' but central to modern culture, such as the concept of peoples "without history" in early cultural anthropology and folklore, the psychoanalytical mapping of the “unconsciousness,” or the universalistic aspirations of modernist design. Despite the diversity of these phenomena, they share certain characteristics that I aim to describe in historical context by a systematic close reading of published texts and archival materials combined with an analysis of scholarly practices and material cultures related to it.
It is a truism that historians believe in the historicity of culture and rely on the – mostly implicit – assumption that all phenomena they observe are subject to historical change, but isn’t it most likely that they tend to miss phenomena that are beyond time, but central to our culture? Those phenomena of timelessness will be the objects of the proposed research. Therefore, this study touches upon one of the taboos of cultural analysis: that one cannot simply engage with "the real" in the first place since one can only perceive it as an – historically construed – symbolic and imaginary form.
In its initial phase the proposed project will focus on selected case studies that cover four main areas of inquiry:
- Timelessness in historical thinking
- The timeless character of the psychoanalytical unconscious
- "Timeless peoples" in history, anthropology, and folklore
- Organisms as precondition of evolutionary historical thought
My current book project Archival Bodies. A Cultural History of Historical Knowledge, picks up on what 19th and 20th century German archivists called "archival bodies" ("Archivkörper") to trace an ensemble of conceptual, metaphorical, and material traces that was literally embodied in the formative years of modern archival and historiographical theory and practice from the late 1880s to the 1930s. In the first section I describe the German-Austrian debates on archival terminology ("Archivberufssprache") in international context and its relations to archival practice as well as to the writing of history.
The second section shows how many dimensions in the world of archives, the historical profession, and the historical imagination figured in the 1926 trial of Karl Hauck, a well-known historian, who was accused of the theft of thousands of archival documents. When the case was pressed and documented by the distinguished German archivist Heinrich O. Meisner, Hauck began to confess to an unusual passion that literally fetishized archival documents. The interplay of professional and perverse uses of the "archival body" allows me to dissect the mostly implicit rules and practices of archival work and their relation to the logic of the historical imagination.
This brings me in a third section to what I call the "archival unconscious" of enabling assumptions and techniques shared by archivists, the guild of historians, and the founding figures of the modern discipline of history. In close readings of the writings and experience of Leopold von Ranke and Jules Michelet I develop an account of the historical imagination suggesting how modern historiography emerges not only along the archival grain but also along the boundaries between absence and presence, detachment and immersion, "life" and "death".