Reviews for Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey

The average rating for Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-10 00:00:00 Tom Monasmith Jr Taking a step back from his "Farewell to interpretation" stance, this is a fascinating exploration (in part via Heidegger) of what the dominance of Cartesian intellectual orientations may exclude from the analysis of cultural phenomena. A central trope is the tension/oscillation between 'presence effects' and 'meaning effects' in place of the divide sometimes glossed as the veil of perception. Gumbrecht calls for the generation of concepts that would "allow us to point to what is irreversibly nonconceptual in our lives" and makes a case for three of his own: epiphany, presentification, and deixis. As an ethnographer engaged with what Gumbrecht calls presence effects I found some of his assertions at once overly cautious and ethereal. Gumbrecht doesn't distinguish between different orders of publics, a move that helps articulate how the different materialities of media matter, for example between a reading public and a listening public occupying shared space. The intersubjective and the performative are in general impoverished in his work which leads him to characterize the relation between presence and meaning as volatile rather than often stabilized in practice, for example through ritual (a concept he often invokes) and the other ways that publics constituted through co-presence dampen such volatility through repetitive associations. My objections, while more than cavils, do not detract from my overall enthusiasm for this beautifully written and richly generative work.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-11 00:00:00 Joseph Jacko I'm ambivalent about Gumbrecht. I think the chapter entitled "Beyond Meaning..." is wonderful and his illusion that power is more sinister than physical violence is politically and theoretically fruitful. But herein lies the most frustrating thing about this book: G. resists and negates the political implications of his work! The rest of the book reads as sentimental wallowing. It feels as if Gumbrecht has fallen prey to impulse male scholars have to "feminize" themselves and their disciplines, bemoaning their positions of entitlement and power for not being edgy enough. (See Braidotti's "Nomadic Subjects" for more on this comment.) The long and short of it: At times, Gumbrecht reads as a baby. But Ch 3 is worth a read.