beyond meaning

Basic questions concerning communication and media never cease to pussle me. The answers appear further and further away as I read about the materiality of media, the (im)possibility of communication and social appropriation and consequences of media technologies. Of course this only serves to confirm academic cliches about the unattainable truth, which sort of makes me wanna gag.

Anyway, I'm just back from a colloquium on Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's Production of Presence. Gumbrecht aims to present a non-hermeneutic view of cultural pheonomena. Interpretation is not enough. This is where presence comes in. Presence refers to a spatial relationship to the world and its objects. I understand it as 'pure', something that is lost when we inevitably try to interpret a text, an image, anything. As such presence is not about understanding. Having read and enjoyd J.D. Peters Speaking into the air, I necessarily have to let Peters guide my reading: We misspend hope in seeking spiritual fullness in communication. As I understand Gumbrecth, we misspend hope in seeking spiritual fullness in interpretation. Body, being and presence matter. Though Gumbrecht doesn't really tell us how to cope with the concept of presence in actual analytical work. It's seems to be a rahter contradictory task: analysis can hardly be anything but interpretation, can it.