Hans Ulrich Gumbrech

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Title

Biography

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (b. 15 June 1948, Würzburg) is a German literary theorist, Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature at Stanford University, where he taught from 1989. Trained in Romance philology, philosophy and sociology in Munich, Regensburg, Salamanca and Pavia, he held chairs at Bochum and Siegen before moving to the United States. He is known for a body of work that argues against interpretation as the sole business of the humanities.

Key Ideas

• Presence versus meaning. The argument of Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford University Press, 2004), his best-known book. Gumbrecht identifies a dominant "meaning culture" in the humanities, in which every object is treated as a text to be decoded, and argues that this systematically excludes an entire dimension of experience: the spatial, material, bodily, and substantial presence of things. Some encounters — with music, with a landscape, with a sporting event, with a body — do not primarily mean anything, and the discipline's exclusive training in interpretation renders it unable to say anything about them. He proposes an oscillation between "presence effects" and "meaning effects" rather than the replacement of one by the other.
• Moments of intensity. The experiences that presence-oriented analysis is meant to reach: brief, non-instrumental, difficult to justify and impossible to paraphrase. Gumbrecht's book In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006) pursues this through sport, on the grounds that it is the ordinary setting in which large numbers of people willingly submit to an experience with no meaning to extract.
• In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (1997). A formally unusual book: fifty-one alphabetically arranged entries — "Airplanes," "Bars," "Boxing," "Elevators," "Gramophone," "Telephone" — attempting to reconstruct what it was like to live in a single year, without the retrospective narrative that turns a year into a stage on the way to something else. It is an experiment in writing history as simultaneity rather than as sequence.
• Stimmung. Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012) argues that texts do not only signify; they also produce moods, and that Stimmung — a German term spanning mood, atmosphere and the tuning of an instrument — names a dimension of reading that is neither purely subjective nor reducible to interpretation.
• Latency. After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013) proposes latency — the sense of something present but inaccessible — as the mood organising the postwar period.

Selected Works

• In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (1997)
• Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004)
• In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006)
• Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (2012)
• After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Gumbrecht supplies a rare theoretical warrant for taking the non-semantic dimension of technology seriously. Most critical writing about devices treats them as texts — as carriers of ideology, meaning and representation — which is the meaning culture he describes. The presence dimension is what material choices, weight, warmth, sound and haptics actually operate on, and it is why an object can be significant to someone who has nothing to say about what it means. This is also the ground on which calm technology and sonic metadata work: they address presence rather than meaning, which is exactly why they cost less attention.

Related Reading

• Juhani Pallasmaa
• Calm Technology
• Materials
• Sonic metadata
• Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media