The methodological restraint Gumbrecht allies to his very bold and wide-ranging claim
on the necessary future epistemological orientation of the humanities is all the more
significant when one acknowledges that The Production of Presence represents "a
comprehensive version of [his] thinking" (publisher comments). The thesis defended in
this book is the result of a long personal theoretical quest, which he is anxious to recount
from its very inception in the 80s during the colloquiums on the "Materialities of
Communication", when he first turned his attention to presence and, as he put it, the
"phenomena and conditions that contribute to the production of meaning, without being
meaning themselves."(8) His pledge for an epistemological shift is therefore explicitly
grounded in a life-long reflection; it is consciously presented as a mature and wellpondered
position.