In a 2006 interview with Gumbrecht, Ulrik Ekman describes Gumbrecht's work on presence as an "extremely intricate oscillation between a move, perhaps unavoidable, towards epistemological sense-making and conceptualization on the one hand, and, on the other, an at least formally opening move in the direction of ontological concerns." Gumbrecht links the practice of interpretation as the search for meaning or "sense-making" with a form of understanding that is unique to the social and historical context, as well as the material and bodily experience, of the reader.