On Interpretive Conflict
by John Frow
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Cloth: 978-0-226-61395-6 | Paper: 978-0-226-61400-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-61414-4
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226614144.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
“Interpretation” is a term that encompasses both the most esoteric and the most fundamental activities of our lives, from analyzing medical images to the million ways we perceive other people’s actions. Today, we also leave interpretation to the likes of web cookies, social media algorithms, and automated markets. But as John Frow shows in this thoughtfully argued book, there is much yet to do in clarifying how we understand the social organization of interpretation.
On Interpretive Conflict delves into four case studies where sharply different sets of values come into play—gun control, anti-Semitism, the religious force of images, and climate change. In each case, Frow lays out the way these controversies unfold within interpretive regimes that establish what counts as an interpretable object and the protocols of evidence and proof that should govern it. Whether applied to a Shakespeare play or a Supreme Court case, interpretation, he argues, is at once rule-governed and inherently conflictual. Ambitious and provocative, On Interpretive Conflict will attract readers from across the humanities and beyond.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
John Frow is professor of English at the University of Sydney. His books include Character and Person, The Practice of Value, and Genre.
REVIEWS
“This is peak Frow. The book’s at once capacious and rigorous framework for thinking about the conflicted protocols, values, and institutions of interpretation—and its stunningly informed readings of past but especially recent legal, literary, artistic, and scientific cases—are urgently absorbing. When, on the last page of the last chapter, Frow breaks out of persona to speak passionately in personal voice about the interpretation of climate science, the reader knows he has earned that right.”
— Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Through a brilliant and wide-ranging prolegomenon followed by original case studies drawn from law, literature, art, and climate science, Frow powerfully unfolds the role that interpretive conflict plays in the knowledge worlds that shape our present realities. According to Frow, the regimes of reading advanced by particular interpretations direct discussion but do not determine it, making room for invention and creativity in the construction of new arguments and readings. On Interpretive Conflict will initiate its own interpretive conflicts, demonstrating decisively why thoughtful argument matters today.”
— Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine
“Changing the world requires interpreting the world and interpreting it well. Frow defends interpretation against its postcritical critics, administering them a gentle but devastating smackdown with his well-known authority and flair, taking his examples from climate change and Kafka, bridge building and Shakespeare, and Australian aboriginal art. In his hands we see contextualization not as a dull obligation but as an opportunity for brilliance.”
— Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
“Frow has long been one of the Most Valuable Theorists in the enterprise known as cultural studies. In a wonderfully eclectic analysis that ranges from the U.S. Constitution to The Merchant of Venice, from climate change to the history of iconoclasm to the work of Aboriginal artist Dorothy Napangardi, Frow shows us how the conflict of interpretations weaves the social fabric, setting the terms for how we apprehend one another—and the nonhuman world as well.”
— Michael Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University
"Timely and relevant for a wide audience, this volume provides interesting expository descriptions of four major interpretive conflict contexts. . . . Frow employs a textual Marxist-relativist–inspired structural approach, illuminating institutional 'regimes of interpretation', i.e., regimes that establish protocols, create interpretive conflicts issuing from temporal, political, and contextual changes, all animating the landscape of functionally interpreted meanings. . . . Recommended."
— Choice
". . . On Interpretive Conflict is admirably direct. Except for specialists in the topic, the question of “intention” in interpretation has become worryingly inexplicit in contemporary literary criticism . . . Interpretive Conflict is a welcome corrective to this tendency.
— Len Gutkin, Genre
". . . a tour-de-force that will be of immense interest to legal scholars. . . this book can be read both as a primer on how to study practices of interpretation, and as a showcase of the complex entanglement of law with culture, history, science and politics. . . Frow is a remarkably proficient author, and there are many aspects of his work that connect to law. . .with this new book, and its explicit connections to law and legal method, one can only hope that legal scholars will pay more attention to his oeuvre."
— Maksymilian Del Mar, The Modern Law Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Institutions of Interpretation - John Frow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226614144.003.0001
[interpretation;exegesis;intention;interpretive institution;regime of interpretation;Quentin Skinner;Michael Baxandall;Jacques Rancière]
The Introduction sets out the parameters of a broad definition of interpretation, extending it beyond exegesis to the complex of knowing, interpreting, judging, valuing, feeling, and consequentially acting that works as an inseparable whole in any and every act of making sense of things. Interpretation as exegesis or as the critique of illusory knowledge is under suspicion these days, but the Introduction argues that there is no escaping the drive to interpret. Through readings of texts by Quentin Skinner and Michael Baxandall, it seeks to clarify the concept of intention that underpins any account of interpretation; then develops the concepts of the interpretive regime and the interpretive institution in order to understand the differentiation of interpretive cultures and the ways in which they organize practices. What these concepts make possible is a way of understanding how interpretations and valuations are arrived at, the transactional and institutional dimensions of our dealings with texts, and the excess of our textual transactions over the frames that constrain and organize them. (pages 1 - 48)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Reading with Guns: District of Columbia v. Heller - John Frow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226614144.003.0002
[constitutional interpretation;Second Amendment;District of Columbia v. Heller;gun rights;Antonin Scalia;Bruno Latour;common law interpretation;originalism]
This chapter explores a 2008 US Supreme Court case that brings into play two starkly contrasted readings of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution: a textualist or “originalist” reading written for the majority by Justice Antonin Scalia, and a “contextualist” reading written by two of the dissenting justices. The Court’s discovery of a previously unarticulated constitutional right (the right of private citizens to carry guns for self-defense) is firmly rooted in the libertarian principles of the US gun lobby. Yet its judgment in this case is made as though it were entirely free of any such context: the Court endows the text of the Constitution with an absolute authority and envisages its own decision-making processes as taking place within an apparently timeless and transcendental institution. That interpretive institution is, however, neither timeless nor transcendental but rather a field of self-reinforcing authority that enables and contains dissenting views and is composed of quite heterogeneous materials: a multiplicity of legal domains, a network of material and immaterial orderings,disparate forms of discourse, and the pre-judgments and tacit understandings that underpin them. (pages 49 - 84)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Contract, Custom, and the Multiple Historicities of The Merchant of Venice - John Frow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226614144.003.0003
[Merchant of Venice;anti-Semitism;Shylock;theatrical interpretation]
After the Holocaust, the figure of Shylock has increasingly come to look like an anti-Semitic caricature.This chaptermakes sense of The Merchant of Venice's generic and structural anomalies (the fact that its three interwoven plots conclude, respectively, in Acts Three, Four, and Five) by showing how the semantic associations clustered around the themes of usury, mercantilism, and the gift are threaded through these three plots. Whereas most readings of the play oppose the worlds of Venice and Belmont as contrasted orders of contract and the gift, of law and grace, and of the Old and New Testaments, this chapter argues conversely that Shylock is the representative of an older, customary economy, and that Portia and the world of Belmont represent a new order of contractual relations.The chapterthen takes the history of changing performances of the play as a metonym of changing interpretations over three centuries and as one of the ways in which the figures of Jewishness and usury have functioned as condensed and overdetermined moments of social tension. Our own reading of the play is necessarily a moment of that tension, and the interpretive institution of the theater has played a central role in shaping it. (pages 85 - 124)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Icon, Iconoclasm, Presence - John Frow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226614144.003.0004
[iconoclasm;aesthetic regime;art museum;aura;Dorothy Napangardi]
Chapter Three explores the entanglement of two institutionally grounded regimesthat endow a work of art with a particular ontological status,affective force, and modality of judgment: the aesthetic regime of religion, which constitutes the image or sculpture as an icon charged with the powerful presence of the god or saint, and the aesthetic regime of the art museum, which transforms that charged image into an object of detached contemplation. Both regimes are paradoxically shaped by an iconoclastic impulse: the image of the god or saint may come to be perceived as idolatrous or demonic, and figural representation is displaced by the abstract artwork, a pure aesthetic form that is destined for a timeless existence in the art museum. This chapter investigatesiconoclasm in some depth through its two major appearances in the history of Western art: those of Byzantium and the Protestant Reformation. Whereas the Reformation sought to destroy the aura of the work of art; that aura survives and thrives in every representation of the human figure, in the iconoclastic refusal of presence by the sacralized work of art, and in the mass media systems of the star, the celebrity, and the selfie. (pages 125 - 164)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Construing Climate Change - John Frow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226614144.003.0005
[climate change;climate change denial;fossil-fuel industries;Koch brothers;climate simulation modeling;climate science;IPCC;institution of science]
Chapter Four discussesthe roles played in undermining the science of climate change by the denialist counter-institutions of knowledge funded by the fossil-fuel industries, and particularly the way those institutions have reduced the science of climate change to a proxy in broader economic and political struggles. One of the charges frequently made by denialists is that climate science does not correspond with the observed data. One of the central arguments of this chapter covers the relation between scientific models and a “reality” that is only indirectly available to them and that is configured in a form that is amenable to analysis.The chapter also arguesthat the epistemic solidity of the craft of modeling can thus not be derived from its access to and reflection of a field of independently given data. Rather, itis a function of a rigorous regime of knowledge and of the convergence of many different models on an explanation of climate change that directly implies the effect ofgreenhouse gases. More generally, modeling is a convergence of the resources and constraints of the institution of science, whichshould be understood as a normative apparatus and as a field deeply entangled with the imperatives of capitalism. (pages 165 - 206)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Coda: Interpretation and Judgment - John Frow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226614144.003.0006
[Immanuel Kant;Critique of Judgment;determining judgment;reflective judgment]
In the introduction to The Critique of Judgment, Kant distinguishes between two distinct powers of judgment that he calls “determining” and “reflective.” Determining judgments have to do with the subsumption of the particular under an already known universal; while reflective judgments concernjudgments of aesthetic value and must generate their own laws in a kind of bootstrapping operation that takes place in the absence of any pregiven framework. Kant’s concept of reflective judgment includes both cognitive and evaluative acts, and thus has something of the breadth of reference thatthis bookclaims for its concept of interpretation. In each of the book'scase studies, even those areas that one might have expected to be closest to the model of determining judgment, instead turn out to deploy procedures that are more like those of reflective judgment, to the extent that we might perhaps take reflective judgment as a general (but not exclusive) model of sense-making. (pages 207 - 214)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
