Stuart Hall’s Voice

David Scott's latest book is an exemplary and novel exercise in style, form, and content that seeks, simultaneously, to grasp the inner meanings of Stuart Hall's eclectic and lengthy oeuvre, locate it within the universe of contemporary social and political theory, and celebrate the life and work of a close interlocutor and friend.Any one of these objectives would be difficult to execute successfully in such a short monograph, yet Scott is able to largely pull off an accurate and compelling engagement without, for the most part, reverting to long-winded adumbration or maudlin sentimentality.This he accomplishes by avoiding any pretense of a sequential history, but rather, using an effective epistolary style, asking the seemingly straightforward question, "What do friends owe each other intellectually?"With this as a launching pad, via a series of letters to his friend, he explores Hall's style, captured in his captivating rhetoric and sonorous vocalization, but which was, inevitably, the alter ego of his even more finely tuned listening ear.Both well-honed dimensions of what he later elaborates as his "receptive generosity" provide the foundation for a deeper exploration of two central dimensions of Hall's work-his lifelong concern with contingency and, closely allied to it, his multiple interventions around the question of identity.Contingency, Scott proposes, is not merely one among a list of abstract theoretical notions that Hall elaborated; rather, it was close to the heart of his entire methodology and motivation for engaging in theory.If there was any recurring critique, whether earlier from E.P. Thompson and Terry Eagleton, or more recently Chris Rojek and Charles Mills, it is that Hall's style is too eclectic, too subject to improvisation and change, to be considered serious, consistent philosophy; as in Eagleton's (in)famous broadside: "If he theorizes himself, he gives off the air of doing so on the hoof, en route from one meeting to another, a prodigious improviser who can effortlessly churn out a sort of intellectual equivalent of rap" (Eagleton in Scott, p. 27).Putting aside for the moment the deeply troubling ethnic and racial implications of this comment, Scott suggests that this and similarly related interventions, miss entirely the thrust of Hall's classic conjunctural work, as captured in essays such as "The Meaning of New Times," "Policing the Crisis," and others.Hall was never primarily concerned with philosophy in the classical sense of getting at the essence of things, but quite distinctly, he focused on how to grasp, adapt, and modify existing theory in order to employ it to the purposes of understanding peculiar shifts in social relations (new conjunctures) as well, critically, as finding novel ways to act

Aesthetics · Art · Contingency · Epistemology · Generosity · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sentimentality · Sociology · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies