Stuart Hall

Abstract

Stuart Hall's form of choice was always the essay: a genre compressed enough for serious elaboration of an argument and yet also suited to an analysis of the 'conjuncture', a defining category he took from Louis Althusser and deployed throughout his life. Hall's place in the pantheon of leftists who emerged in the post-war period is thus peculiar. For most of his British contemporaries, the full-length monograph or book allowed extended elaborations emerging from their particular theoretical apparatuses (thus we have the 'humanism' of E.P. Thompson, the historiography of Eric Hobsbawm, the brief Trotskyism of Perry Anderson). Hall's approach was different, and the essay was paradigmatic of his outlook. His was a methodology of openness, a malleability of approach, in which he moved smoothly between the separate 'levels' of society. Central to this was a rejection of the economism that had troubled Marxism since its founder first used the terms 'base' and 'superstructure.' David Scott suggests, in his thoughtful, extended intellectual love letter, Stuart Hall's Voice, that this methodology might actually take logical priority over Hall's substantive political conclusions. Addressing Hall directly in his book (the affectation of a friend which eventually becomes somewhat strained, and yet it eventually becomes impossible to imagine the book taking another form), Scott explains it's not so much 'your way of having views -how you've gone about having views, and again, having other and further views -that intrigued me' (Scott, 2017: 1). Scott is here interested in delineating Hall as a kind of paradigm of a particular kind of intellectual, whose voice is expressive of an openness and receptivity, a 'provisionality', a 'listening self' (Scott, 2017: 5) rather than the closed certainties of other sorts of 'critical' intellectuals. Scott's book thus highlights the ways that Stuart Hall's approach laid particular emphasis on questioning, clarification, and intellectual generosity. As a whole, it's a fine argument and