Stuart Hall's Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity
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Stuart Hall's Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity
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Overview
Hall’s intellectual life was animated by voice in literal and extended senses: not only was his voice distinctive in the materiality of its sound, but his thinking and writing were fundamentally shaped by a dialogical and reciprocal practice of speaking and listening. Voice, Scott suggests, is the central axis of the ethos of Hall’s style.
Against the backdrop of the consideration of the voice’s aspects, Scott specifically engages Hall’s relationship to the concepts of "contingency" and "identity," concepts that were dimensions less of a method as such than of an attuned and responsive attitude to the world. This attitude, moreover, constituted an ethical orientation of Hall’s that should be thought of as a special kind of generosity, namely a "receptive generosity," a generosity oriented as much around giving as receiving, as much around listening as speaking.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373025 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/18/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 465 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Stuart Hall's Voice
By David Scott
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6363-7
CHAPTER 1
A Listening Self
Voice and the Ethos of Style
DEAR STUART,
In the wake of the 1996 publication of the edited volume Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton wrote an ostensible discussion of it that appeared in the London Review of Books that same year. Your editors, David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, had aimed at a collection of writings, including some of your own key texts, that would capture the eloquent, dialogical spirit in which you had contributed to the shaping of the cultural studies project now associated with your name. The very image on the book's cover, a still from Isaac Julien's 1993 short avant-garde film The Attendant, in which you make a memorable cameo appearance as a visitor to a museum with a slavery exhibit, seemed an essential part of Morley and Chen's desire to evoke what is undeniably distinctive about your intellectual style, namely, the practice of making yourself tangibly — embodiedly, attentively — present in any particular situation in which you're involved. This style — and indeed this question of style — wasn't entirely lost on Eagleton, of course, sharp and witty critic that he famously is, but for him it pointed not to a dimension of moral-intellectual virtue but rather to a special kind of fraudulence or a special kind of betrayal, inviting mockery rather than dialogue. Indeed, the title of his essay, "The Hippest," was evidently meant to sum up his assessment of you as little more than a trendy recycler of intellectual fashions. Remember, this is how he begins:
Anyone writing a novel about the British intellectual Left, who began looking around for some exemplary fictional figure to link its various trends and phases, would find themselves spontaneously reinventing Stuart Hall. Since he arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951, Hall has been the sort of radical they might have dispatched from Central Casting. Charming, charismatic, formidably bright and probably the most electrifying public speaker in the country, he is a kind of walking chronicle of everything from the New Left to New Times, Leavis to Lyotard, Aldermaston to ethnicity. He is also a Marxian version of Dorian Gray, a preternaturally youthful character whose personal style evokes a range of faded American epithets: hip, neat, cool, right-on. (3)
I have to say, Stuart (shake your head and shrug your shoulders, as you may, because it was all par for the course for you — merely Eagleton's mischief), that for many years, and perhaps perversely, I've been fascinated with this text because although, as we can already glean from the tone and perspective of this passage, it was meant to ridicule and disparage and trivialize rather than seriously engage you, it nevertheless has the paradoxical, unintended virtue of vividly calling to our attention a number of notable and valuable aspects of your way of being an intellectual, of carrying on an intellectual vocation. I would say that these include, one, your responsiveness, over the arc of your life, to a mobile diversity of cultural-political moments and theoretical orientations, your refusal to be confined to any single attachment or commitment; two, the way this responsiveness to political and theoretical pluralities is connected not simply to the content of ideas but also, perhaps principally, to an intellectual style or ethos, that is, to the cultivation not merely of doctrines but of alert modes of intellectual presence, or being-with-others; and, three, the connections between these — your responsiveness, your style and ethos of presencing — and the register of your voice (in literal and metaphorical senses) as a public intellectual.
For Eagleton, clearly, the most damning thing about you is precisely this mobile intellectual attitude of responsiveness, this refusal to stand still, to be arrested by conformity, this attentive voice of receptivity. Change, Stuart, including changing your mind about matters concerning change, is the signature of your style. Indeed, what has remained unchanging about you throughout the years is this "open-endedness," this ceaseless flexibility, this willingness — one might even say, this courage — to not stay the same. But for Eagleton this commitment to self-reflexive change only solicits an unflattering, sarcasm-saturated comparison with other prominent leftist intellectuals in postwar Britain who'd cultivated a rather more settled sense of intellectual identity. Listen again:
Far more than Raymond Williams or Perry Anderson, and more persistently than E. P. Thompson, Hall has been the Left's finest instance of the strategic intellectual, the theorist as mediator and interventionist, broker and communicator, bringing the more arcane flights of Frankfurtian or Post-Structuralist theory to bear on questions of voting patterns and televisual imagery, racism and youth culture. Nimble, mercurial, and timelessly up-to-date, he has nipped from one burningly topical issue to another, turning up wherever the action is, like a cross between a father figure and Mr. Fixit. (3)
Your intellectual dexterousness and strategic sensibility, your idea of theoretical work as bound to a practice of intervention, serve here to merely underline your evident scholarly deficiencies. "In some forty years of ceaseless intellectual production," Eagleton writes with peculiar, gatekeeping zeal, "Hall has never authored a monograph" (3). It is, apparently, the final, shocking evidence of your lack of the right sort of intellectual value or credentials. But since when, we might ask — and on what disciplining criteria or convention — is the monograph the measure of intellectual (or even scholarly) merit? Are Eagleton's numberless little books monographs? Do they have — or lack — merit because they are monographs (if this is what they are)? Yet, interesting to me is the fact that Eagleton recognizes the importance to your intellectual style of the form of the essay — your "elective genre," he calls it — and offers that you've fashioned it with a "rare blend of metaphorical flourish and polemical punch" (3). This is an insight, I think, with important, if unexplored, implications. I return to it in my next letter, but the trouble is that, even here, Eagleton's intention is only to mock your irreverence for the conceit of originality, your indifference toward disciplines and the conventional criteria for what constitutes theory.
Let us listen one last time:
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. If he is sometimes a bit thin on the ground, with the odd bald patch peeping through his densely tressed conceptualisations, he compensates for this with a striking versatility, leaping from discourse to the diaspora, Rastafarianism to post-Fordism, with all the disdain for traditional academic demarcations of the classical left-wing intellectual. (4)
I've quoted enough, I think, to make the point I want to make.
Implicit in Eagleton's characterization of you here, Stuart, is a very different ideal of the intellectual self than you cultivated, than abides with you. His is a familiar version of the "critical self." Now, I take it that the critical self is a resolutely theoretical and methodological consistent agent of dissenting inquiry whose analytics and rationalities and techniques and principles are put to systematic work on objects, conditions, events, situations, conundrums, in order to demonstrate the contrast between what they presume to be (in their hegemonic or fetishistic or normalized autobiography) and what they really are (in some epistemologically relevant sense of "really are"). The critical self is a courageous pursuer of truth who assigns itself the task of confronting and confounding and unmasking the semblance of the world as it is given to us in the ideological forms of its appearance. Certainly, Stuart, you, too, if in a qualified way, were a critical self in some such sense. But your intellectual sin, apparently, was your cavalier unfaithfulness to this cherished model and its authoritative ethos, your unshakable suspicion that it wasn't always easy for critical selves, such as those Eagleton admires (indeed, perhaps, such as Eagleton himself), to entirely abjure the conceits and presumptions of enlightenment, the deceptive seductions and consolations of mastery, the studied air of condescension, sometimes supercilious arrogance and prideful abstraction, the willfully unexamined whiteness. By contrast, Stuart, what we find in you is a certain attachment to an ethos of intellectual being that, in working to temper the conscious and unconscious excesses and hubris of critique, sought to honor the contingent, unpredictable instability of the world, and endeavored to cultivate an attuned ethos of self-revision and recurrent readjustment to it and its possibilities. I'd like to call this posture of attunement the attitude of a "listening self." As we will see in what follows, I'm going to spend some time extolling the virtues of listening against the persistent deafness at work in much contemporary critical practice preoccupied as it is with its powers of pronouncement and argument. Thinking with listening may open us toward novel possibilities of being and acting. I will suggest that a listening self is one that, like you, Stuart, practices a style of intellectual being animated by the dialogical ethos of voice. Like you, a listening self is one that cultivates an intellectual habitus of voice driven less by the acquisition of more and better apparatuses of critique, less by doxas underpinned by metaphysics, than by a mobile responsiveness to marginalization and exclusion and by the moral-political prospect of being not only expressively but also receptively present to others.
* * *
In a broad sense, then, Stuart, these letters to you are going to be concerned with style, ethos, and voice — the connections among them, the company they keep with each other — in your intellectual practice. With you, I believe, style is everything — or very nearly everything. What do I mean by this? It's not easy to say with methodological precision. Style scarcely commends itself to propositional analysis. You might have said this yourself. It's an intuition, yes? It compels you or it doesn't. And when it does compel you it does so as a moral-aesthetic whole, like a compound or a gestalt. By style, clearly, then, I don't mean to imply something merely decorative or ornamental, like a mannerism or a flourish, something exterior and thus detachable from the substantive core of your intellectual work. In a moody inscription dedicating a copy of his 1951 medical thesis to his brother, Félix, Frantz Fanon wrote, "The greatness of a man is to be found not in his acts but in his style. Existence does not resemble a steadily rising curve but a slow and sometimes sad series of ups and downs." Susan Sontag might have disputed the value of the distinction here (between an act and its style), thinking it just another modernist fallacy. But that would be a mistake. For while neither exactly an aesthete nor a moralist, Fanon is making a point that is really not very far from her (modernist) concerns. Like Sontag, arguably, Fanon is reacting against the familiar contempt for style, the insensitivity to style as a serious and worthy dimension of human conduct. Indeed, Fanon seems to share Sontag's insight (overstated, some might have complained) that style possesses its own kind of moral content, its own excellence or virtue — here, "greatness." He would, I think, have agreed with her invocation of Jean Cocteau's remark that "style is the soul of an act." You'd have agreed too, Stuart, I imagine. I know that for you (and we'll come back to this in a later letter) Fanon had an almost figurative or maybe emblematic quality about him, something anyway that exceeded the mere facts of his biography or the mere details of his theories of black alienation and anticolonial violence — something that, to stay with Sontag for the moment, embodied his particular "style of radical will." I've always found the pathos of phrasing in Fanon's remark unusual (the contrast between the progressivism of the "steadily rising curve" and the tragic sense of the "slow and sometimes sad series of ups and downs"), pointing, I think, to his often unnoticed or unappreciated depth of sensibility for paradox.
In any case, your friend the novelist and essayist George Lamming (you might have known him as a poet, too, in the early days in London) brooded on a very similar theme of style, you may remember, in an essay about his strange relationship to that inaugural and enigmatic and frustrated West Indian writer Edgar Mittelholzer, who immolated himself in England in May 1965. The essay, "But Alas Edgar," was first published in the Guyana Independence issue of New World Quarterly the following year, an issue I gather you worked on with its indefatigable and unforgettable editor, Lloyd Best. (I wish I'd known more about your friendship with Lloyd — he was to me a most singular individual, at once absorbing and absorbed, someone else I might think of less in relation to his acts than his style.) In his inimitable way with poetic language, Lamming is trying in this essay to evoke what he intuitively recognized, painfully but luminously, in the obscure figure of Mittelholzer, namely, a courageous "aristocracy of the will" that sheltered his absolute commitment against all odds (against the pettiness and spiritual squalor of the colonial Caribbean and racist philistinism of colonial Britain) to the precarious life of the writer. And the only word that Lamming could summon to capture the meaning he discerned in Mittelholzer, even in the manner of his death, was style:
Nothing matters more than a man's discovery of his style, a discovery which is also part of his own creation, and style — not a style — but style as the aura and essence, the recognized example of being in which and out of which a man's life assumes its shape. The flavour of his thinking, the furious silences that fill his heart, and finally his function, the work that chooses him and for which there is no alternative; no other instruments he can select to fulfill that choice: these constitute the style of a man.
I don't know of a more poignant, or a more profound, way of putting this elusive matter of style. Fanon and Sontag would surely have approved. Lamming here could just as well have been talking about you, not Mittelholzer. And indeed, Stuart, here is the center of what I too am reaching for with you — your discovery-creation of the "aura and essence" out of which your intellectual vocation took shape.
Indeed, in your case, Stuart, I believe that you cannot separate the content of your thought from your style, because this style, itself a kind of embodied action, a mobile mode of intelligence, is a constitutive — not merely a contingent — element of the content of the form of your practice of thinking itself. Or to put this another way, I take you to be an intellectual or social critic (we may argue about the relative merits of these terms) whose style is exemplary in the sense that whether or not one agrees with the substantive content of what you have to say on any given subject, from liberalism to race, there is something distinctive about, and therefore something to be learned from, your way of taking your bearings in relation to the topic at hand. I think of you as forever taking your bearings, forever orienting and reorienting yourself in relation to the world around you. Such, one might say, is the instinctive gesture of the listening self. Style, therefore, in the sense in which I'm going to use it here, is connected to ethos, by which I want to evoke the general character or disposition of your mode of being an intellectual. Ethos, one might say, discloses an order of shaping values; it is concerned less with specific ideas or practices than with the animating spirit that motivates and moves — and moves within — ideas and practices, that finds expression in them. So what interests me, Stuart, is the ethos of style that composes and drives your characteristic way of carrying on an engaged intellectual life, the generative and orienting tendency, so to say, that establishes your inimitable presence as an embodied intellectual.
* * *
More specifically, though, Stuart, I am going to suggest that part of what establishes this presence and the style it vivifies is your voice. Your style, so to put it, has a sonic, an acoustic character, that renders the experience of your intellectual presence, however one encounters it, in print or in person, audible — we are listening to you. As I indicated in my first letter, this habitation of voice was by no means naive; you were not unaware of the ways you used your voice in your intellectual life. At any rate, I want to suggest that there are several exemplary dimensions that constitute the register of what I'm calling the listening self that is disclosed in your voice.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stuart Hall's Voice by David Scott. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Apology: On Intellectual Friendship 11. A Listening Self: Voice and the Ethos of Style 23
2. Responsiveness to the Present: Thinking through Contingency 53
3. Attunement to Identity: What We Make of What We Find 85
4. Learning to Learn from Others: An Ethics of Receptive Generosity 115
Adieu: Walk Good 143
Acknowledgments 147
Notes 149
Index 179
What People are Saying About This
"I found myself disagreeing often, only to discover this is David Scott’s whole point—unlearning what we take for granted can open us to a dialogical ethics of receptivity of the kind Stuart Hall enacted throughout his intellectual life. With philosophically inflected readings of 'identity' and 'contingency' that engage a range of political traditions, this epistolary experiment brings a new interpretive perspective to understanding Hall’s inimitable way of thinking aloud."