Stuart Hall's Voice

Stuart Halls Voice explores the ethos of style that characterized Stuart Halls intellectual vocation. David Scott frames the bookwhich he wrote as a series of letters to Hall in the wake of his deathas an evocation of friendship understood as the moral and intellectual medium in which his dialogical hermeneutic relationship with Halls work unfolded. In this respect, the book asks: what do we owe intellectually to the work of those whom we know well, admire, and honor? Reflecting one of the lessons of Halls style, the book responds: what we owe should be conceived less in terms of criticism than in terms of listening. Halls 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 Halls style. Against the backdrop of the consideration of the voices aspects, Scott specifically engages Halls 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 Halls 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.