“What is it about the life and work of Stuart Hall that ‘calls’ on us to think biographically?” Professor David Scott asked in this year’s W.H.R. Rivers Memorial Lecture.
In one sense, the answer is obvious. Stuart Hall led an exemplary life. His intellectual achievements and range were formidable: the founding editorship of the New Left Review, establishing Cultural Studies, new forms of collaborative writing at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), experimental pedagogy at the Open University. The list goes on.
As he grew older, Stuart Hall’s life and identity became a mirror for the British public to reflect, particularly through the “prism” of race (Hall 2018b), on the legacy and endurance of colonialism and imperialism.
But what does it mean to “think biographically”? To an extent – and not entirely unlike ethnography – Scott approached biography as both method and genre. As method, he pursues his subject through interviews, publications, and private papers. But the conventional biographical relation between author and subject is here thickened by years of friendship and intellectual exchange and mourning.
To borrow from John Akomfrah’s groundbreaking documentary and three-channel installation on Stuart Hall, the conversation between Scott and Hall remains “unfinished”, in no small part because of their friendship.
Scott is writing Hall’s life by drawing on Hall’s own concepts, central among them the conjuncture (Hall 1986; 2018a). For Hall, a conjuncture is a method of periodization, a moment of transition, and a mode of historical analysis when a particular set of contradictions – social, political, economic, and ideological – come into view but remain unresolved.
The lecture was structured around two such conjunctures: late-colonial Jamaica in 1938, and late-imperial Britain in 1956. During the first, an uprising marked the beginning of the end of British rule. During the second, the UK and France plotted an imperial foray, conspiring with Israel to invade the Sinai Peninsula, occupy Gaza, and attempt to depose Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser; meanwhile the USSR sent tanks to Hungary to quash a popular uprising.
The biographical question David Scott asked was how these conjunctures intersected with Stuart Hall’s intellectual formation. The conjunctures weren’t producing or determining Hall’s intellectual formation but “prefiguring” them. Scott detailed how the first was mediated through Hall’s middle class “brown” family and thus structured by “disavowal” – knowing without acknowledging, or both knowing and not-knowing – the coloniality of his upbringing, education, and self.
The second conjuncture marked the end of a kind ideological innocence. 1956 led Hall to abandon his doctoral work on Henry James at Oxford. Equally, it shattered any illusions he might have held about the Eastern bloc. While not a member himself, the invasion of Hungary led friends and colleagues to leave the Communist Party of Great Britain. Yet, Hall would remain “within shouting distance” of Marx (Hall 2021). He would form and was formed by a heterodox Marxist tradition grappling with post-imperial British society, politics, and culture.
How did the lecture intersect with David Scott’s broader body of work? Thinking biography alongside theory – organising Hall’s life story around his signature concept the “conjuncture” – bears a family resemblance to Scott’s concept of the “problem-space” (Scott 1999; 2004). For Scott, a problem-space is the horizon of critical questions that are often implicit in an intellectual’s work. From the reader’s perspective in the present, these questions therefore need to be carefully re-constructed in order for an author’s critical answers from the past to make sense as interventions.
But the lecture left me tempted to modify, however slightly, Scott’s concept to make it more explicitly temporal: to think in terms of a problem-time. The lecture sketched how, against the shifting historical and biographical backdrops of different conjunctures, conceptual stakes were being foreshadowed – whether questions of identity, race, ethnicity; or questions of ideology, neoliberalism, empire.
The dialogue across a generational divide has taken different forms in David Scott’s work, from the many interviews in Small Axe with the likes of Sylvia Wynter (Scott 2000), to a “biographical dialogue” in a co-authored book (Scott and Patterson 2023), to the co-editing of his teacher and mentor Talal Asad’s festschrift (Scott and Hirschkind 2006). The first issue of Small Axe (1997), the journal which Scott founded and edits, included an interview with Stuart Hall. Hall reciprocated a few years later, interviewing David Scott for Bomb Magazine (Hall 2005).
In all these works, that dialogue has been between what Scott (2014, 160) called “overlapping generations”. A temporality differential configures the encounter: interlocutors share the time of the interview (they are “co-temporaries”) without sharing identical historical formations or political horizons (they are “not contemporaries”).
Scott’s careful analysis of the experience of dialogue across a generational divide but within a shared critical intellectual tradition doesn’t hold here. What continues to hold is the intellectual tradition, and friendship. The lecture modelled critical and biographical production as an act of generosity albeit one that can no longer be reciprocated (Scott 2017). The critical work of friendship.
David Scott teaches at Columbia University in New York, where he is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is currently at work on two book projects, one is a biography of Stuart Hall.
Words by Dr Stefan Tarnowski, Early-Career Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.