39. Fulford’s feeling of estrangement and exclusion

Unpublished
June 6th 1996

Re: The post-modern hoax offers a glimmer of hope-June 5th.
Robert Fulford is a long-serving arts critic whose accomplishments include assisting a wider popularisation of Glenn Gould, Michael Snow, and Marshall McLuhan as “the genuises that lived next door.”. McLuhan has subsequently been recognised as a prophet of postmodernism. It is therefore ironic that Fulford can be repeatedly upset that intellectuals he once championed helped in a re-writing of contemporary philosophical ideas from which he now feels so estranged and excluded.
Having had the “best seat in the house” for so many years, what exactly makes Mr. Fulford and other similarly positioned arts journalists have these outbursts of anti-intellectualism? What can they gain by denying entire bodies of theoretical practice that usefully have attempted to account for the social effects of language, knowledge, and power ?
One answer is that , unbound by any representational politic, Mr. Fulford can continue to represent everybody. Fulford’s column insists that we must appreciate his clarity rather than academic “jargon”; his media platforms as productive of common sense versus academic journals that are just “stupid and empty”; his attachment to excellence versus a theoretical approach that is “designed to perpetuate mediocrity”.
It’s easy to blame ‘continental theories’ for unlimited heresies now being perpetrated. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is not seen (as Fulford writes) to “mean ruling” but refers to a process whereby ideology is naturalized as common sense.
Mr. Fulford asserts that postmodern theory “(has) become a burden and a bore to students who are forced to deal with it.” What is burdensome is having Mr. Fulford whining about scholarship after a career of living off deadline simplifications that can distort and/or misrepresent the cultural ideas and actions of others. In his book “Best Seat in The House” Fulford chose to quote a 1964 letter he received from McCluhan following a favorable Fulford review of Understanding Media. McCluhan wrote: “It’s amazing that you got anything out of my writing at all, since you misconceive my entire procedure...”