Tom Nicholas

Post-postmodernism? | The Friday Update

Added 2025-02-21 17:00:14 +0000 UTC

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

With the House of Lords video out in the wild, this week, we’ve been making a start on two future videos, about two quite different topics.

The first is about postmodernism.

For a while, I’ve wanted to make a video which does two things:

Firstly, I wanted to undertake a postmortem of the “postmodernism panic” of the mid-2010s. Why were conservatives so wound-up about this supposed malady which they claimed had infected our body politic?

As plenty of people (myself included!) have already asked: was the conservative understanding of “postmodernism” at the heart of that panic even accurate? Was the panic itself kind of postmodern?

While some of this ground was already covered during the panic itself, I also want to ask whether postmodernism, as it actually existed might be… dead.

Have the scepticism and obsession with how we talk about things (rather than what we talk about) which defined so-called post-modernity faded? Has an era of visceral omni-crisis pushed us beyond them?

And, if so, what does post-post-modernity look like?

As someone who made a couple of videos about postmodernism at the height of the conservative postmodernism panic, I’m partly interested in just returning to the scene of the crime to see what it can teach us about conservatism more broadly; and how it’s changed since.

Maybe a niche one, but I think there’s something really rich in there to explore!

The second video is about pubs. But I'll tell you more about that in a future Friday Update1

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!