Tom Nicholas
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Post-postmodernism? | The Friday Update
🕑 Added 2025-02-21 17:00:14 +0000 UTCWelcome 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!!
Comments
Tom Nicholas
I usually quite like the Very Short Introduction books, but they are a mixed bag. Some of them are primers, some of them make quite specific arguments and therefore don't quite fulfill the role you'd want a book called a "Very Short Introduction" to do...
Izzy Killeen
Oh wow, I had no idea that you already have videos on postmodernism. I'm gonna watch them, and this upcoming one, because I've always wanted some understanding of what it actually *is*, and while the Very Short Introduction on it was quite well written (at least in contrast to the one on theology, blech), it was a bit inscrutable and I put it down ages ago and haven't picked it up since.
