Tom Nicholas, Postmodernism is dead. This is Who Killed It. Apr 25, 2025
Written, directed, and presented by Tom Nicholas.
Filmed and edited by Georgia Burrows.
Remember postmodernism? Just under a decade ago, the term “postmodernism” seemed to be everywhere.
To slightly nerdier commentators on the political right (including Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, Gad Saad, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and others), it was a way of warning of the dangers of the so-called “identity politics”: feminism, anti-racism, disability activism. To just-as-nerdy folks on the political left, it was a way if describing the sheer bizarreness of the first Trump presidency: a new world of “fake news” and “alternative facts”.
But, at some point in the intervening period, postmodernism kind of just vanished from the political conversation. So… is postmodernism dead? And, if so, who killed it?
[Editor: Includes discussion of the straw man attacks on Foucault, amongst others, in the “Culture wars”]
Foucault News 
Postmodernism does not appear in Nicholas’s video—it is staged as an absence. The piece does not offer critique but closure: a neat narrative in which an “era” had its time, its villains (Peterson, Saad, Lindsay), and was eventually displaced. But what exactly was displaced? The film offers no reconstruction, no conceptual genealogy, no return to the texts. There is no Lyotard, no Baudrillard, no Jameson or Spivak. No Deleuze. Postmodernism becomes a ghost—a style, not a philosophical event.
More crucially, the film confuses two levels: disappearance from public discourse, and the exhaustion of the differentiating potential that postmodernism once activated. The former is easy to narrate: reactionary figures mocking campus discourse. The latter would require acknowledging that postmodernism was never just a “phase” or “mood,” but a sustained effort to de-reify meaning and to challenge the machinery of representation.
If postmodernism has vanished, it is not because it was defeated, but because its tools were absorbed—neutralized—by systems of optimization. Irony is now monetized. The simulacrum is standard UX. Difference is filtered into recommendation engines.
Nicholas does not analyze; he seals the filter. He produces the effect of an “end” precisely where the real question should be: why can’t today’s cognitive regime sustain any meaningful play of signification that doesn’t yield immediate predictive value?
The film doesn’t show that postmodernism is dead. It shows that our cultural systems can no longer distinguish thought from its parody. And that is not the death of a theory—it is the exhaustion of a topology of perception.
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Thank you for this really useful and insightful analysis. “Our cultural systems can no longer distinguish thought from its parody” This is a fundamental impasse at present.
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What if it’s not that our cultural systems can no longer distinguish thought from parody —
but rather that we still expect thought to appear in recognizable form?
And in the meantime, thinking has already begun to occur where we no longer have access.
Maybe the problem isn’t the absence of thought,
but that it no longer arrives as statement, as position, as critique —
but instead as a shift in the topology of accessibility itself.
And still we search for it in what can be quoted, debated, performed.
Perhaps the most intense thinking today does not speak.
It does not represent.
It reorganizes the very conditions under which something might become thinkable.
Or perhaps the question is even sharper:
Isn’t this, after all, the mark of fascism in every form —
that any thought immediately becomes its own parody?
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Perhaps the problem is that few believe any longer in the Enlightenment ideal that knowledge will save us. Which small story do we choose amongst the plethora? Perhaps one of the important current questions is how do we connect with and work with the material world (including our own bodies) in ways that are not destructive at very practical levels?
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