In other words...

Here's the example I wasn't able to project in class today. In this essay the author, Miriam Bratu Hansen, rephrases an idea, not once, but twice. When you find yourself doing that, backtrack and clarify!

Whether motivated by postmodern critique or the search for alternative traditions of modernity, this attack on hegemonic modernism runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing the same epistemic totalitarianism that it seeks to displace. For one thing, it reduces the contradictory and heterogeneous aspects of twentieth-century modernisms to the claims of one dominant paradigm or, rather, the positions of a particular, canonical set of modernist intellectuals. For another, this attack collapses the discourse of modernism with the discourses of modernity, however mediated the two may be. That is, the critical fixation on hegemonic modernism to some extent undercuts the effort to open up the discussion of modernism from the traditional preoccupation with artistic and intellectual movements and to understand the latter as inseparable from the political, economic, and social processes of modernity and modernization, including the development of mass and media culture. In other words, the attack on hegemonic modernism tends to occlude the material conditions of everyday modernity which distinguish living in the twentieth century from living in the nineteenth, at least for large populations in western Europe and the United States.

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity." Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.