Dubious Approaches to "Postmodernism" Whether you're an enthused sloganeer or setting up straw positions to tilt at, if you want to further muddy the waters, do the following:
1	Make authoritative-sounding pronouncements (criticisms, generalizations, dismissals, etc.) about thinkers whose work you have never read.
	a) Rely on bluffers' guides instead of reading primary sources. b) Start with dismissive accounts in lieu of actually reading people's work, especially hand-holding texts that reassure readers they "need not bother" with the thinkers in question. c) Actually read an article by a "postmodern" thinker and use it as a basis for making sweeping generalizations about that thinker's entire oeuvre, influence, or, even better, "postmodernism" itself. d) Rely on secondary citations from articles in your field to draw inferences about their sources. e) Take enthused accounts from a thinker's epigones to be an accurate reflection of her or his work. f) Do these things in the name of defending traditional academic rigor and integrity.
2	Conflate "postmodernism" with poststructuralism.
3	Lump the following senses of "postmodernism" into an obscure mass, and then proceed to treat it as a monolith:
	a) A loose group of aesthetic trends which break with modernist ones, or which push selected elements of modernism past a threshold to the point they are no longer modernist, or which exploit formal elements of modernism in a context where modernist aspirations or self-conceits are no longer tenable. b) A changed set of historical and economic circumstances sometimes referred to as advanced, late, multinational, or post-Fordist capitalism. c) An uncritical celebration of 3.b, often as a "post-industrial" or "information" economy. d) Shoddy, half-baked, or drearily programmatic attempts to apply elements (usually a narrow range of them) of poststructuralist thought to research in a particular discipline. e) Any unfamiliar ideas that threaten to undermine established ways of doing things (see 5). f) Rely on 1.a & 1.b to justify this approach.
4	Group together as a "movement," a disparate set of thinkers:
	a) Who sharply disagreed with each other. For example: Deleuze with Lacan, Derrida with Foucault, Irigaray with Lacan, Kristeva with Irigaray. b) Or have contempt for one each others' positions. For example: Baudrillard for Foucault, LaTour for Baudrillard. c) Or who refused to be grouped under a common rubric. For example: DeMan and "deconstruction," LaTour and "postmodernism." d) Dismiss these differences between thinkers before acquainting yourself with them (see 3.f).
5	Attack as "elitist" any new ideas that undermine current hierarchies of authority. (This is especially useful for tenured professors).
	a) Replicate, term for term, earlier dismissals of modernist art and thought. Consider using the following terminology: elitist, willfully obscure, pretentious, irrational, ridiculous, irresponsible, immoral, nihilistic, and, of course, jargon. b) Stage discussions of postmodernism as a moral agon or contest: the defenders of clarity and reason vs. the deceptive and opportunistic.* c) Disavow any self-interest as you make these attacks.
	* For a fuller account of this (staged) agon between believer and skeptic, eiron and alazon, pedagogue and Sophist, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Belief & Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, 73-87. For more on the moralism that often structures these discussions, see A Resentimental Education. 12/99