 The newly popular work of postmodernists and post-structuralists like Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, which argued the simulated and deferred nature of the sign and text, was critically analysed as, in fact, a description of a highly abstracted media society, falsely generalised and transhistoricised.These and other debates increasingly put the "Arena" editors in a critical relationship to what remained of the Left, which had enthusiastically embraced the celebration of difference and hybridity as the post-structuralist revolution swept English-speaking humanities departments in the 1980s.Paradoxically, this also led to some on the Left failing to grasp "Arena"’s standpoint, representing it, too, as an expression of the post-structuralist wave.