 Its critical account of instrumentalised abstraction also has some surface parallels with Slavoj Žižek's critique of postmodernism in "The Ticklish Subject" and "The Fragile Absolute", and Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of 'liquid modernity’ in his recent works.More generally, "Arena"’s distinctive approach is grounded in an emphasis on the constitutive role of abstraction both within the interpretive and the instrumental expression of rationality.Though it continued to publish a great deal of conventional radical-left political economic and geopolitical material, it was at this point that its orientation began to diverge from other Australian left publications such as "Overland", and the "Australian Left Review".