The road to nowhere.(Letter to the editor)

SIR. The destructive intrusion of postmodern thought into various academic disciplines has recently been chronicled and vigorously dismantled in the pages of this magazine and elsewhere. John Dawson has warned us that truth may be history (March 2006), and Keith Windshuttle concludes that history itself is history (The Killing of History, Macleay Press). It would seem that our lives and times well and truly beat to the hypnotic rhythms of the postmodern drum. No facet of our daily existence, from politics to accounting and even policing, has been spared this insidious metastatic cancer of thought. Just the other night, in one of Melbourne's top restaurants, I was treated to a carbonara pasta dish that had been lovingly deconstructed by the chef into its less palatable constituent parts. I am sure that Derrida would have been delighted.

Readers should nevertheless take solace in the fact that postmodernism (in all its guises) is an inherently self-limiting concept that boastfully and cheekily predicts its own implosion. Baudrillard's vision of a post-historical, hyper-real future is exemplified by an MTV world dominated by a confusing pastiche of soundbites, intertextuality and reflexivity.

The thoroughly entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying US postmodern sitcom, Fox's Arrested Development, draws heavily upon these concepts in its satirical ...