Postmodernism-bashing is still very common in Australian academia these days and it usually takes postmodernism and poststructuralism as identical. Gavin Kitching's The Trouble with Theory: The Educational Costs of Postmodernism" is a critique directed primarily at the poststructuralist contention that social reality and individual identity or subjectivity are ‘socially constructed’.

In a review of Kitching’s text Stephen Gregory in Dialogue (vol.27 No 3) says that:

The Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations in believing that ‘language gets its meaning from its use (ditto “discourse”) not from its “structure”’ because individuals use language in the same way they use tools to make kitchen cabinets . Poststructuralism, however, cannot adhere to this common- sense view of language (or ‘discourse’) because it starts out from the Saussurean idea of the essential arbitrariness of the sign, wherein the gap between word and meaning can only be closed artificially (by extra-linguistic circumstance as in everyday conversation, or by pre-determined means as in the creationist ideology of biblical iteralness). The use-value approach to language assumes an easy connection of meaning to intention, whereas the Saussurean view suggests that, whatever the intentions of the producer of a piece of language, its meaning will be decided by those who receive or read it. Many of the typical strategies of poststructuralist thought⎯and much that is difficult or unfamiliar in the art and literature labelled postmodernist ⎯ arise because their creators were among the first to work on the assumption that they themselves could not control the meaning of what they wrote or made.