Postmodern abstractions that claim universality are actually local and self-inverting.

Evidence

The other proposition that demands exploration is the generation, from out of the transcoding process, of strange new ambivalent abstractions, which look like traditional philosophical universals but are in reality as specific or particular as the paper they are printed on, and tend to turn ceaselessly into each other (that is to say, into their own logical opposites). We have already confronted several such pairs of abstractions: in Identity and Difference themselves, but also in the peculiar postmodern or late capitalist indistinction between uniformity or standardization and differentiation, or between separation and unification (which in this particular mode of production turn out to be the same thing). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 850

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that uniformity and differentiation are the same thing in late capitalism is testable — worth chasing specific cases where standardization produces apparent diversity.
• DEFINE: Defines the key ambivalent abstraction phenomenon, central to distinguishing what’s specifically postmodern about theoretical discourse.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodernism’s rejection of unified representation leads logically to pragmatic localism. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 353; Logical abstraction is simultaneously a sociological abstraction. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 528; Commodification of land, not utopian design, universalized abstract space — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1614