Tolerance of difference may result from social homogenization that erases real difference.

Evidence

For the very concept of difference itself is booby-trapped; it is at least pseudodialectical, and its imperceptible alternation with its sometimes indistinguishable opposite number, Identity, is among the oldest language and thought games recorded in (several) philosophical traditions. (Is the difference between the Same and the Other the same as the difference between the Other and the Same, or is it different?) Much of what passes for a spirited defense of difference is, of course, simply liberal tolerance, a position whose offensive complacencies are well known but which has at least the merit of raising the embarrassing historical question of whether the tolerance of difference, as a social fact, is not the result of social homogenization and standardization and the obliteration of genuine social difference in the first place. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 738

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal — that liberal tolerance of difference might be a symptom of, not an antidote to, standardization — is a paradigm-flipping move that resists one-sentence digesting and connects to the chapter’s larger thesis about postmodern difference being a surface effect.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of testing whether postmodernism as cultural dominant is falsifiable — this is Jameson exposing how ‘difference’ itself is a pseudodialectic concealing identity, a key move in that argument.