Futures of Negation: Jameson’s “Archaeologies of the Future” and Utopian Science Fiction

Jameson complicates the specificity of utopian thought in science
fictions by situating these messages firmly in the sociocultural and
material histories that produce them. Jameson’s explication of the
historical conditions that generate individuated wishes for utopia is
understandable: the conditions that determine the nature of utopian
longing and protest are often the same ones that make society consider
utopia an irresponsible fantasy, or as Reinhold Niebuhr declared in 1952,
“an adolescent embarrassment.” Still, viewing utopia from a material and
psychological vantage can’t completely overcome the inherent vagueness in
the utopian impulse as Jameson describes it. His account of the cultural
and political forces in various eras that repress the desire for a better
world nevertheless leaves the utopian project orbiting on a general path,
far from the praxis that trenchant dissatisfaction with capitalism would
seemingly demand. While his point is well taken that the inability to
imagine alternative societies would mark the triumph of capitalism,
Jameson perhaps overestimates the political practicality of the
imaginative process. This is a shortcoming that may leave some Marxists
who were expecting more material applicability dissatisfied. That said,
Jameson does well to remind us that “our most energetic imaginative leaps
into radical alternatives were little more than the projections of our own
social moment and historical or subjective situation” (211).