Jameson, Progress Versus Utopia (1982)

Jameson's argues against SF as a representational drama which accustoms its readers to the rapidity of our present moment. Instead, he argues that these visions of a dizzying, rapid technological future are themselves 'historical and dated' (151). He starts by characterizing this notion of the 'future' as 'merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past' (151). This, he suggests, requires a shift in understanding of the function of present-day SF. Rather than give us images of the future, Jameson argues that SF's structure is 'to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present' (151). Indeed, but for Jameson, our own present in SF is experienced not as present, but instead it re-installs our present in History itself. In Jameson's conception, the past is 'dead' and the future is 'unthinkable' (152). Further, Jameson argues that the present is 'unavailable to us in its own right because of the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises' (152). It is SF's future imaginings then that function to transform 'our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come' (152). In SF, we experience our present as 'some future world's remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered' (152). Jameson argues that this is not only historical melancholy, but that it is comforting to be able to recognize our present day as not the 'end of history.' Through enabling an apprehension of a historical present, SF is not about keeping the future alive but instead to 'demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future' (153). It is this that Jameson characterizes as the nature of utopia as a genre in our contemporary time.

On the utopian genre specifically, Jameson argues that its purpose is to 'bring home in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutionally inability to imagine Utopia itself' (153). Jameson pushes for the importance of attending to the negative in utopian texts, as it is the place of that repression that will lead us to an understanding of the contradiction of utopian texts. This leads Jameson to his last claim, namely that if we accept that utopian narrative is about our inability to imagine Utopia, such texts then 'find their deepest "subjects" in the impossibility of their own production, in the interrogation of the dilemmas involved in their own emergence as utopian texts' (156).

To conclude, what I take from Jameson's article is that SF is about re-instating a sense of history in the present through enabling us to understand our present as a future past. Further, that the utopian genre specifically performs this inability to imagine a future utopia, but that it is this performance of failure that produces utopian texts.