Feeling Utopian: Demystification and the Management of Affect

Although literary critics have rarely come to an agreement on how to read since the splintering of the New Critical consensus into a variety of theoretical schools and paradigms, this methodological diversity has nevertheless been subtended by a distinct utopian through line.¹ Drawing on a range of intellectual traditions, from Freudian psychoanalysis to French poststructuralism, a preponderance of literary scholarship in the late twentieth century consistently attested to a widely shared, if not always coherently articulated, commitment to imagining how society might be otherwise than it is. In a critical field thus populated with a multitude of approaches to reading aimed at addressing, and redressing, power imbalances in a variety of social relations, the work of Fredric Jameson stands out not only for its totalizing assimilation of these numerous currents of contemporary literary theory to a dialectical method of Marxist interpretation, but also for its totalizingly utopian demand for an alternative social future. From The Political Unconscious's formulation of an interpretive method aimed at "the decipherment of the Utopian impulses of … ideological cultural texts" to Postmodernism's insistence on "the necessity of the reinvention of the Utopian vision in any contemporary politics," Jameson's oeuvre represents a career-spanning meditation on the possibility of mobilizing cultural analysis in the service of social transformation (1982, 296; 1991, 159).

Given the unfailing utopianism that underwrites Jameson's critical ambitions and procedures, it seems paradoxical that these should have been so often pitched at an affective register rarely matched in its negativity. "Utopia's deepest subject," writes Jameson, "is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as with fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history" (2008, 412–13). Inability, incapacity, failure: it is difficult to describe the feeling tone here as anything but the dreary melancholy of a killjoy who won't allow us to enjoy the pyrotechnics for fear that it might lead us to forget the history to which we must inevitably return. "Always historicize!" and "History is what hurts"—if these two oft-quoted slogans from The Political Unconscious have come to represent Jameson's most influential injunctions to literary critics, their combination yields the worrying prospect that, in an era that has forgotten how to think historically, the possibility of utopia somehow rests on our willingness to always feel hurt when we read (1982, 9, 102).²

That literary criticism's efforts at remaining proximal to the possibility of utopia might come at the cost of an implacably negative relation to its objects of study is a concern that has surfaced in a number of recent methodological debates, several of which take Jameson's approach to reading as their touchstone.³ Although there has thus emerged a growing consensus that something has gone awry in the demystifying modes of criticism that Jameson's method is felt to emblematize, the intuition that this glitch somehow concerns its affective negativity has not yet led to a specification of either the lineaments or the implications of such an assessment.⁴ If indeed the reasons for our present eagerness to jettison Jameson's demystifying method originate in a diagnosis of its affective negativity, then what would account for the immense influence and attraction exerted by this very same negativity when it appeared on the critical scene a mere three decades ago? Part of the answer to this question lies, I believe, in the fact that negativity was always only half the story of Jameson's Marxist hermeneutic.⁵ Existing accounts of literary criticism's negativity apply only imperfectly to Jameson's interpretive system, because the dialectic of utopia and ideology systematized in The Political Unconscious and extended over the course of his career tends to complicate any simple ascription of positive or negative affect.⁶ Indeed, the centrality of dialectical reversal to Jameson's thinking, "that paradoxical turning around of a phenomenon into its opposite" and "the transformation from negative to positive and from positive to negative," virtually guarantees...