The critic’s dismissal of utopian thought is itself a symptom to be analyzed.

Evidence

But it is more useful, and more dialectical, to turn our attention back upon ourselves and our own reactions for an instant. What if the fact of our judgment stood as a judgment on us, rather than on the Utopian speculation that we are unable to take seriously? What if our judgment were itself a measure and a symptom of our own incapacity to support such thinking, of our own repression of the principle of futurity, smothered under the realism of the reality principle and the massive weight of what is? What if it were the very psychologism, the cynical reductionism, of the reality principle itself that turned out to be not reality, but just another symptom? … Thus we are scandalized when we discover the source of Rousseau’s political speculations in undisguised erotic reverie and sexual daydreaming (as in the ninth book of the Confessions); we find ourselves only too willing to discredit the former on the grounds that the latter was its cause, without understanding that such an argument cuts both ways, and that the process can be seen precisely as that return to a common source of both poetry and politics, of the erotic and the political impulses, which marks a reintegration of consciousness fragmented in the modern world. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 188

Categorization

• XREF: This is the dialectical method of turning the analysis back on the analyst — echoes Adorno’s reflexive criticism and the hermeneutics of suspicion; also resonates with Jameson’s later notion in The Political Unconscious of the ‘untranscendable horizon.’
• DEEPTHINKING: The maneuver of holding the analyst’s own judgment accountable as symptom — ‘the reality principle itself… just another symptom’ — is a distinctive dialectical reflexivity the reader tracks across Jameson’s Frankfurt lineage.