Utopian vision is a necessary but insufficient ingredient of politics.

Evidence

The scope of the present essay, however, is more restricted than this; if it must specify the ultimate political coordinates of the problem of the evaluation of Postmodernism as we have just done, our topic here is the narrower one of the Utopian impulses to be detected in various forms of the postmodern today. One wants to insist very strongly on the necessity of the reinvention of the Utopian vision in any contemporary politics: this lesson, which Marcuse first taught us, is part of the legacy of the sixties which must never be abandoned in any reevaluation of that period and of our relationship to it. On the other hand, it also must be acknowledged that Utopian visions are not yet themselves a politics. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 378

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s cognitive-mapping goal — the thesis that Utopian vision alone isn’t politics echoes the later chapter’s argument that class consciousness requires narrative grounding. — connects to: Matriarchal society’s historical reality was less important than its utopian vision. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 339; Local resistance experiments are insufficient without a wider vision of solidarity. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 594; Critical positions must inhabit liberal individualism without full hope of teleological change. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1266