For Jameson, as for Abensour, the purpose of utopian fiction is no longer to provide an outline of a social system to be interrogated in terms of its structural properties, still less treated as a goal. Utopia is important less for what is imagined than for the act of imagination itself, a process which disrupts the closure of the present: ‘Utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them’. For Jameson, as for Abensour, this process circles around desire. His 2005 Archaeologies of the Future is subtitled The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Thus ‘we might think of the new onset of the Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called utopia in the first place’ – a passage bearing a remarkable similarity to Abensour’s. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 119-120

For Jameson, as for Abensour, form is more important than content here, and the function of utopian writing is negation and critique, not building an alternative. Utopia’s proper role is not to resolve tensions, but to hold them in mutual opposition. Any apparent resolution in an institutional proposal is necessarily ideological: “[...] we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion of difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery that our most energetic leaps into radical alternatives were little more than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation.” Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 120

Failure is an inevitable part of the process of trying to think utopia itself rather than a characteristic of particular representations. He [Jameson] argues (like Marx and Morris) that utopia is literally unimaginable. The imaginable always falls short of utopia, so that actual utopian texts ‘bring home in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself; and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners’. Utopias enable us to explore the structural limits of what is thinkable, ‘in order to get a better sense of what it is about the future that we are unable or unwilling to imagine’. Thus ‘the true vocation of the utopian narrative begins to rise to the surface – to confront us with our own incapacity to imagine Utopia’. The function of the utopian text can only be ‘to provoke … to jar the mind into some heightened but unconceptualizable consciousness of its own powers, functions, aims and structural limits’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 120-121

Jameson proposes that libidinal investment in utopia is difficult because it is impossible to imagine ourselves radically otherwise: the prospect of annihilation of one’s actually existing self evokes existential terror. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 121

Recognizing provisionality, reflexivity, dialogue and an element of inevitable failure may be useful. Overemphasis on openness, process and impossibility is not, and sidestepping the substance of imagined alternatives can go too far. Abensour and Jameson are Marxists, but perhaps over-influenced by understanding that any future we envision will of course not come to pass. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 124