Introduction
“

Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.

— Fredric Jameson

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all." in the context of "Introduction" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Fredric Jameson" (Quotes, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Fredric Jameson

About Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson (April 14, 1934 – September 22, 2024) was an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist.