Eagleton reviews Jacoby on Utopia:

http://www.thenation.com/article/just-my-imagination?page=0,2

"The worst is not," remarks a character in King Lear, "so long as we can say, 'This is the worst'"; and what goes for the worst also goes for the best. Anything we can speak of must by definition fall short of the otherness we desire. So perhaps it is better to imagine the future only negatively, as Kant thought that we could catch a glimpse of infinity only by pressing against the limits of the mind and watching them warp and buckle. For his part, Jacoby wants a utopian thought that "pines for the future but does not map it out."

For Theodor Adorno, this negative utopia is known as art. For others, the only true image of the future is the failure of the present. Or, for that matter, the failure of the past. As Walter Benjamin reminded us, it is memories of enslaved ancestors, not dreams of liberated grandchildren, that drive men and women to revolt. To avoid some cheap leftist triumphalism, we must move backward into the future with our eyes fixed mournfully on that great heap of wreckage that is the past. Otherwise we are merely callow modernizers or cavalier avant-gardists, who in seeking to eradicate the past will discover that it returns with a vengeance to plague us.

Yet there are problems with this option, too, which Jacoby does not fully take on board. For one thing, it leaves the left open to a familiar pincers movement on the part of its adversaries. If you can spell out what a radical future would look like, you are the prisoner of a soulless blueprint; if you refuse to do so, you are an idle visionary. Marx sought to elude this double bind by spelling out what would be necessary for constructing a socialist future but not what it would look like once it was in place. You cannot deduce what a thing might look like simply by examining its conditions of possibility.

' ... it is the hard-nosed pragmatists who behave as though the World Bank and caffe latte will be with us for the next two millennia who are the real dreamers, and those who are open to the as yet unfigurable future who are the true realists.'