Heretics Can Still Be Believers

Itai Farhi
Jackie Basu
Yoon Sook Cha

Intro
In modern discourse universities are often derisively portrayed as a hotbed of Marxist radicals. As a
fairly typical, if somewhat hyperbolic article1 has it, academia is the most postmodernist, knownothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society (Glick); a
similar view is expressed in a Times Literary Supplement review, where the academic institutions of
capitalist America will be the last redoubt of Marxist theorizing (Gray). A common response to such
accusations is one of amused disbelief; this paper proposes to take the claim that Marxism influences
academia - especially literary studies2seriously. Yet I will invert this negative evaluation of the
correlation between literary criticism and Marxism that is often implied in the accusation, assessing
instead the Marxisms potential to foster an environment that produces brilliant and eccentric minds.
In order to do this, I will establish a framework for discussing Marxism, attempting to synthesize a
working version for the purpose of analysis. I will then examine Franco Moretti, an influential literary
scholar and theorist at Stanford, as a case study for the larger phenomenon of Marxist-inflected literary
academia. In my analysis of his work, I will outline his methodology as seen in his explicit work on
theory, and in his implicit practices. I will then relate Morettis works to the intellectual tradition of
Marxism, showing how his concepts are influenced by the ideas and styles of Marxism. Finally, I will
move to more general analysis, and attempt to understand some of the environmental traits of Marxism
that make it so intellectually fertile.
What are Marxism and Marxist criticism?3
In discussing Marxism and Marxist criticism, I will tentatively attempt to construct a picture of what
Marxism is, on the one hand, and of what it does and the concepts it consistently deploys, on the other.
1 Wonderfully, this article was published in an online review titled American Thinker, whose logo is a cartoon of Uncle
Sam sitting on a tree stump, a mix of Rodin, Lincoln and traditional iconography.
2 I use the term analysis and study interchangeably when discussing most broadly intellectual enterprises that seek to
create a secondary literature, differentiating this from terms like theory and criticism which have in academic jargon
acquired tangled meanings. I will use the term 'theory' to denote the discourse that consists of the 'how', 'why' and 'what'
of literary analysis and the term 'criticism' to denote the practice (and discourse) of approaching a text or group of texts
and producing interpretations or narratives about them.
3 In the section that follows, I draw heavily on Terry Eagleton's Marxist Literary Criticism, his attempt to update and
explain many of the concepts present in the history of Marxist literary thought.

It is productive to first clarify what Marxism is not. Against those who consider Marxism a totalizing
grand narrative or general unified theory, it is important to remember that Marxism has nothing very
interesting to say about malt whiskeys or the nature of the unconscious, the haunting fragrance of a rose
or why there is something rather than nothing, is not to its discredit. It is not intended to be a total
philosophy (Eagleton 34). Marx never attempts to produce a total picture, and construing his work
and the work of those inspired by him as a treasure trove with the answer to any question not only
misses the point, but is misguided: the term 'Marxism' is itself misleading. As Althusser explained it,
Marxism is not a 'block of steel', but contains difficulties, contradictions and gaps (Althusser 4). A
more nuanced understanding of the Marxist project as practiced by Marx would call it not Marxism,
but 'Marxisms'.4 Marx's project is a series of local (both in time and space) politically-informed
interventions into various aspects of modern life. This practice led Marx to a certain comfort with
contradiction: his writing is tailored to what he considers to be the historical circumstances of the event
in question regardless of prior systematic constraints.
However, given these clarifications, it is clear that Marx's work, while lacking programmatic
consistency, contains certain theoretical principles that under-gird his intellectual enterprise. In the
Theses on Feuerbach, Marx lays out his general guiding principles in their most distilled form.
Thesis 11 has become famous as the summary of the of the essence of Marxist thought: The
philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it (Marx 15). As
a discipline, Marxism is a scientific theory of human societies and of the practice of transforming
them (vii) founded on certain philosophical foundations and methods, namely dialectical or historical
materialism, which both share a common interest in historical account of concepts as explanations and
heuristics5. Extending this broad orientation to the domain of literary analysis, Marxist criticism
4 The notion of orthodoxy in Marxism emerges after Marx, erasing the non-coherence in Marx's thought and adding a
systematizing impulse that is decidedly not present in the original.
5 The way Marxist method is viewed differs widely from movement to movement. At this point in the paper, it is not yet
important to further explore either of these ideas. I will return to the dialectic when I analyze his work in those terms.

analyzes literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it (v). An example clarifies the
way in which this method is deployed: Balzac has always been a favorite of Marxists since the time of
Marx and Engels for expressing in clear terms the ideological effects of the social transformations
French society was undergoing at his time. With Balzac's novels, the link between history and ideology
is almost direct; he is a perfect author for Marxist criticism, since his work must be situated in its
historical context in order to be fully understood and appreciated.
The political implications of this analysis for Marxism are of the utmost importance. Eagleton
explains that
Marxist criticism is part of a larger body of theoretical analysis which aims to understand ideologies [...]
To understand ideologies is to understand both the past and the present more deeply; and such
understanding contributes to our liberation (v).

Marxist criticism is a subset of the larger Marxist project of ideology-critique, an important discipline
for political movements since, at a basic level, they wish to persuade people of a new position and
ideology-critique is the enterprise of understanding the mechanisms of that persuasion.
However, the politicization of theory and aesthetics and their relation to political and partisan
commitment are often misunderstood in discussions of Marxism. Historically, the crucial factor in this
confusion has been the Soviet Union's egregious simplification of Marx's notions into a dogmatic and
unitary theory of proper as Socialist Realism. For Marxism:
overt political commitment [...] is unnecessary (not, of course, unacceptable) because truly realist writing itself
dramatizes the significant forces of social life, breaking beyond both the photographically observable and the
imposed rhetoric of the 'political solution'. This is the concept [] of 'objective partisanship'. The author need not
foist his own political views on his work because, if he reveals the real and potential forces objectively at work in a
situation, he is already in that sense partisan. Partisanship, is inherent in reality itself (46-47).

This notion of objective partisanship posits that the revelation of the truth is in itself necessarily
revolutionary. Accordingly, work need not be overtly political in order to be aligned with the Marxist
project.
Beyond general foundational methods, Marxism usually follows certain classic concepts set out in
Marx's works, with perhaps the most important example being the concepts of base or infrastructure

and superstructure. Marx famously lays these notions out in his Preface to the Contribution on
Political Economy:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and
independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of
their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
[infra]structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life
conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general (4).

In other words, the realm of ideas depends on, and is structured by, concrete historical social relations.
For Marx, art and literature fall under the domain of this superstructure and are thus finally determined
by economic and social relations. Put another way,
Literary works are not mysteriously inspired or explicable simply in terms of their author's psychology.
They are forms of perception [] and as such they have a relation to [the] ideology of an age. That
ideology, in turn, is a product of the concrete social relations into which men enter at a particular time and
place; it is the way those class relations are experienced, legitimized and perpetuated (6).

Marxist critics are interested in dissecting and explaining the ideology of an age, producing a
body of work that accounts for the qualities of any given works form of perception as a
symbolic negotiation of underlying structural forces present in the authors experience. This
process is not a simple one to one correspondence; Marxism is capable of explaining not only
a works particular content, but also its form as key to its ideological message. As Trotsky puts
it in Literature and Revolution, The relationship between form and content is determined by
the fact that the new form is discovered, proclaimed, and evolved under the pressure of an inner
need of a collective psychological demand which, like everything else [] has its social roots
(191). For Marxism, a work's form and its content are at one level indistinguishable; both
express ideology, though the message may not be fully coherent between the two elements.
Moretti
In my treatment of Moretti's work in relation to Marxism, I will analyze it in two conceptually
distinct ways. First, I will examine the explicit characteristics of his work: his methodological
concepts and attitudes, and the way in which these principles are put into practice, relating them
in turn to Marxism. Following this more direct engagement with Moretti's work, I will analyze

his work for undercurrents that persist throughout his work, focusing especially on Moretti's
understanding of the concepts of the dialectic and of crisis.
Methodology is the science of those who have nothing
Moretti's quotation of the Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti6 begins my discussion of Moretti,
since it resonates with one of Morettis main interests, namely establishing a new methodology
for literary studies, but also expresses the part of that new methodology that is deeply skeptical
of methodological analysis devoid of practice. In this section, I will address Moretti's work on
the 'how' of literary analysis as expressed in both his theoretical works and in the ways he
studies literature.
Moretti's fame stems in large part from his novel theoretical approach, described in reviews
alternatively as iconoclastic7, heretical8 and groundbreaking9. Broadly speaking, Moretti's
program enacts a shift in literary history towards a new object of study (Moretti, Graphs 1). It
is worth rehearsing at some length Moretti's introduction to Graphs, Maps, Trees where he
rhetorically wonders what would happen if literary historians decided to 'shift their gaze' []
'from the extraordinary to the everyday, from exceptional events to the large mass of facts'?
What literature would we find, in 'the large mass of facts' (3)? He explains that this question
occurred to him
when the study of national bibliographies made me realize what a minimal fraction of the literary field we
all work on: a canon of two hundred novels, for [] nineteenth-century Britain [] is still less than one
percent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more [] a field this large
cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it
isn't a sum of individual cases: it's a collective system, that should be grasped as [] a whole (3-4).

The problem for Moretti, then, is one of quantity; there are simply too many books not included
in traditional literary methodologies. His aim is to find new methods that will support this more
global and inclusive field.
6 The Colletti quote is especially resonant considering the political symbolism of Colletti, a former communist who by the
end of his life had become an MP for Berlusconi's right-wing party.
7 Guardian
8 New York Times
9 Verso

All of the methods Moretti describes in his work rely on a fundamentally new notion of reading;
what he calls 'distant reading'. When he debuted the notion in his landmark article Conjectures
on World Literature, he introduced it against the backdrop of the structural failure of close
reading, explaining that the trouble with close reading [] is that it necessarily depends on an
extremely small canon [] you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very
few of them really matter (2). Moving away from close reading, Moretti throughout his work
defends two overlapping categories of new approaches: the use of quantitative as opposed to
qualitative data about literature on the one hand, and the construction of conceptual models of
formal characteristics on the other.
Having described Moretti's general methodology, his discussion of guiding principles in
constructing these methodologies becomes crucial. Early on in Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti
remarks that problems without a solution are exactly what we need in a field like ours (26),
framing ambiguity as more important than a solid solution. In a similar line of thought, Moretti
asks for a theory not so much of 'the' novel, but of a whole family of novelistic forms. A theoryof diversity (30). Instead of theorizing any single genre of novels, Moretti instead constructs a
more general theory, that is able to grasp many elements as part of a grander schematic. For
Moretti, this kind of general theory of difference takes its cue from Darwinian theory, except
whereas natural selection is a metaphor [...] social selection is not. 10 With this theory, Moretti
is able to relate the gradual, or punctuated, evolution of literary form and genre to historical
changes in society. In Morettis work,
literary genres are problem-solving devices, which address a contradiction of their environment, offering an
imaginary resolution by means of their formal organization. The pleasure provided by that formal organization is
therefore more than just pleasureit is the vehicle through which a larger symbolic statement is shaped and
assimilated (The End, 3).

Form is here an expression of underlying tensions in any given environment, a reified expression of its

10 This quote comes from my interview with Prof. Moretti.

problems and ideologies. One explanatory case must suffice. A full third11 of Morettis Graphs, Maps,
Trees makes concrete this ideology analysis, constructing spatial representations of literary works in
order to bring to the foreground many features that had previously been hard to describe or even
understand. In the midst of his discussion of village narratives from 19th century Britain, Moretti notes
that the shape of the map of these works alters as time goes, a shift he assigns to the dramatic
transformation of rural space produced by parliamentary enclosure (38). This is only one case of the
broader phenomena he describes where A map of ideology [emerges] from a map of mentalit [which
in turn emerges] from the material substratum of the physical territory (42). Moretti here literally and
figuratively documents how ideologies take shape, and become reified in literary production.
Even more theoretically foundational than the evolutionary and materialist theory of forms for
Moretti, however, is his somewhat pragmatic view of theoretical knowledge (Graphs, 91). In
his view,
theories are nets, and we should evaluate them, not as ends in themselves, but for how they concretely
change the way we work: for how they allow us to enlarge the literary field, and re-design it in a better
way, replacing the old, useless distinctions [] with new temporal, spatial, and morphological distinctions
(91).

Thus, for Moretti, the most important characteristic about any theory is its ability to produce
new practical work.
Since for Moretti the point of theory is to make way for practice, he is quite careful to stray
away from pure theory, including in each of his articles examples of research he has conducted
that back up or complicate the theory he presents. Going beyond methodological theory,
Moretti's practice as such contains certain implicit methodological points, evidenced in his
deeply collaborative work, his intense devotion to concreteness and his superbly readable
writing style.
Moretti's collaborative work is no mere coincidence; it is a logical outcome of his theoretical
disposition towards quantitative approaches. Moretti explains that
11 Unsurprisingly, the third titles Maps.

quantitative work is truly cooperation: not only in the pragmatic sense that it takes forever to gather the
data, but because such data are ideally independent from any individual researcher, and can thus be shared
by others, and combined in more than one way' (5)

Collaboration is thus an outgrowth of Moretti's more distant method; when viewed distantly,
facts emerge instead of interpretations, making it easier to work with a co-researcher without
having to reconcile two wildly different subjective perspectives.
Another aspect of Moretti's work that deserves methodological attention is his straight-forward
treatment of the various objects of his analysis; in other words, his unfailing materialism.
Materialism is felt on every level of his work, but is most important in terms of method;
Moretti's project as a whole can be seen as a re-orientation of literary criticism towards more
materialism. In an article written before Moretti began his distinctive academic program, he
described the kernel of it:
A Darwinian history of literature, where forms fight one another, are selected by their context, evolve and
disappear like natural species Here is a fascinating prospect for the moment when literary criticism
forsakes its present metaphysical nullity and reverts to some form of materialism (The Moment of
Truth, 3).

In this moment of truth12, Moretti's program is framed explicitly as a possible materialist

replacement for versions of literary criticism that resort to idealizing a text; materialism, then,
not as a mere bias or tendency of Moretti's work, but as the fundamental coherence of his
project.
A third methodological feature emerges from Moretti's writing, namely the style of the writing
itself. Christopher Prendergast, in his response to Moretti, sums up the default style perfectly:
One of the signatures of the Moretti house style is syntactic elision (the sentence that is not a
sentence) (3). Prendergast goes on to ask, as a way of beginning to criticize the text what
happens when this fetchingly informal economy of means travels up from sentence to
argument? (3). Instead of seeing this fetchingly informal economy of means as a detriment
to Moretti's argumentation, I see it as a methodological point Moretti enacts in his work. In
12 To abuse and misuse Moretti's term.

Moretti's article The Grey Area, he describes Ibsen's writing, focusing especially on a change
in the nature of Ibsen's prose saying in a different context what could equally be applied to
Moretti for him language should never be soserious. It should never be prose (The Grey,
10). For Moretti, Prose [is] the bourgeois style; style as conduct, as a way of living in the
world, not just of representing it. Prose as analysis, first of all: trying to see clearly:
unmistakable definiteness and clear intelligibility (10). In his persistently slippery prose,
then, we find our first hint of the political Moretti.
a very small one13
It is clear from Moretti's occasional political asides that his radical engagements14 are not firmly
separated from his academic work. Two contrasting asides should suffice to establish a pattern:
Did Doyle deserve to sell ten times more than Huan Mee and McDonnell Bodkin? Yes. A hundred times?
Doubtful. A thousanda hundred thousand times? Of course not: this order of magnitude no longer has
anything to do with actual morphological differences, but only with the perverse market logic [emphasis
added] to those who have, more shall be giventhat goes by the name of increasing returns (The End
of the Beginning, 7).
this is indeed how capitalism functions: uneven exchange, equalized by contracts; expropriation and conquest,
rewritten as improvement and civilization. Past might becomes present right. But Victorian culture [...] cannot
accept the idea of a world of perfectly lawful injustice. The contradiction is unbearable: lawfulness must become
just, or injustice criminal: one way or the other, form and substance must be aligned, making capital ethically
comprehensible. Thats what Victorianism is: social relations cannot always be morally goodbut they must be
morally legible. No ambiguity (The Grey Area, 8).

Here, two different arguments, united only by their unabashedly anti-Capitalist politics. Against this
background, how are we to square this with Moretti's claim that the political implications of [] what
we do when we study literature I think are almost nil.15 In this section, I will compare Moretti's
methodology with the picture of Marxism sketched above, searching for points of influence, contact
and disagreement between the two edifices.
A distant reading of Moretti's work would identify the influence of the conceptual vocabulary of
Marxism- with terms like 'hegemony', 'ideology', 'capitalism' and 'bourgeois' showing up in high
13 A quote from my interview with Moretti when he discussed whether or not he makes a politically motivated argument;
his answer - Yeah, but a very small one, a very small one.
14 To name just two: membership in Retort, a Bay Area based collective of writers and activists, and in a small
Trotskyist group as a student.
15 From my interview.

frequencies- along with a distinct tendency to use analogies drawn from political economy. Beyond
these rather obvious influences, many elements of his methodological paradigm directly flow from
Marxism. As Moretti himself put it, albeit with heavy reserve, Insofar as you define Marxism as
historical materialism, and Marxist literary criticism as a historical and material explanation of how
literary forms changeIm certainly a materialist, and Im certainly interested in history.16 Moretti
here refrains from calling himself a Marxist, but the quote seems to at very least align his most
foundational principles and interests with the version of Marxism I sketched above.
Can the rest of his method be assimilated quite as easily? Whereas this task is very simple for many of
Moretti's ideas, it becomes more challenging with the strictly empirical and scientific requirements he
places on theory. The elements of his method that seem almost directly lifted from Marxist theory- his
thoroughly practical disposition, his collaborative practice, his already mentioned anti-bourgeois
style and his notion of form as reified ideology- serve as reminders of an academic ethos that seems to
flow directly from the Marxist project of ideology critique. His refocusing of the literary field based on
notions of inclusion and his related notion of theories as neutral nets meant to capture as much
knowledge as possible, however, seem to present a greater challenge to this assimilation into classical
Marxist theory. In Marxism, theories are inherently political and are therefore judged based on how
politically valuable they are. However, with the more nuanced concept of objective partisanship, as
long as Moretti's theory is more powerful it need not be explicitly politicized in order to have immense
political value. An even stronger version of this claim may be posited: not only is Moretti's 'distant
reading' project political in the sense of objective partisanship, it also opens up new spaces for radical
critique. Moretti defends his distant perspective against the criticism that it loses the element of social
critique, explaining that his constructs
signal a clear break with the literary tradition as we know it [...] not only does literature look very different from
the one we are used to, but it also no longer speaks to the historian [] until the right question is asked. And the

16 From my interview.

epistemological alterity thus instituted between subject and object contains the seed and the potential for critique
[...] an estranged tradition leaves us free to advance new, irreverent hypotheses (The End, 15-16).

This explanation essentially transposes objective partisanship from the level of literature to literary
theory, aligning with a view of Marxism as the project of social transformation, where revealing new
truth is inherently transformative.
Having reconciled these aspects of Moretti's paradigm with Marxism, I will now attempt to show that
the dominant product of his project, that of literary evolution, can be aligned with the dialectical
materialism that is, on one account, the underpinning of all Marxist thought.
the dialectic needs to be abandoned for the good of Marxist criticism17
My title for this section expresses the Olympian task ahead of me; I will attempt to prove that
far from abandoning the dialectic, by aligning himself with Darwinian theory and especially
with Gould, Moretti in fact embraces a kind of dialectic, albeit one with certain important
differences from the dialectic as traditionally understood. Instead of slogging through the
literature on the enormously complicated notion of the dialectic18, I will restrict my discussion
to the idea of the dialectic not as a firm basis for all truth, but rather as a heuristic useful in the
construction of theories.
Stephen Gould, one of the thinkers Moretti draws on most heavily, has written persuasively in
favor of the dialectic and how it has impacted his own scientific work. In an essay on the
intersection of natural and social science, he writes that
Dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars, not discarded because some nations of the
second world have constructed a cardboard version as an official political doctrine [...] When presented as
guidelines for a philosophy of change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws of dialectics
embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems and sees the
components themselves not as a priori entities but as products of and inputs to the system. Thus the law of
interpenetrating opposites records the inextricable interdependence of components. The transformation of
quantity into quality defends a systems based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of
state. And the negation of negation describes the direction given to history, because complex systems cannot
revert exactly to previous states (An urchin, 153-4).

Elsewhere, Gould wrote that his theory of punctuated equilibrium, which Moretti draws on
17 Moretti in my interview describing his view on the utility of the dialectic to Marxism.
18 Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson alone have produced a literature on the topic that spans hundreds of pages.

heavily, was influenced by the fact that he learned his Marxism, literally, at his daddys knee
(Sunderland, 108). The role of the dialectic in Morettis work, however, is not restricted to his
deployment of Goulds theories; dialectics, especially the second law of quantity into quality
already occupy an important place in Moretti's paradigm. Whenever he makes his argument
about how a fundamentally new practice of reading is necessary for a larger field of literary
study, he relies on the logic of this second law. When discussing the difference between Eastern
and Western conceptions of the novel, Moretti remarks that size is seldom just sizea story
with a thousand characters is not like a story with fifty characters, only twenty times bigger: its
a different story (The Novel, History and Theory, 6). Moretti is here in his essential
methodological mode a quintessential dialectician, enlarging the literary field of study and
pointing out how the qualities of literature themselves change once new works are considered.
Morettis intersection with the dialectic extends beyond the second law in two important ways:
the analysis of cycle in Graphs and the general rhetorical tool he deploys throughout his work
of an oscillation between alternating positions. Morettis deployment of Braudels notion of
cycle as the hidden thread of literary history (26) is almost indistinguishable from the
Hegelian motto of the motor of the dialectic. Moretti comes close in this analysis to restating
the first law, when he writes Variations in a conflict that remains constant [...] the point is not
who prevails in this or that skirmish but exactly the opposite: no victory is ever definitive [...]
only the abstract pattern reveals the true nature of the historical process (29). Here, as
elsewhere in his oevre, Moretti relies on the figure of an oscillation between extremes but in a
fundamentally non-teleological way; this is a dialectic, it would seem, with an abundance of
theses and antitheses, but no stable synthesis. This non-classical version of the dialectic,
remains, however a dialectic; Moretti, far from abandoning the dialectic, makes instead an
importantly dialectical contribution to literary history.
"Once Again on the 'Crisis of Marxism'"

Often, when Moretti speaks of his intellectual formation, he makes a reference to the Crisis of Marxism,
where In the mid 70's, especially in France and Italy, a lot of Marxist intellectuals started having
stronger and stronger doubts and many of them concluded that Marxism was not a promising theory
and started following different theories.19 On this point, it is fascinating that when Moretti examines
the role of crisis for the Left, he writes
a revolution should be seen neither as a value in itself, nor as a mechanism to generate values: but
fundamentally as the possible consequence of a given set of value in given circumstances. What I have in mind is a
culture of the Left which would consider the moment of crisis neither as the only moment of truth, nor as the
moment of the only truth. For what personal experiences are worth, I can say that this supposed uniqueness, in its
superstitious intractability, has left a deep scar on my generation, in my country: it has blinded us to the reality of
much of the world around us, [] a belief taken to its logical, and pragmatic, conclusions by [] left-wing
terrorism. It is of this unhealthy complicity of melodrama and emptiness that the Left must rid itself [] No tragic
yearning for catastrophe as the well-spring of truth, then: no metaphysical contempt for consequences, no
Baroque delight in exception (The Moment, 9).

Moretti reasonably responds to a romantic, aestheticizing tendency in the Left; however, the irony of
his statements is striking considering his continual return to the Crisis of Marxism as intellectually
formative. This seeming paradox will frame my last analysis namely of the structural characteristics of
Marxism that make it an intellectually fertile environment.
Taking a cue from Moretti's anti-romantic attitude, I will analyze crisis not as a distinctive event in
Marxism, but rather as a structure that has persisted from its origin and that is crucial to its production
of great minds. Althusser, in his lecture on the crisis of Marxism reminds us that Marxism has
experienced other periods of crisis [...] But Marxism survived. We must not be afraid to use the phrase:
it is clear from many signs that today Marxism is once again in crisis (Althusser 1). As David Harvey
explains, From a Marxist perspective, equilibrium is an unusual condition [...] you always have to be
careful from a Marxist perspective not to say, 'Here is the next crisis and its the final crisis' (Harvey
2). Turning this perspective towards itself renders Marxism just as embroiled in perpetual crisis as
Capitalism. Ironically, it is by approaching Marxist crises with the theory of crisis that Marxism
developed for analyzing Capitalism that the fertility of Marxism as a generative intellectual movement
can be best grasped. When reframed in this way, the relevant political question becomes whether the
19 From my interview.

crises of the system are productive. In the case of Marxism, the answer is a decisive yes.
One of Moretti's former students, Steven Johnson, has written a book where he analyzes the productive
characteristics of systems and environments. Innovative environments are better at helping their
inhabitants explore [...] because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts [] and they
encourage novel ways of recombining those parts (41). Marxism classically meets this requirement; it
brings together a diverse group of people under one banner and its revolutionary character forces it to
be constantly interested in new approaches and configurations. For Johnson, fertile environments are
liquid and serendipitous, possessing two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new
connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a 'randomizing' environment that
encourages collisions between all the elements in the system (51). As a broad social movement that
tries to foster class consciousness, Marxism is actively engaged in networking, creating dense networks
that transcend personal categories. In Johnson's theory, innovative environments are tolerant of error; as
he explains it Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore (137). It is here that
Marxism's perpetual instability can be described as a strength; Marxism structurally fails to cohere, but
it is this very failure that produces such a plethora of intellectual responses. Finally, in Johnson's
productive environments, Concepts from one domain migrate to another as a kind of structuring
metaphor, thereby unlocking some secret door that had long been hidden from view (159). Here
Marxism again is an impressive example: materialism, the dialectic and Marx's general program can be
interpreted in such a multitude of ways so as to make exaptation a necessity for every generation trying
to make sense of Marxism.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have attempted to link Franco Morettis fascinating work in literary studies to his
intellectual formation as a Marxist, as present both explicitly in his thought and in his
argumentative style. I have attempted to sketch a picture of what characteristics Marxism as a

system possesses that make the Moretti phenomenon of eccentric, heretical brilliance not a
coincidence, but an almost routine result of the structures of Marxism itself. In Marxism heresy
is not only required, but, in a sense, constitutes true belief.
Further study would be valuable on this question of Marxism as an intellectual environment,
fleshing out in greater detail how Marxism has been able to produce such a preponderance of
great literary minds. Another question for further research concerns the implications of
analyzing Marxism as a system in perpetual crisis; besides being favorable for the formation of
great thinkers, do the environmental characteristics I have described have broader political or
historical meaning for Marxism? I will end with Morettis final words in Graphs, which seem
just as true of my project: Much remains to be done, of course, on the compatibility of the
various models and the explanatory hierarchy to be established among them. But right now,
opening new conceptual possibilities seemed more important than justifying them in every
detail (92).

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