Mohanty and Academic Self-Criticism: A Fitting Conclusion

Chandra Mohanty's Feminism Without Borders represents a fitting conclusion to a semester of feminist theory, as it recapitulates (not without variation) many of the themes that dominate other pieces of third wave feminist writing. Mohanty celebrates difference with the vigor of bell hooks and Audre Lorde, but rather than situate it within a specifically American (and therefore race- and class-dominated) context, she frames it in global terms and emphasizes a postcolonial sensitivity toward the historical and cultural significance of difference. Her militant anti-capitalism also echoes hooks's and Lorde's critiques, and her insistence that feminism should be "without borders" rather than "borderless" echoes the strict writings of Marx himself when he outlines a specifically international (rather than cosmopolitan) model for global Communism in Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. She develops her theory so as to maximize its actual applicability to real socio-political situations (much like Butler does when her theory embeds itself in the contemporary international debate on gender policy in Undoing Gender), providing postcolonial feminist analytics that safeguards against the types of dangerous generalization she outlines in the first chapter. Her book embodies the spirit of postcolonial and metacritical feminism, distilling the useful and applicable aspects of a larger body of scholarship into a single text that revolves around praxis.

One new strain of critique that Mohanty actively engages (which is not as evident in the other works I've mentioned thus far) is a constant an concerted reappraisal of the academy as an institution. Although Robyn Wiegman celebrates academic self-criticism in her essay "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion", she does not actively engage in actual critique herself (which is perfectly fine, as her argument lies elsewhere); Mohanty foregrounds the problem of academic self-criticism, however, devoting quite a bit of thought to the tension between the validation afforded marginalized peoples' studies programs by their position within the academy and the constant pressure for them to de-radicalize. She argues that many women's or ethnic studies programs have become nothing more than token programs, protective facades that prove that an institution is not racist or sexist, and the "race industry" that has developed around the proliferation of such programs is invested in the "management" of racial or ethnic scholarship; in other words, the academy has developed an entire technology for the assimilation of dissenting scholarship and the maintenance of the existing institutional structure because "diversity is always and can only be added on" (Mohanty 211). The narrative of assimilation that Mohanty creates provides justification for her adamant anti-capitalism, as the this problem can only be resolved by revolution and not reform, by the complete restructuring of the institution rather than a change within the existing structure.

This critique of the academy is incredibly compelling, and it is quite likely that the only way for marginalized people's studies programs to avoid this program of forced complicity is a radical overhaul of the institution. Rather than functioning hierarchically and as a cohesive unit, the academy must foster critical dissent within itself, creating an environment of populist politics and knowledge production. The development of women's and ethnic studies (along with the accompanying blurring of disciplinary boundaries) was a good first step toward academic change, but they represented a change in academic focus rather than a methodological shift in scholarship. The work of critical theorists has been around for long enough now that the academy should have had time to change its pedagogical and administrative techniques in order to match such a dramatic shift in the philosophical paradigm. It has thus far failed to do so, however, and a radical revision of academic structure and praxis is long overdue.

Wide Sargasso Sea and Schizophrenia

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism is a ridiculously obscure text with an extremely powerful argument about the nature of schizophrenia and its relationship to production and "madness." To drastically oversimplify their critique of psychoanalysis, they essentially argue that the psychoanalytic structure is based on lack--lack of the phallus, circumscription of life-flows, the privileging of absence over presence and the abstract over the concrete--and does violence to the true nature of desire, which is based on the production (not the representation or expression) of the unconscious within a system of flows that is constantly being disjointed and reconfigured. Schizophrenics refuse to be "Oedipalized," producing individuals within the psychoanalytic framework that seem to have lost touch with reality (either by removing themselves completely from it and becoming "autistic" or acting as if they existed on their own unique plane of reality). Thus schizophrenics become social revolutionaries, as their actions are based on the (innately radical) desiring-production of the unconscious rather than the (ex post facto) applied structure of the Oedipus complex.

This schizoanalytic framework is extremely useful when discussing the question of Antoinette's "madness" in Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette's "madness"--as annoying as it may get, I'm going to continue to put "madness" in quotation marks--reads as a type of schizophrenia: her rapid change in mood,  her disbelief in that which she cannot empirically sense (D&G convincingly argue that not only is the scientific claim to "nonbelief" the last bastion of belief in contemporary society, belief is absurd and completely foreign to the schizophrenic), and her inability to temporally locate herself according to those around her (D&G argue in a very complex and confusing way that the schizophrenic is atemporal according to phallocentric conceptions of chronology but is supremely historical in that he experiences all of history by merit of his constantly shifting subject-position) all characterize her as a type of schizoanalytic heroine. Her alignment with desire (in a less nuanced sense than D&G suggest but desire nonetheless) associates her with revolutionary production, particularly when contrasted with Rochester's Oedipal fixation on order and restriction (demonstrated by his linguistic and bodily imprisoning of Antoinette on the basis of her "madness"). The roots of the conflict between Antoinette and Rochester become clear, then: Antoinette is schizophrenic and poses a radical challenge to the order of Rochester's Oedipal regime. The question still remains, however, as to whether schizophrenia is actually "madness."

D&G would suggest that Antoinette is not mad--she simply refuses Oedipalization. Her connection to desiring-production represents a radical threat that Rochester feels he must contain, but which he ultimately fails to do. In light of the work done by Anti-Oedipus, one can read the ending of Wide Sargasso Sea--Antoinette's arson--not as a destructive act but as a positive act of production-of-consummation. She performs a "disjunctive synthesis," a synthesis that seems destructive (in that it breaks a previously existing connection) but is productive in that it allows for the configuration of a new order of connections. D&G argue that all life is connected and that seeming disjunctions only cause new formations and structures; in fact, they argue that subjectivity resides in the shifting disconnects between desiring machines and that the Subject is always disjunctive. In the context of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette performs a disjunctive act (the burning of Thornfield) in order to posit a new social situation and its accompanying Subject--a social situation that is anti-colonial and anti-phallocentric and a Subject that has freedom and agency.

Women, Madness, and Poetry

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea revolves around Bertha Mason's (or Antoinette Cosway's, as she prefers to be called) upbringing in the West Indies--it's almost a sort of postcolonial Bildungsroman--and her eventual "descent into madness." This narrative is far more complicated than it appears, as much of what constitutes Antoinette's "madness" is a socially imposed pathologization of her identification with non-whites and non-Western culture, and Rhys's interesting narrative style and framing develops a complex system of social relations that makes it difficult to judge the relative sanity of Antoinette, her husband, her servants, etc. An exhaustive interpretation of this social system would not fit in this limited space, so I would like to focus on one small theme in the novel: the interrelatedness of femininity, madness, and poetry.

The association between women and madness might be obvious; being a political (postcolonial, feminist) text, the pathologization of femininity is foregrounded. The only characters presumed to be mad are Antoinette and her mother; despite her husband's alcoholism, his alterity in West Indian culture, and even a few bodily indicators (he is sick with fever for an extended period before he marries Antoinette, which can suggest madness [see  Heart of Darkness]), he is considered perfectly sane within the patriarchal logic of postcolonial white rule. This fits the long history of feminine hysterics in psychological discourse and the narrative terrain of Jane Eyre, the novel to which Wide Sargasso Sea responds. Women and madness are clearly linked.

The connection between women and madness and poetry might be slightly less obvious. While the novel is technically what it claims to be--prose--Antoinette's voice takes on a certain poetic quality the madder she becomes. While her husband's narrative voice is restrained and (chrono)logical, Antoinette's takes on the incoherence and the hyperspecificity of poetry once she is brought to England. When she loses a letter to her brother, she rants to Grace Poole about it: "Where did I hide it? The sole of my shoes? Underneath the mattress? On top of the press? In the pocket of my red dress? Where, where is this letter?" (108). This catalogue of specific possible hiding places is a technique of poetry, which revolves around precision and specificity, rather than prose, which relies more heavily on logical progression.

This engagement with poetry represents a type of structural resistance to patriarchy. While her husband's narrative is prosaic and phallogocentric, Antoinette's is feminine, mad, and poetic. The frame of her story complements its content and gestures toward a feminine language that is fundamentally different from masculine language. Thus the very writing of poetry becomes a resistant act, a medium for the expression of all things non-Western, non-masculine, non-logical.