The Microphysical Corporeality of Power in the Theatrical Works of Arthur Miller

286 Pages·2008·1.53 MB·English

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Department of American Literature and Culture
School of English

Politics, Subjection, and Subjectivation:
The Microphysical Corporeality of Power in the
Theatrical Works of Arthur Miller

by
Neamat Imam

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

March 2003
Politics, Subjection, and Subjectivation:
The Microphysical Corporeality of Power in the
Theatrical Works of Arthur Miller

Neamat Imam
School of English
Department of American Literature and Culture
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

March 2003
to the memory of the martyrs
of the War of Independence of Bangladesh,
subjects who had comprehended with their blood and existence
what power really means
TITLE OF THE DISSERTATION

Politics, Subjection, and Subjectivation:
The Microphysical Corporeality of Power in the
Theatrical Works of Arthur Miller

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Dr Savas Patsalidis
Professor and Supervisor

Dr Elizabeth Sakellaridou
Professor and Member

Dr Youli Theodosiadou
Associate Professor and Member

DATE OF DEFENSE

The views expressed in this doctoral dissertation
completed in the Department of American Literature and Culture
of the School of English are those of its author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinion of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
N. 5343/32 A. 202 P. 2
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
Abstract

INTRODUCTION
Arthur Miller and Power:
The Stasis of Discourse and the Metastasis of Seduction 1

CHAPTER ONE
The Nazi Apocalypse:
Power, Antisemitism, and the Culture of Denial 34

CHAPTER TWO
McCarthyism: Politics, Polemics, and Control 80

CHAPTER THREE
Fiction and Friction:
The Panoptic Fashioning of the Archbishop’s House 131

CHAPTER FOUR
Capital: Dream, Schizoanalysis, and Subalternization 164

CHAPTER FIVE
Body: Ethics, Instrumentality, and Anatomo-politics 200

EPILOGUE
Memory, Mirror, and the Enigma of the End 246

Works Cited
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

It is my pleasure to mention the generosity of Professor Yiorgos Kalogeras; his unstinting
encouragement of my work places me in his debt. I must also thank my Supervisor
Professor Savas Patsalidis and other two members of the Advisory Committee, Professor
Elizabeth Sakellaridou and Associate Professor Youli Theodosiadou, for their co-
operation. The completion of this work substantially owes to their academic enthusiasm,
suggestion, and moral support. In addition, Professor Karin Boklund and Associate
Professor Domna Pastourmatzi have been two patient mentors. Many thanks to my friend
Kathleen Malone Hart for reading a late draft of the work. I also wish to thank my
graduate friends in the school, who have spent hours in the library locating material for
my study. Back home, I thank Professor Abu Taher Majumder, Professor Khaliquzzaman
Elias, and Professor Harun-ur-Rashid, my esteemed friends and colleagues, for inspiring
me throughout this work.
This project was supported entirely by the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) of the
government of Greece. The General Assembly of the School of English approved two
graduate grants for completion of bibliographical research at the University of Essex and
the University of East Anglia.
A B S T R A C T

This project looks at the theatrical works of Arthur Miller
through the Foucauldian prism. It concentrates on the
correlation, aggrandizement, and sententiousness of
modern power, as it preoccupies Miller’s characters in their
system of embodiment, insurgence for existence, rhetoric
of dilemma, and politics of freedom. On the one hand, the
fantasies as well as the promises of self-stultification of the
characters are observed to corroborate power’s capacity of
control, while, on the other, their condescension as well as
cultivation of resentment is noted as inescapably subsiding
in its playfulness.
Power in Arthur Miller is not power proper, but in its
microphysical technologies and reflective prognosis. It is
not limited to epistemologically developed influential
issues; it rather associates local, marginal, and empirically
unaccounted for uncertainties. It is a power expressed in
subjectivation and exercised through tangential and
nominalistic reciprocation. It plays more with the
proliferation of identity, the consciousness industry, the
vestiges of self-determination, and the discursive stance of
a subject than its scrupulous historico-political role and
condition. It incarcerates the subject’s body, manipulates its
dreams, and outflanks its desires. It engages the subject in a
framework of transaction not only by essentializing in it a
drive of hegemony or resistance, but also by creating a
spell of erotico-masochistic gratification. Invisibility
instead of corporal intervention is its process, normalization
instead of extinction its consequence.
Even in the case of solidified historical crises, i.e., Nazi
transnational aggression, Judeo-Nordic racial confrontation,
McCarthyite polarization of political ideologies, and
frustrating squandering of capital during the Depression,
crises that appear and reappear in Miller’s dramaturgy,
power is fundamentally and predictably manifested at
biopolitical level. It simultaneously engages and interacts
with different conventionally divisible ingredients, i.e.,
nationalism, race, class, gender, thus illegitimizing their
gridline of distinction and further bureaucratizing their
functioning method.
Politics, Subjection, and Subjectivation:
The Microphysical Corporeality of Power in the
Theatrical Works of Arthur Miller
INTRODUCTION
ARTHUR MILLER AND POWER:
The Stasis of Discourse and the Metastasis of Seduction

… the problem before us is how to get rid of the greatest
hindrance to civilization—namely, the constitutional
inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one
another …
Sigmund Freud Civilization, Society and Religion

It’s an interesting problem—whether it matters who anyone
is or what anyone thinks, when all that counts anymore—is
power.
Arthur Miller The Archbishop’s Ceiling

... to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon
other actions is possible—and in fact ongoing. A society
without power relations can only be an abstraction.
Michel Foucault “The Subject and Power”

The proverbial humble subaltern, who never raises his voice
with his equals, let alone his superiors, will abuse his wife
or, as a last resort, kick his dog.
Peter Gay The Cultivation of Hatred

I
“All that counts anymore—is power.” This statement by Arthur Miller proposes an
ideological reading of his works in connection with the technologies of power. His
work straddles nation and nationality, ethnicity and diaspora, government and the
governmental, race, class, and other similar constructs of power. The cultural
moments and components that he has engaged in during his long theatrical career
also express his concerns for both overt and covert trajectories of power. He has
written on Nazi aggression, the schizophrenia of the cold war, and the surveillance
by the House Un-American Activities Committee. American military presence across
The Stasis of Discourse and the Metastasis of Seduction 2
East Asia, dictatorial politics in East Europe, and rise of political conservatism in the
Federal German Republic are a few more domains through which he explains the
problematic engineering of power. Outside theater, as a leading member of PEN and
Amnesty International, Miller has shown particular sensitivity for the condition of
oppressed intellectual and artistic life in various countries. Even now at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, he is greatly occupied with the constraints,
transgressions, and solidification of power’s strategic relations with regard to
infranational and transnational dominations.1
While explaining the conspicuous and transmutable sites formed by
conventional political efforts and imagination, Miller elaborately charts the
microphysical corporeality of power, a power that is embryonic and pervades
consciousness, confession, production of knowledge, formation of discourse, fiction,
and fantasy. By the microphysics of power, I am referring to Michel Foucault’s
poststructural relations of power espoused especially in The History of Sexuality and
Discipline and Punish, according to which power takes hold of the technologies of
the self2 in its transmission. Foucault believes that power is not a possession
discovered, safeguarded, utilized, or controlled by a subject,3 to rule over, dominate,
and exploit another subject engaged in a continuous struggle to acquire, absorb,
conduct, and enjoy it at different corporeal levels. Power is not unitary; it has no
unifying center and does not work through any centralized or totalized system (“Two
Lectures” 214).4 According to Foucault’s biopolitics,5 power cannot be identified
with state, class, hierarchy, race, gender, or any other apparatus that is believed to
create and control the postmodern Other (Power/Knowledge 122).6 As a factor it is
not the product of nor subordinate to another factor or factors. It does not frame the