Politics, subjection and subjectivation: the microphysical corporeality of power in the theatrical works of Arthur Miller

Abstract

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 it is 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 the 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.