權力劇場：大衛‧馬梅特之《房地產大亨》及《美國水牛》中的衝突、反抗與傅柯式權力觀

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(1)國立中山大學外國語文研究所碩士論文 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRAGUATE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE NATIONAL SUN YAT -SEN UNIVERSITY. 指導教授: 王儀君 Advisor: Professor Wang I-Chun. 題目：權力劇場：大衛•馬梅特之《房地產大亨》及《美國水牛》中的衝突、反抗與傅柯式權力觀 Title: Theatre of Power: Conflicts, Resistance and Foucauldian Power in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. 研究生: 陳宛伶. 撰. By: Chen Wan-Ling. 中華民國八十九年六月 June 2000.

(2) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I’ve learned that the most precious gift I’ve received is the warm concern and constant encouragement from the following people on my way of bringing this thesis to fulfillment. First and foremost, my gratitude goes to Professor Wang I-chun, my advisor. Without her patient guidance and perceptive advice, I could never be out of the impasse in the process of my thesis-writing. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my oral examiners, Professor Wu Hsin-fa and Professor Liao Pen-shui, whose inspiring questions and invaluable suggestions help better this thesis. I am grateful to my sworn confidants for their lasting friendship and immense support: to Emily Wu, for her steady care and understanding; to Sharon Tseng and Joan Lin, for their collecting important resources; to Gavin Wong and Vincent Tsai, for their careful proofreading at the final stage of the draft; to Leo Chen, Jackie Chen and Irene Wang, for their continual assistance. I wish to thank my musketeers, as well as forever friends, Pao-i Hwang and Grace Lai, for their cherished companionship. I also owe my good friends Ashlee Tai, Gloria Tsai and Jay Lee a great deal. My special thank goes to Eric Chen and Pei-ju Wu for their reading part of my draft and offering advisable opinions. I am deeply and permanently indebted to my parents and siblings. With their indefatigable love and inexhaustible confidence in me, I am always courageous to accept every challenge in my life..

(3) 論文名稱：權力劇場: 大衛•馬梅特之《房地產大亨》及《美國水牛》中的衝突、反抗與傅柯式權力觀頁數：一百二十八頁校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文研究所畢業名稱及提別要：八十八學年度第二學期碩士學位論文提要研究生：陳宛伶指導教授：王儀君教授論文提要本論文旨在以傅柯式權力觀詮讀分析大衛•馬梅特著名之「商業三部曲」中的《房地產大亨》及《美國水牛》。多數的評論家在檢視這兩部劇作中的權力關係時，著重在權力的負面觀念上，例如：剝削與壓制。本文主要探討在《房地產大亨》及《美國水牛》中的人際關係裡之權力正向性，並進而闡明馬梅特的商人角色其自我維護之失敗，乃因運用錯誤的權力策略所導致。傅柯式權力通徹地彰顯出馬梅特式商業世界中權力運作的精密性與權力功效的正面性。緒論一章提及馬梅特之商業戲劇的獨特風格，並指出所選的二部戲劇與傅柯式權力分析觀的關連性。首章概述本文之理論架構，介紹傅柯式權力觀。此章中，除了探論傅柯之權力觀念的變遷和梗概，且提出法律的迂迴論証之權力模型(juridical-discursive model of power)的特質。由此，在接續的次兩章權力分析過程中，揭櫫筆者採傅柯式權力觀為本論文詮解之原因。第二章企圖由《房地產大亨》中一連串的背叛行為來檢視其中的權力關係。為求生存，馬梅特的商人角色以反抗之名為其在權力關係中的反叛行為掩護。第三張主要探討《美國水牛》中角色間的矛盾衝突及精細的權力運作。劇中三位主要角色因無法將友誼與商機間的考量清楚區別，造成物質利益涉入之人際關係的扭曲。經由這二齣權力劇的權力關係探討，結論一章肯定大衛•馬梅特戲劇創作目的已臻至善，倘使其讀者能警覺錯誤的權力策略造就扭曲的人際關係之危機。.

(4) ABSTRACT This thesis is focused on the Foucauldian analysis of power in two of David Mamet’s famous “Business Trilogy” – Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. Most of Mamet’s critics concentrate on the negative notion of power, i.e., exploitation and repression, while examining relations of power in the business worlds of these two plays. The primary concern of this study is to explore the positivity of exercises of power in human relationships in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo and then illuminate the fact that Mamet’s figures of businessmen’s false employment of strategy of power thereupon leads them to fail their self-assertions. Foucauldian analytics of power thoroughly manifests the subtlety of operation of power as well as the productive effects of power in Mametian business world. The introduction mentions the distinctiveness of Mamet’s business plays and explains the connection between these two plays of Mamet and Foucauldian analytics of power. Chapter one deals with an overview of Foucault’s conception of power, which provides a theoretical frame for the body of this study. In this chapter, not only the transformation and the skeleton of Foucauldian power are proffered, but the characteristics of juridical-discursive model of power are also introduced. Therefore, in the following two chapters, the reasons of employing Foucauldian analytics of power for this research are displayed in the process of analyzing exercises of power. The second chapter attempts to exam the power relations from a series of actions of betraying in Glengarry Glen Ross.. It is shown that Mamet’s. businessmen, for the sake of survival, practice betrayals in the light of exercising resistance in relations of power. Chapter three is chiefly concerned.

(5) with the conflicts and delicate exercises of power among the characters in American Buffalo.. The three main characters’ failure of distinguishing. business from friendship causes the distortion of human relations in which material advantages are involved. Throughout the examination of power relations in these two plays of power, the last chapter concludes that David Mamet’s aim of writing plays will be achieved if his readers become to be aware of the danger of wrongly adopting strategies of power in human communities..

(6) Notes on the text (Abbreviation for the text) References to the following works are cited parenthetically in the text: AM Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). DF Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). DM David Mamet: A Casebook, ed. Leslie Kane (New York: Garland, 1992). DMs. David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: Text and Performance, ed. Leslie Kane (New York: Garland, 2000).. DP Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). HS. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).. LF The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. Jeremy Moss (London: Sage Publications, 1998). PK. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).. WW Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1999)..

(7) Table of Contents. Introduction -----------------------------------------------------------------------------1. Chapter One An Overview of Foucauldian Power ------------------------------------------20. Chapter Two: Glengarry Glen Ross: Betrayals as Resistance ----------------------------------------------50. Chapter Three American Buffalo: Where There Is Conflict, There Is Power --------------------------84. Conclusion ----------------------------------------------------------------------------113. Works Cited --------------------------------------------------------------------------123.

(8) Chen 1. Introduction. Though David Mamet started to write plays late until after 1970, his position in American literary or cinema history is publicly recognized as important and influential. C. W. E. Bigsby highly praises Mamet as a “natural successor to such writers as Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill” (Bigsby 63), and Philip Kolin also writes: “If Miller, Williams, and Albee form a first generation triumvirate in the American theatre, then Rabe securely stands with Mamet and Shepard as the triumvirate of the second generation of American playwrights since 1945” (Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama 117). Mamet has worked in the theatre as an actor, director, teacher, playwright, producer, and recently screenplay-adapter. Distinguished themselves by Mamet’s genius for dramaturgy, Mamet’s works not only win him a lot of literary prizes, but three of his adaptations are also nominated for the Academy Awards. Mamet was born of Jewish parents who were children of immigrants from Russia in 1947. When he was sixteen years old, Chicago-born David Mamet became the follower of Bob Sickinger, who is said as the inventor of “Chicago theatre.”1. Significantly, with the lowercase letter. “t,” Chicago “t”heatre means not to serve for the downtown or the so-called “the white-collar.” The experience of being Sickingner’s pupil profoundly influences Mamet’s ideas of dramaturgy. Moreover, Mamet himself actually 1. See William Herman, Understanding Contemporary American Drama (South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1987) 125. It is suggested that “we[Chicago theater] were something new: we were the neighborhood getting together and talking about the world …no Shakespeare in Eton collars, no sex comedies.”.

(9) Chen 2. did many different kinds of jobs to temporarily sustain his life before, like cab driver, short-order cook, factory worker, window washer, land-selling telecommunicator and so on. Hence, it is observed that nearly all characters in Mamet’s plays are not from the high-class, and the sites of the plays are set usually in marginal places, such as a real-estate office (Glengarry Glen Ross), a resale shop (American Buffalo), a radio station (Mr. Happiness), the Lakeboat (Lakeboat), a living room (The Cryptogram) and so forth. Mamet’s characters are “fringe characters” (Language as Dramatic Action 85), according to Mamet’s own notion, and they live on the frontier of society. Mamet asserts, while “looking at a large picture, you don’t go to the top of the foodchain of the King but to the little people,” and he considers that “that which best expresses an integrated idea of the nation is not only those who are in power” (Language as Dramatic Action 85).. Only by demonstrating the. life of these “little people” can Mamet wonderfully examine the unscrupulousness and the corruption of American society. Most of Mamet’s plays provide the readers with morality-corrupted societies, in which people lack the capability of making a good connection with others. They search for a stable relationship with each other; however, in order to preserve their own benefits, they self-contradictorily destroy the companionship they desire to build up. Gradually and naturally, Mamet’s characters tend to be alienated from their true selves and others. Under the pressures from the materialistic society, people have the problem of spiritual absence, and this becomes the main concern of Mamet’s plays. Simply put, Mamet’s work is always thought to be dealing with social issues and spiritual issues as well.. Among all characters in Mamet’s plays, the figures of. businessmen probably can best represent the failure of establishing any.

(10) Chen 3. relationship with other people in social field and the sense of emptiness in their souls. Mamet’s businessmen seek to establish a male bond, yet beneath the surface of the partnership is often a trap. For surviving in the competitive business world, they lose their sense of morality and distort the standards of business ethics.. Betrayals happen all the time, because the culture is corrupt,. and all illegal or immoral means are excused as long as the aim of being wealthy is accomplished. Then why does Mamet often choose the American business world as the main subject of his plays? C. Wright Mills’s statement in White Collar in 1951 would be a good answer for this question: [t]he Salesman’s world has now become everybody’s world, and, in some part, everybody has become a salesman…This is a time of venality…The bargaining manner, the huckstering animus, the memorized theology of pep, the commercialized evaluation of personal traits -- they are all around us; in public and in private there’s the tang and feel of salesmanship. (DM 102) Lately, Anne Dean in her David Mamet: Language As Dramatic Action also points out that Mamet makes an echo to the words of one character who is in Saul Bellow’s Herzog and says, “the life of every citizen is becoming a business.. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the. meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man’s life is not a business” (91). Mamet indicates, “Although you see a play about thieves2…it is not. 2. In Mamet’s plays, some figures of businessmen are portrayed as thieves in order to gain the commercial benefits. For example, in American Buffalo, Don, the owner of the resale shop, plans to steal a nickel back from his customer, and in Glengarry Glen Ross, the real-estate salesmen cooperate to.

(11) Chen 4. [only] about that particular section of society but about ourselves.”. As a. playwright who is full of compassion for human beings, Mamet intends to expose the problems of distorted spirituality and broken human relationship in the materialism-based American society through giving portraits of businessmen. Indeed, Mamet writes many plays that are concerned with businessmen’s life. Ruby Cohn defines Mamet’s American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed-the-Plow as “Business Trilogy” (Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama 59).. With Mamet’s noted specialty of writing male-cast plays,. the violent and competitive culture of American business world is vividly represented. Among the “Business Trilogy,” Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are widely thought to be more popular and powerful. It is undeniable that Glengarry Glen Ross, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and American Buffalo, which won Mamet an Obie as best playwright in 1976, most successfully illustrate the law of jungle in the business world. Based on the male-cast structure, these two plays, in which female characters are put off-stage, also uniquely underscore the masculinity issue through business talk. Speaking of the macho ethos and business ethics in Mamet’s business world, almost every critic will not forget to mention Mamet’s brilliant ability of using obscene language. Mamet’s businessmen usually converse by the coded terminology to prove they are professionals, and filthy words they use to bargain and insult others actually function as the cover of their fear and powerlessness. Though, in fact, they badly long for good communication as. steal the better leads for the sake of surviving in that office..

(12) Chen 5. well as friendship or companionship, they still make their words untruthful with their mind. Besides the language-analysis, some critics analyze Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo through the angle of capitalism; Michael L. Quinn tries to read the plays through the aspect of realism3; some others discuss the contact and the moral issues, and recently, Leslie Kane, perhaps the critic who knows Mamet best, observes Mamet’s work from the perspectives of ethnicity (Judaism) and ethics in her latest book on Mamet– Weasels and Wisemen. In an interview with Leslie Kane in 1990, Gregory Mosher, the director who cooperates with David Mamet many times, reveals the content of a letter written by Mamet. In the letter, Mamet indicates his ideas about Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo: [l]ook, this[Glengarry Glen Ross] is not a play about love. American Buffalo is a play about love…This is a play about power. This is a play about guys, who when one guy is down, the other guy doesn’t extend a hand to help him back up. This is a play where the guy who’s up then kicks the other guy in the balls to make sure that he stays down. (DM 239) Mamet manifestly points out the spirits of these two plays. In Henry I. Schvey’s journal article entitled “Power Plays: David Mamet’s Theatre of Manipulation,” both Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are defined as “power plays.” 3. Although the author offers a detailed observation of the. See Michael L. Quinn, “Anti-Theatricality and American Ideology: Mamet’s Performative Realism.” Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, ed. William W. Demastes (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1996) 235-54..

(13) Chen 6. essence of American business, he still gives no explanation for the reason why they are “power plays.” Also as for the power games that always occur in the two plays, surprisingly, Schvey doesn’t thoroughly discuss the tension between the power-players/businessmen, and the pattern of the power practice, which I consider is the most interesting part, is not touched upon at all. Briefly, the trace of any theoretical power analysis of Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo is rarely suggested in this article. Among the few critics concerning power mechanism in Mamet’s work, Pascale Hubert-Leiber clearly demonstrates the mechanism of power by the teacher-student paradigm to probe Mamet’s plays, and this analysis is partly based on Michel Foucault’s theory of power. Through the pattern of question-answer, the exercise of power takes actions upon the teacher and the student as well, and the question of who takes the role of the dominator helps set up a hierarchy of power in the human relationship. In Hubert-Leiber’s article entitled “Dominance and Anguish: The Teacher-Student Relationship in the Plays of David Mamet,” only American Buffalo is inspected through the eye of Foucault’s theory of power; however, Glengarry Glen Ross, which should be a good instance to be indicated by theories of power as Mamet declares -- “this is a play about power” (DM 239), is little touched upon. Glengarry Glen Ross is centred on power games in which the participants want to establish themselves images of power. Moreover, this play also represents a very complete and typical practice of power in the capitalistic world, in which a hierarchy of power is firmly established. Likewise, in Don’s resale shop in American Buffalo, power relations are founded.

(14) Chen 7. everywhere. In order to affirm his identity of dominator or controller, each character strives to practice influential and powerful actions upon others, and in that process he has to struggle in the power structure, so that a hierarchy of power naturally is built up. Therefore, responding to Mamet, in this study I intend to illustrate reasons why Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are plays about power. In the first chapter of this research, an overview of Foucault’s theory of power will be generally introduced. Since, as I mentioned above, both Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are located in competitive business worlds, the problem of struggling in power relations is easily seen inside the system of capitalism. According to Foucault’s inaugural lecture in the Collge de France –“The Order of Discourse,” discourse is constituted by the exercise of power and desire. The relationship between power and desire is just like a tug of war in which each side wants to grasp more possibly-developed space than the other. Objects (the desire side) existing in that discourse must be disciplined by the authorities of power in order to become the appropriate production for the discourse. Consequently, the tense power relations between disciplinary power and desire are understandable. It is safe to make an assumption that power relations can be found in any social relations, and the two business worlds in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are no exceptions. In order to survive in the jungle-like business world, each character, according to his interests, attempts to be the dominator to control others as well as the whole circumstance. As Foucault’s conception of power suggests that power relations sometimes pass through the system of communication, the dialogues between Mamet’s.

(15) Chen 8. characters are always business talks.. While applying business talks, we. know the exertion of power-exercising is inherently operating along with it. The real thoughts behind the words are skillfully and intentionally hidden from the addressees by the addressers.. In other words, the utterances businessmen. speak serve to conceal the truth instead of revealing the truth. When personal benefits are involved in the power relations, there’s no trust in human relationships. Inside the discourse of business world, everyone is forced to attend to the bloody power games without self-consciousness.. Foucault. overthrows traditional analysis of power, which claims that power is an object to possess, and he emphasizes that “power is exercised rather than possessed” (DF 21).. If power is possessed by some specific person or agent, the. practice of power will cease, and surely there’s no existence of power anymore. Accordingly, power is a set of actions which are (re)acted upon other actions; thus, power is not a thing to be gained but a relation which exists only when it is in operation. In this study I will point out how the practice of power keeps on exercising in the two plays and how the dominator and the dominated can exchange their roles instantly. Supposing that power is a relation and it appears anywhere, then where should we start to analyze the mechanism of power? Foucault’s answer is “power is analyzed as coming from the bottom up.” Jana Sawicki makes a clear explanation of this point that “Foucault’s ‘bottom-up’ analysis of power is an attempt to show how power relations at the microlevel of society make possible certain global effects of domination, such as power class and patriarchy” (DF 21). In Mamet’s business world, there is a hierarchy in each power relation, and the system of capitalism is full of patriarchic atmosphere. In addition to this, Mamet’s preference for choosing “fringe characters” to.

(16) Chen 9. cast his plays, which has been mentioned above, confirms the idea that to read Mamet’s plays with an overall view, Foucault’s theory of power provides a good observation post. Insisting that power is a relation and power comes from the lower status of power hierarchy, Foucault also points out a new conception of power that “power is not primarily repressive but productive” (DF 21).. To this point,. power can be no more simply negative as the traditional analysis suggests. Power has effects on both bodies and souls of individuals, and on this point, it is proposed that resistance comes out along with the exercise of power. This is why power is productive as well as positive. In other words, repression is not the only form that power takes. Foucault indicates that “there are no relations of power without resistance; the later are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised” (Wickham 163). In this regard, individuals who notice they themselves are dominated by some authoritative power will think about taking actions to resist the stress and control. With the forces of resisting, power becomes a bi-directed or a multiple relationship among the subjects of power. Mamet’s businessmen in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, though occupy the lower positions in the hierarchy of power, do not give up any chance to make resistance. Some of them even lay out illegal plans in order to rebel against the dominating authority or to win (back) the roles of dominator in a relation of power. In Glengarry Glen Ross, the theft is planned and then takes place; however, in American Buffalo, the arranged robbery does not happen. The desire of making resistance does exist in any power relations, anyhow. It is found that the action of resisting is actually the action of betraying as well on some level. Conspiracies become techniques.

(17) Chen 10. of power in the name of resistance in both plays. To carefully analyze the power relations in the capitalistic business world, I would like to separately detect the issue of power from the actions of resisting and the occurrence of conflicts in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. In my observation, these two plays proceed by a set of actions of betrayals, which serves to be strategies of making resistance; therefore, to perceive why and how resistance occurs provides us with a good stand to view the overall operation of power. Apart from the analyses of power relations in the two plays, the issue of self-assertion will also be included in the discussion. Mamet’s men in these power games shake others’ identities, but their own identities are seriously argued by others at the same time. In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault states: This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks himself by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.. (AM 420). Being effects of power and production of discourse, businessmen in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, encounter challenges of struggling against subjecting themselves as effects of subjection. The problem of establishing a self-identity has a strongly relative connection with the operation of power in the sophisticated and competitive business world..

(18) Chen 11. In both plays, nearly all characters endeavor to subjugate others, since they believe that is the only way to successfully claim their own self-assertions and effectively protect their self-identities from being quaked by others. Nonetheless, their strategies of power evidently do not accomplish their aims, and it is depicted that the illegal means they adopt lead them to a failure of self-assertion-making. In fact, there is no lack of production of plays which deal with business world and the American dream while we look back on American history of drama. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which is produced about twenty-six years earlier than American Buffalo and thirty-five years earlier than Glengarry Glen Ross, might be regarded as the most impressive reflection of businessmen’s life. Both Miller and Mamet point out the failure of the American dream myth and the cruelty in capitalistic society. Similarly, Willy Loman and Mamet’s businessmen are forced to sell as best as they can. They are not only businessmen but also great storytellers. Anne Dean suggests that “when asked what Willy Loman actually sold; his[Arthur Miller’s] answer: ‘Himself,’” and she also indicates that Mamet’s opinion recalls to Miller’s answer: [t]he men I was working with could sell cancer…They were amazing. They were a force of nature. These men…were people who had spent their whole life in sales, always working for a commission, never working for a salary, dependent for their living on their wits, on their ability to charm. They sold themselves.. (Language As. Dramatic Language 196) Besides, in Leslie Kane’s Weasels and Wisemen, it’s suggested that Mamet tells Mary Cantwell “Glengarry is an extrapolation of Willy’s scene with.

(19) Chen 12. Howard,” and he believes “ ‘Shelly the Machine’ Levene and Willy Loman are the same guy, except my [Mamet’s] play deals with him at work” (64). The last name “Loman” suggests us the expression of “low man,” and Mamet’s Shelly (Levene), like Miller’s Willy, also occupies the lower position on the “board” of power struggling. So far, it seems that the themes of Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are entirely the same, then a question is raised here: in what way are Mamet’s these two plays distinguished among other plays? To answer this question, we shall first notice that the date of Willy’s business world and that of Mamet’s businessmen’s business world are set in different periods. When the play begins, Willy is an old man who is in his sixties. And according to Miller’s description, Willy should start his work as a businessman around the 1910s. Working as a traveling salesman for thirty-six years, Willy, who experiences the economic depression4 and the two world wars, firmly believes the American dream in his whole life. To be concise, the business world in which Willy exists is set around the early twentieth or mid-twentieth century. Comparatively, Mamet’s business world obviously is dated after the mid-twentieth or in the late twentieth century, and his men are much younger than Willy Loman is. Nevertheless, no matter which era, these businessmen all embrace the American dream, which teaches them that everyone has an opportunity of succeeding in the pursuit of wealth. 4. The great Depression is dated to start in 1929. And from one of Willy Loman’s speech, it is proved that Willy does experience the period of the recession. Willy says, “…Your father -- in 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions.” (The Bedford Introduction to Drama 779)..

(20) Chen 13. Though time keeps moving on, it seems that the belief of American dream myth has never been shaken, and the danger of this is what Mamet plans to point out through these two plays. “The whole Horatio Alger myth5 in America is false…” says Mamet, “Calvin Coolidge once said ‘The business of America is business.’. The ethics of the business community is that you can. be as predatory as you want within a structured environment” (Carroll 32). For Mamet, the false belief which guarantees material successes will bring love and personal integrity cannot be more strongly rooted in American’s mind while it is sponsored by Mr. President. In addition to the difference of background, Death of a Salesman primarily deals with family relationship, yet both of Mamet’s plays mainly focus on social sphere/working places -- the real-estate office and the junk shop. Willy is the only salesman in the play, and he fights for his family by himself (Howard Wagner is not Willy’s partner due to his official position as the boss).. Parallel to Willy Loman’s situation, Mamet’s businessmen have. options to choose establishing partnership with other colleagues or not. Usually when cooperation arises, they converse and work in pairs. They get together as a group or a team to make benefits, and this partnership could be reliable only when they make sure they would not be betrayed or taken advantage of by their partners. To sum up, Willy Loman works alone, so in Death of a Salesman the communion issue is not the main point; however, in Mamet’s two plays, the concept of working groups or teams cannot be. 5. In The American Dream in the Great Depression, it is noted that the name -- Horatio Alger “has become synonymous with the rags-to-riches story” (11)..

(21) Chen 14. neglected in these businessmen’s mind; thus, the communion issue and businessmanship issue have significant meanings. Guido Almansi, in “David Mamet, a Virtuoso of Invective,” asserts: Although Miller’s play has aged remarkably well, it seems rather irrelevant and inadequate to the problem of businessmanship, as if it were mainly a question of locomotion -- aching feet after carting heavy suitcases of samples and tired eyes from driving too long. These are mere side-effects.. As to the qualities of a salesman,. Miller mentions only sympathy, i.e., the passive capacity to ingratiate oneself to a customer. There is nothing about the active requirements to the profession: persuasion, aggressiveness, tenacity, imagination, eloquence, and shamelessness. (204) Mamet’s men, who are trained to be “professional,” get together only when they pursue the same profits, but this does not show the assurance that this bond will last to the next moment. It is noticed that only present actions are counted in business world whereas individuals are valued by what they do at the current moment. As Teach in American Buffalo says, “The Past is Past, and this is Now, and so Fuck you” (16), Mamet’s businessmen live purely at the present moment. Consequently, the actions of betraying keep on happening in the two plays. To preserve the chance of survival, most people seek every possible venal trick to exclude others out of the competitive business world. In an interview, Mamet informs “the play [Glengarry Glen Ross] concerns how business corrupts, how the hierarchical business system tends to corrupt. It becomes legitimate for those in power in the business world to act unethically” (DM 123).. Furthermore, in Mamet’s essay entitled “In the.

(22) Chen 15. Company of Men,” he says: Men get together under three circumstances. Men get together to do business.. Doing business is not devoid of fun. It gives us. [men] a sense of purpose…Men also get together to bitch. We say, ‘What does she want?’ … The final way in which men get together is for That Fun which Dare Not Speak Its Name, and which has been given the unhappy tag ‘male bonding.’ (A Whore’s Profession 280-81) Referring to these statements, Zeifman suggests that the three circumstances mentioned above are all sited in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. By borrowing Eve Sedgwick’s term6, he defines the business world in the two plays as a “homosocial” society, in which “Mamet’s businessmen are both deeply misogynistic and deeply homophobic” (DM 126).. Truly, Mamet’s. genius for describing male ethos is a well-known event, and in these two plays, it is detected that many female-discriminated words appear in the dialogues. Those words are referred to as the males who are incompetent to do business well. In other words, those who are the addressees of female-discriminated words are thought to possess no skills and talent to sell, and the balls 7. 6. Zeifman cites Sedgwick’s definition of “homosocial” that, “‘Homosocial’ is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with ‘homosocial,’ and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from ‘homosexual.’ In fact, it is a applied to such activities as ‘male bonding,’ which may, in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia…” (DM 125). 7. Quoted from Don’s speech in American Buffalo. Don says at the very beginning of the play that, “…Bob, and this is what I am getting at. Skill..

(23) Chen 16. (manhood), which are considered to be the so-called businessmanship in this all-male society. There is an inseparated relationship between maleness and salesmanship in the cannibal world of capitalism. Individuals exploit each other for the sake of survival, because the allowance of surviving in this world is judged by how much wealth one makes or robs from others 8.. Precisely. speaking, Mamet’s business world suggests a single-gendered battleground from which feminine ethos must be expelled. After inspecting the relative connection between masculinity and businessmanship in these two plays, we should not overlook the status and influence of the opposite sex -- female in power relations among Mamet’s business“men.” If Mamet attempts to establish a hierarchy of power in the male-cast world, then does he also want to construct a patriarchic relationship between the two sexes? There are only three female figures mentioned in the two plays, and compared with the thirteen male figures onstage, they are grouped as the minority. Mamet’s arrangement of these three characters thus illustrates his attitudes toward women in men’s business world. In February 1999, Mamet refuses to let his male-cast plays be staged by the five women who belong to the QuintEssential Theatre Company. According to the report from Boston Harold, Mamet says the men in his plays must be, well, men, manly men. Skill and talent and the balls to arrive at your own conclusion…” (4). 8. In his article entitled “Phallus in Wonderland: Machismo and Business in David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross,” Hersh Zeifman indicates Mamet’s assertion that “To me the play [Glengarry Glen Ross] is about a society with only one bottom line: how much money you make” (DM 123)..

(24) Chen 17. Otherwise, it would be like the tail Wagging the Dog…. Manly and mad Mamet had his agent tell the company his client ‘does not permit any gender changes.’ The Pulitzer Prize-winner author of such macho plays as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross apparently decide women were breaching his artistic integrity. 9 Therefore, many critiques label Mamet as a sexist and accuse him of being a woman-hated playwright, not to mention the comments from the actresses of the QuintEssential Theatre Company. However, in my observation, Mamet is never a woman-hater that he even makes his three women in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo powerful and influential to the other sex. In the essay entitled “Women,” Mamet never forgets to give attention to lots of women’s superior qualities to men’s. There he writes, “Men have a lot to learn from women. Men are the puppydogs of the universe. Men will waste their time in pursuit of the utterly useless simply because their peers are all doing it. Women will not…” (A Whore’s Profession 241).. To accuse Mamet. of being as a women-hated playwright is obviously not objective. Although Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo cast only male figures, and Mamet seems to intentionally make female figures absent in these plays, it is still too arbitrary to affirm that Mamet is definitely a sexist. Mamet’s female characters are not described as powerless, and though they are severely discriminated in Mamet’s male characters’ talks, they display these men’s incompetence actually.. 9. See Sullivan, Paul. “Playwright Nixes Female Gender Bender.” Boston Herald (10 Feb. 1999): n. pag. Online. Northern Light. 23 Mar. 1999..

(25) Chen 18. Despite the fact that female figures are arranged to be off-stage, they are not really absent in the play. Their voices, which usually are heard through the male characters’ mouths, are absolutely powerful, and their words indeed make great influences on the endings of the two plays. Additionally, those male characters cannot ignore the powerful effects behind these women’s words. In Glengarry Glen Ross, Roma, a patriarchal male figure, tries to fight with the only woman and excludes her outside the macho business world, yet he fails. In American Buffalo, Teach keeps on insulting the two absent female characters because he cares much about their belittlement of him. To conclude, it is interesting that Mamet’s real intention is to make female characters powerful in these plays, although meanwhile very few female characters under his depiction develop their career as his male characters do. In the discussion of power relations in the businessmen’s world, the power relations in which Mamet’s silent female protagonists join will not be omitted. At last, after giving a general introduction to Michel Foucault’s analytics of power in the first chapter and separately analyzing resistance as well as conflicts in the power relations in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo in next two chapters, I will firstly provide a brief review of these chapters in the closing chapter of this study.. Moreover, I plan to elucidate Mamet’s. intention of writing these violent macho plays in which power exercises all the time and in which men cannot find their real self-worth and self-identities as well. Though proffering the obscene language, which these characters use, and the condemned corruption of American business ethics, Mamet does not purposely want his readers to learn to see the world with a passive view. In.

(26) Chen 19. his prose entitled “Semantic Chicken,” Mamet asserts: The purpose of the theater, as Stanislavsky said, is to bring to light the life of human soul; and the theater, essentially and even today, possesses this potential. Alone among community institutions the theater possesses the power to differentiate between truth and garbage… (Writing in Restaurants 68) Mamet’s plays serve to bring people hopes to deal with the spiritual and social problems, such as the problems which are presented in American Buffalo: the corruption of business ethics, the failure of mutual communication with people, and so on. Mamet considers that “It’s not the dramatist’s job to bring about the social change” (Three Uses of the Knife 26), and “The power of the dramatist, and of the political flack therefore, resides in the ability to state the problem” (30). We, thus, read or watch Mamet’s plays and then notice Mamet’s request for a solution. In order to solve the problems, we analyze and be concerned for our society, and at the same time Mamet’s purpose of writing plays is completed..

(27) Chen. 20. Chapter One An Overview of Foucauldian1 Power. “One doesn’t have here a power which is wholly in the hands of one person who can exercise it alone and totally over the others. It’s a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised….Power is no longer substantially identified with an individual who possesses or exercises it by right of birth; it becomes a machinery that no one owns. Certainly everyone doesn’t occupy the same position…” --Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power”2. The conceptions of power have always been the main issues in which many political and sociological philosophers are interested for a long time. As we can see, in our daily life the exercises of power occur almost everywhere and anytime. Throughout human history, the fact that different modes of mechanisms of power are practiced in the relationships between husbands and wives, fathers/mothers and sons/daughters, teachers and students, employers and employees, the colorless and the colored, and countries and countries; therefore, the philosophers’ discussions of power issues never cease in the field of humanity sciences.. Michel Foucault, who is publicly recognized as one of. 1. I adopt Simon During’s and Jana Sawicki’s ways of terming Foucault’s conception “Focauldian.” See Simon During, “Post-Foucauldian Criticism: Government, Death, Mimesis,” Genealogy and Literature, ed. Quinby Lee (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1995) 71-95 and Jana Sawicki, “Feminism and the Power of Focauldian Discourse,” After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. Arac Jonathan (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988) 161-178. 2. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980) 156. This citation is quoted from the conversation with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot..

(28) Chen. 21. the most important philosophers in the twentieth century, though not the first person who exposes the question of power, provides a “new” analysis of power which makes great impacts upon human sciences studies. The word “new” here means Michel Foucault abandons conventional assumptions of power and intends to analyze the notion of power from an angle which is not ever taken by others before. The mechanism of power, according to Foucault, should not purely be observed with an economic concern or simply by any political understandings. Otherwise, the studies of power would be limited to deal with, if not the class domination, then the State or the laws only. What makes Foucault’s analytics of power significant is it is centred on the dynamics of power. As Foucault himself points out in an interview, most of the other theories dealing with power are problematic; there he indicates: It is hard to see where, either on the Right or the Left, this problem of power could then have been posed. On the Right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, etc., that is, in juridical terms; on the Marxist side, it was posed only in terms of the State apparatus.. The way power was exercised – concretely and in. detail – with its specificity, its techniques and tactics, was something that no one attempted to ascertain; …power in Western capitalism was denounced by the Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power in themselves were never analyzed. (PK 115-16) Both the notion of “liberation” of the Right side and the sentiment of “repression” of the Left side are excluded from Foucault’s discussion of power. On the basis of Foucault’s understanding of power, the effects of power are not.

(29) Chen. 22. limited to be that the dominators possess something called “power” to repress and the dominated subordinate or dream about the liberation from the oppression. By now, the definition of power is redefined by Michel Foucault; firstly, power is not an object which can be possessed by someone or some groups anymore, and secondly, the effects of power are not negative but positive by nature in fact. Foucault says: In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of prohibition…If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?” (PK 119) Foucault challenges the notion of traditional political theories of power that all the exercises of power which are presumed to be essentially negative are formed through control, prohibition, surveillance, repression or punishment, and so on. “What we need,” Foucault declares, “however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that still to be done” (PK 121). Most of the social scientists will agree that Michel Foucault starts his analyses of power with his publication of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in 1975 and accomplishes his study of power in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I one year later. However, as a matter of fact, the first time when Michel Foucault publicly mentions his conception of power should be dated in 1970 at the Collège de France where he delivers his.

(30) Chen. inaugural lecture – “The Order of Discourse.”. 23. In this speech, Foucault. expounds his speculations not only on discourse but also on power. Although the issue of power is just relatively and limitedly illustrated there, Foucault still provides us with a brief introduction to power as well as a general skeleton of Foucauldian power. Foucault links the construction of discourse to the exercise of power in “The Order of Discourse” and points out the inseparable relation between them. Accordingly, a discourse which can be heard and spoken is the production of the operation of desire and power. The institutions, standing for the forms of power, make the exercises of power start with the acts of “censoring” discourses, and discourses, which desire to be “infinitely open,” are controlled and restricted somehow. Foucault manifestly writes, “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 52). From this perspective, we learn that the circulation of discourses has in advance been restrained and controlled by masterful institutions, which by taking procedures of exclusion, division, or rejection decide what is allowed to be revealed and what is forbidden to be apprehended. Clearly, inside the order of discourse, exercises of power involving desires are constantly operating. In 1972, Foucault has a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, concerning the issues of intellectuals and power. Foucault’s growing interests in the theme of power are more evidently observed from this conversation. Starting from discussing the position and responsibilities of consciousness of intellectuals,.

(31) Chen. 24. the two philosophers then shift the gist to the system of power. Foucault doesn’t agree that the questions of power have been fully answered by Marx and Freud, and he declares: The question of power remains a total enigma. …We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power…we know that it is not in the hands of those who govern… No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power; and yet it is always exerted in a particular direction, with some people on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power. (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 213) Foucault affirms that power is no more an object which can be possessed by someone or some groups. By nature, power is an exercise operated by institutions or individuals that stand at different places inside the structure of power. The publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975 directly declares Foucault’s strong concern for the issue of power. The development of penal systems in the Western society is the main task which Discipline and Punish deals with, and in the text Foucault also outlines his observations about the complex of punishment through which mechanisms of disciplinary power are covertly established.. Foucault starts his analyses of exercises of power with. Jeremy Bentham’s device of surveilling architecture – the “Panopticon” at the end of the eighteenth century. In fact, as Jeremy Bentham himself proclaims, the design of the Panopticon is his brother’s idea while visiting the Military School, and it is proposed to attain the balance between the expenditures of.

(32) Chen. 25. “gaze” and the cost of space. To speak it more clearly, the invention of the Panopticon is meant to produce the most effective results by the lowest cost. In a conversation with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot, Foucault points out the principle of the Panopticon below: A perimeter building in the form of a ring. At the center of this, a tower, pierced by large windows opening on to the inner face of the ring. The outer building is divided into cells each of which traverses the whole thickness of the building. These cells have two windows, one opening to the inside, facing the windows of the central tower, the other, outer one allowing daylight to pass through the whole cell. All that is then needed is to put an overseer in the tower and place in each of the cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, a worker or a schoolboy. …In short, the principle of the dungeon is reversed; daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which afforded after all sort of protection. (PK 147) Therefore, if the Panopticon is applied to the system of prisons, a subtle relationship between gazers/prison guards and the gazed/ prisoners is developed. As stated in Discipline and Punish, this subtle relationship is one type of power relations. Since each gaze upon the prisoners functions as a technology of observing each prisoner’s behaviors, the effects of this power relation are clearly shown -to discipline the gazed and make the gazed discipline themselves at the same time. Foucault calls this mode of power relation as “disciplinary power.” We have to bear in mind that the design of the Panopticon concerns the continuous operation of visibility and invisibility; therefore, those who lack the.

(33) Chen. 26. visibility are made as the objects and agents of this mode of power. Continuing using the example of the prison system, we discover that criminals jailed in little cells facing the central watching tower cannot sense whether or when they are gazed/watched by the prison watchers. As a consequence, the surveillance is supposed to be constant, and the criminals must always be aware of their own manners. Through such power of surveillance, the chief aim of punishment or the so-called prison system is not to torture the criminals’ bodies but to help them make “corrections” of psyches. In brief, the objects of the penal system have transformed from criminals’ physical bodies to their souls, even though we have to confess that along with the transformation of the goal of the penal system, the prisoners’ bodies are still the most immediate objects in the penal processes.. For instance, their bodies are demanded to labor, their sexual. desires cannot be satisfied, each of their movements is judged and controlled and so forth. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that the treatment of criminals is improved, and on the same basis, the treatment of patients of mental illness in medical system, the management of soldiers in military system, or the treatment of schoolchildren in educational system will make progress too. As Barry Smart denounces, “we may still punish but we seek to obtain a cure” (Smart 75). What Foucault tends to suggest is an efficient technique of establishing a disciplinary society. Surveillance becomes a method that helps construct a disciplinary power. Whether being under the surveillance or not, the gazed prisoners, losing communication with others, will discipline themselves all the time. Roy Boyne states, “it [the surveillance power] is a general mechanism known through its effects rather than its presence at a given point” (Boyne 110). To be concise, Foucault demonstrates how and why.

(34) Chen. 27. vision becomes a form of power in Discipline and Punish, and both the gazers and the gazed are inevitably caught up in this form of power. Moreover, Foucault also points out an important event that the prime effect of disciplinary power is the production of individuality3. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, published in 1976, can be taken as a companion to Discipline and Punish. In this book, Foucault spends more than the space of two chapters on illustrating his conception of power. We can safely conclude that Foucault’s conception of power has developed to be much more complete and comprehensive than before at this time. “In Discipline and Punish,” David R. Shumway states, “we saw how the disciplinary techniques could constitute the individual as an object to be judged, measured, and examined. In The History of Sexuality, we saw how the individual is constituted as a speaking and desiring subject with an inner realm of experience that the confession reveals” (Shumway 146). Like Discipline and Punish, which discusses not only the techniques of imprisonment but also the main effect of the practice of power -- the individuality, the first volume of The History of Sexuality stresses Foucault’s emphases on the question of sexuality in Western culture as well as the constitution of subjectivity, which is the ongoing conception of individuality.. 3. Foucault claims, “The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects.” Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power, and the Subject (New York: New York UP, 1997) 73..

(35) Chen. 28. The question to the past theoretical studies on sexuality opens the introduction of The History of Sexuality. For a long time, in the Western society, most people have come to agree that the topic of sex or sexuality has been a prohibited subject of discourses. Generally speaking, the notion of sex is asked to be silent and is confined by the conventional thoughts. To make remarks of sex a taboo, people believe sex and the history of sexuality are repressed. However, Foucault doesn’t intend to tell us how and why this repression happens; instead, he is more interested in why people accept the notion of repression of sex(uality). He states: The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we silence? And we do all this by formulating the matter in the most explicit term, by trying to reveal it in its most naked reality, by affirming it in the positivity of its power and its effects. (HS 8-9) It is not denied by Foucault that there is an existence of sexual repression. But what he wants to lay more emphases on is that people should get rid of the preoccupation which tells them that they are already at the position of the repressed.. Only when this presumption is taken away can people fairly. analyze the relationship between sex and power. In this perspective, the definition of power is redefined after being free from the control of the established discourses on power. Foucault’s conception of power abandons the notion of repression, just as.

(36) Chen. 29. his analysis on sexuality rejects the repressive hypothesis. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault carefully investigates the differences between “juridical-discursive power,” which is termed by himself, and his own analytics of power. I plan to present those differences between the two types of power which are laid out by Foucault in the later part of this chapter. By this time, I would like to indicate the main transformations of Foucault’s earlier thesis on power to his “later” work. “Later” work here is assumed as The History of Sexuality Volume I. It is a well-accepted fact for many social-scientific critics that Foucault’s latter-day conception of power makes some differences from his earlier thoughts about power, and to speak it more precisely, Foucault’s thesis on power becomes more matured and complete than before 4. Here I do not intend to point out each difference between his earlier and latter works on power, but I would like to provide Jeremy Moss’s observation of Foucault’s transformation of issue of power. Jeremy Moss suggests two points of Foucault’s main conceptual changes. As he himself claims, the first change concerns Foucault’s ontology of freedom. There he remarks, “A defining feature of power for the later Foucault is that subjects have the possibility of 4. Facing the questioning about his extendedly-changing conceptions of power, Foucault makes a humorous answer, “You see, that’s why I really work like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. That’s the reason also why, when people say, ‘Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,’ my answer is [Laughter] ‘Well, do you think I have worked like all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?’ This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?” See Philip Barker, Michel Foucault: Subversions of the Subject (London: Harvest Wheatsheaf, 1993) 84..

(37) Chen. 30. not just reacting to power, but of altering power relationships as well” (LF 5). Returning back to the ideal of the Panopticon, we learn that according to the hierarchy of the system of surveillance, the watched does not have any opportunity to escape from the gazes from the watchers. Possibly each movement of the watched is observed, since the watchers’ action of surveillance is supposed to be constant and continuous. Opposing to the watched, in the system of surveillance, the watchers own the opportunity of deciding when to watch, or to watch or not. To this extent, the watchers are active in the process of reacting to power, yet the watched are comparatively passive.. Such an operation of power is sort of being single directional. In. Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, the idea of resistance is originally suggested for the first time. Jeremy Ross states, “Foucault moved away from the rhetoric of Discipline and Punish where power seemed to constitute individuals, without there being much opportunity to resist power, to a position where individuals have the scope to refuse the regulation of apparatuses of power” (LF 5). The subjects who are involved in any power relations play the passive roles no more; on the contrary, they have the possibility to “actively” exercise resistance to change their statuses in the power relations. Except for the new proposition of the existence of resistance in power relations, the other main modification Jeremy Ross observes is that Foucault investigates “intra-subjective relationships” more deeply and makes it more active as well. Before this point is indicated, Foucault only puts his emphases on the forms which the exercises of power take and the effects of power. The inner selves of the subjects of power are not mentioned too much. The.

(38) Chen. previous example of the management of imprisonment presents this lack.. 31. All. the techniques of disciplinary power, such as prohibition, rejection, and surveillance, chiefly attempt to make the normalization of individuals. Therefore, along with the publication of The History of Sexuality, the conception of subjectivity strengthens Foucault’s analytics of power, and this point has been remarked upon in the preceding paragraph already. In other words, what we detect from the exercise of power will be just the surface if we neglect to explore the subjects’ freedom of working on the selves. Moss responds to Foucault that “subjects need to be able to have the potential to reflect on and ultimately, to ‘work on’ their own capacities so as to have the potential to reject unwanted forms of identity” (LF 6). To sum up, the active intra-subjective relationships are also the important scopes to seek while we are analyzing exercises of power. As illustrated in the previous paragraphs, the origins and transformations of Michel Foucault’s thesis on power are briefly introduced. Foucault asserts, “It’s impossible to get the development of productive forces characteristic of capitalism if you don’t at the same time have the apparatuses of power” (PK 158). In this study, therefore, I propose to read Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo with my reading of Michel Foucault’s analytics of power. Both plays provide the readers with capitalistic worlds in which the characters of businessmen are involved in power relations for the sake of survival. The main features of Foucault’s analytics of power will help offer detailed observation on the power relations of the two plays. In the next section of this chapter, I will present a distinct map of Foucauldian power so that we shall understand what the nature of power is and how power works by Foucault’s account..

(39) Chen. 32. General Introduction to Foucauldian Analytics of Power. To demonstrate the framework of orthodox Foucauldian power, I intend to concentrate my discussion mainly on some interviews with Foucault and his lectures as well as Foucault’s texts on power, which surely are proposed to be his later works. Certainly, while mapping the framework, not only the resources above will be implied, in order to help understand Foucault’s power issue more, I will also offer some critics’ opinions and citations as secondary references. One thing I want to emphasize here is the framework of Foucault’s power analysis which I am going to show will not be with numerous and detailed discussions, since the most part of this study is projected to be the observations on the power relations in the two power plays: Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, but even so Foucault’s ideas of power offered as follows surely will be correctly directed. Briefly speaking, what this study desires to do is to borrow Foucault’s analytics of power to read two of David Mamet’s business world plays of power. Consequently, the map of Foucauldian power here will not only contain the main features of his power but also will be concerned with other issues when there’s a need to be helpful to interpret the two plays. Before introducing the framework of Foucault’s conception of power, I think there is a necessity for us to learn the significance of Foucault’s views of power at first. As I’ve remarked in the former paragraphs, Foucault’s power can be applied to social, racial, sexual or many other relations, and unlike other theories on power whose practicing ranges are limited to some particular field or class.. Foucault’s conception of power is global though its effects perhaps.

(40) Chen. 33. are not. There’s a chapter entitled “Objective” in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in which Foucault defines the conventional notions of power as “juridical-discursive model of power5,” which has stood at a dominating site in the filed of social sciences for some time. In addition, to let us understand what juridical-discursive model of power really is, Foucault distinctly offers the main principal features of it, so that we readers can make a contrast or tell the differences between it and Foucault’s approach to power. Accordingly, there are five basic prominent characteristics of juridical-discursive model of power being pointed out in Foucault’s text. First of all, power is thought to be essentially negative in its practices. In light of traditional critics’ views of power, power is considered to be an object which is possessed by someone, some groups of people, or some institutions. Hence, we have to admit that when we talk about power, the first thought comes to our mind is someone or some group owns something named “power” and by which they exercise “over” others. Then we immediately picture a structure of hierarchy in which the stronger, who hold power, stand over the weaker, who do not have the thing called “power.” As a result, the representation of power is considered to be if not repression, nor domination, then definitely submission. Whether representing itself with which consequence as maintained above, power becomes essentially negative. Power is defined as a thing that can be. 5. As for juridical-discursive model of power, Foucault states, “It is this conception that governs both the thematics of repression and the theory of the law as constitutive of desire. In other words, what distinguishes the analysis made in terms of the repression of instincts from that made in terms of the law of desire is clearly the way in which they each conceive of the nature and dynamics of drives, not the way in which they conceive of power.” (The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, 83).

(41) Chen. 34. held to abuse, to control, to oppress, or to liberate. Foucault concludes, “It is a power whose model is essentially juridical, centered on nothing more than the statement of the law and the operation of taboos.. All the modes of domination, submission, and subjugation are. ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience” (HS 85).. Laws and taboos thus. are the masks of power, and what the subjects over whom power exercises can do is abide by the “masks of power.” For Foucault, if the laws or taboos really can achieve the aim of fully controlling the subjects, power relations should be stable enough instead of being problematic and unsteady as we observe in our society today. Besides, supposing that power is merely meant to be negatively repressing or controlling, it will be poor in invention and production, since the subjects of juridical-discursive power can only do what laws and taboos allow them to do. Foucault comments, “it is basically anti-energy,” (HS 85) and “its effects take the general form of limit and lack” (HS 83). The next three characteristics of juridical-discursive model of power are its insistence on the rule, its cycle of prohibition and its paradoxical logic of censorship. The reason why I put the three features together here is that they are causes and effects to each other. Foucault cites the relations of power and sex as instances to explain the restrictive mechanics of juridical power. From the observation on juridical-discursive model of power, “sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden” (83). As for sex, as I’ve stated earlier, it is considered to start with a repressive hypothesis, and power sets laws, rules, or orders for it. In other words, the only way for sex to be presented is to restrain itself under the shelter of the so-called legislation, and the action of legislation is the exercise of power..

(42) Chen. 35. Wearing the masks of laws, rules, and orders, power turns to be a force of saying no. Naturally, subjects of power are threatened by the punishment, which is taken as the instrument of laws, and they learn what they are allowed to do and what they are not. If someone violates the laws, he is judged to be challenging “power,” and he must accept the punishment he “deserves.” Power therefore becomes the advocacy of prohibition. This point recalls the first feature – negative essence of juridical-discursive conception of power. Such a power is proved to be negative and unproductive again. Furthermore, Foucault concludes that the prohibition or the interdiction takes three forms: “affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists” (HS 84).. Despite the fact that these three forms are. contradictory to each other at some level, subjects who own power are still capable of establishing a mechanism of censorship, in which the three forms are paradoxically contained. Why is the utterance --“paradoxically” used here? Foucault explains that it is because the combination of “nonexistence, nonmanifestation, and silence” (HS 84) shows the paradoxical logic of this censorship. The mechanism of censorship is tri-banned consequently. Through the operation of censorship, power determines that taboos cannot be touched or discussed and they even never exist or appear. In brief, rules, prohibitions as well as mechanisms of censorship cooperatively provide representations with juridical-discursive model of power. The last feature of juridical-discursive conception of power is its uniformity of the apparatus. Plainly speaking, the exercises of power maintain the same way, and the mere difference among them is the scales they are relative to. Jana Sawicki suggests, “power flows from a centralized source from top to bottom” (DF 20). The centralized source could be a king of a.

(43) Chen. 36. country, the bourgeoisie in a society, or a father in a family, etc. One thing they have in common is that all of them possess the object called “power,” even though the scales in which they exercise power over their subjugators are different from sizes. The manner they take, such as rules, prohibitions, or censorship, is basically the same, and its effects are meant to gain the obedience of the subjugated. Hence, on the basis of the flowing of power from top to bottom, a picture of hierarchy of “descending” power is shown. People who stand at top of this hierarchy are rivals to those who are located at the bottom of the power structure. It is expected to see the two sides of subjects as two forces that hold hostility to each other. As Foucault writes, the two sides are suggested to be “a legislative power on one side, and an obedient subject on the other” (HS 85).. The phenomena like repression and. exploitations are the results of this situation of opposition. Foucault notices that the juridical notion of power, with the five main features stated previously, is “poor in resources, sparing of its methods, monotonous in the tactics its utilizes, incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed always to repeat itself” (HS 85). Indeed, such an essentially negative power can only make its representation in accordance with juridical procedures. Power which is disguised with juridical appearance easily turns to be a tool of sovereignty or the monarchical institutions; on the other hand, from the perspective of the left side of politics, as Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace point out, “power was analysed…in terms of the state apparatus and its ideological ‘representations’ of power – as if power operated through deferred, discursive mechanisms” (McHoul and Grace 87). Foucault realizes that neither the juridical notion of power nor the discursive notion of power is able to examine power relations in our societies in detail, because both assume that the.