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 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. 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。 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 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. 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).
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
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.”
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 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 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. 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.” Although the author offers a detailed observation of the
3 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. 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
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 Collège 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 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 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 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. 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 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).
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).
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 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 balls7
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. 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 others8. 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). 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. 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
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. 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.
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 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 Chen 23 inaugural lecture – “The Order of Discourse.” 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, 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 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 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 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.
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 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 before4. 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. 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
Chen 31 previous example of the management of imprisonment presents this lack. 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. 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 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)
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. 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 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 Chen 37 existences of subjects who hold power and those who submit to power-owners appear earlier than exercises of power. Power is therefore considered to be a result of the relationships between one side which holds power and the other side which lacks power. Power relations cannot be explained well in this way of thinking for Foucault.
Insisting on cutting off the head of the king6, Foucault attempts to establish new analytics of power which is helpful for decoding power better. Differing from the preconceived position of the juridical notion of power, which presumes power-holding subjects and power-submitting subjects exist prior to the exercise of power, Michel Foucault’s conception of power intends to treat power as a relation rather than a possession of subjects. His discussions about power are not meant to be organized and constructed as a “theory.” “Do we need a theory of power?” Foucault writes, “Since a theory assumes a prior objectification, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work” (AM 418).
Foucault’s observations about power are defined as his “analytics of power,” whose contents are constituted by the analyses of phenomena of power exercises in our societies.
Now that we have had some general understanding of juridical-discursive model of power from the brief introduction given above, I intend to present the important features of Foucault’s analytics of power as follows. In “Method,” following “Object” in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault provides us with an ultimately complete presentation of the so-called
6 As I previously mentioned, Foucault thinks “the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy,” (The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 88) so we should abandon the images of “power-law” and “power-sovereignty,” and “we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code” (90). Chen 38
“Foucauldian analytics of power.” At the beginning of this chapter –
“Method,” Foucault clarifies people’s misunderstandings over issues of power that are given by the conventional critiques. In contrast with the juridical notion of power that power is something which can be held and grasped by its owner(s), Foucault declares:
By power, I do not mean ‘power’ as a group of institutions and
mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given
state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation
which, in contrast to violence, has the form of rule. Finally, I do
not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one
group over another, a system whose effects, through successive
derivations, pervade the entire social body. (HS 92).
He keeps on asserting that the rules, prohibitions, taboos, or orders, etc., are only “the terminal forms power takes,” and they are not true nature or essence of power in fact. Foucault overthrows the assumption that as long as mechanisms of power are mentioned, we should firstly think of “certain persons exercise power over others” (AM 425).
If power is neither a thing to be seized nor an object being disguised with laws or constitutions, what is power actually? Interestingly, it is noticed that with regard to Foucault’s conception of power, we do not inquire “who has power” or “who stands for power.” Foucault’s answer to the question of what power is is that power is neither a form, nor a thing which is “acquired, seized, or shared” or which “one holds on to or allows to slip away” (HS 94). Power is nothing more or nothing less than the multiplicity of force relations. In an
Chen 39 interview in 19847, Foucault stresses his point:
I hardly ever use the word ‘power’ and if I do sometimes, it is
always a short cut to the expression I always use: the relationships of
power… I mean that in human relations, whatever they are – whether
it be a question of communicating verbally… , or question of a love
relationship, an institutional or economic relationship – power is
always present: I mean the relationships in which one wishes to
direct the behavior of another. (Bernauer and Rasmussen 11)
Power never belongs to any individual or institution. From the speech, we are given a clearer definition of power and learn the fact that power is shown through the network of multiple relations.
Besides, on the basis of regarding power as a relation between forces, we can get two other notes of power. Firstly, power is present only when it is put into action. To speak more precisely, power does not already exist there, and it is not a thing to be pursued, as juridical notion of power suggests. Power has to be practiced into action. Therefore, power is shown at the moment when power relations are built in societies, and based on this idea, power is never an effect or a cause of any relations of power. MGilles Deleuze makes an interpretation of Foucault’s view that, “An exercise of power shows up as an affect, since force defines itself by its very power to affect other forces (to which it is related) and to be affected by other forces” (Deleuze 71). In addition to advising a point that power can be taken as a function, Deleuze also
7 On January twentieth, 1984, Foucault is invited in an interview whose topic is “The Ethic of Care for the Self, as a Practice of Freedom.” See The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge: MIT P) 11.
Chen 40 tightly relates his remarks to the ways of power’s exercise. Yet by now I intend to go back to the issue on what power is, and as for the question of how power works, it will be left to the later paragraphs. Most importantly,
Foucault's idea of power, contradictory to juridical-discursive power, does not appear prior to the existences of subjects or objects of power. We can boldly announce that power does not exist, and if it does, it’s only when it is in practice.
The other point we make from the observation of Foucault’s statement above is there is no society without power. The logic of this point starts from the notion that power is always present. Power presents itself in any kind of relationships; for example, it can be discovered in kinship, families, schools, factories, companies, races and so on, just as I’ve mentioned formerly.
Foucault emphasizes that, “relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality) for which they play at once a conditioning and a conditioned role” (DP 142). It is comprehended that power relations are constructed in any kind of relationships at different levels.
He adds in “Method” that:
Relations of power are not in a position exteriority with respect to
other types of relationships (economic process, knowledge
relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they
are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and
disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the
internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are
not in superstructure positions, with merely a role of prohibition or
accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they
come into play. (HS 94) Chen 41
To put it simply, power/relations of power is/are rooted “in” our societies, and no one can be outside of it/them. And in our societies, relations of power keep on exercising themselves as well as connecting others. For Foucault, a society without power is an abstraction.
Power, thus, is like a machine within our societies, in which everyone is caught and goes on moving or acting with the movements and actions of others.
In the network of these power relations, each force has the power to affect others and at the same time to be affected by others. These relations of power, stated in Foucault’s term, are constituted by “an action upon action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present or future” (Deleuze 70).
The exercise of power does not mean one side takes actions of repression, domination, or controlling, while the other side merely accepts what has been done with them without giving any response. It should be bi-directional, and it is an operation of both parties or sides. To conclude, power is a set of actions upon other actions.
So far as this notion is concerned, along with the assumption that there’s no society without power, Foucault provides another substantial characteristic of power: the omnipresence of power. We see power is exercised in every kind of relationships by different forms. With the accumulative movements of actions, power is almost taken into practice everywhere at anytime, and this is why Foucault proclaims that, “it [power] is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.
Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (HS 93). Meanwhile, it is also found that when an individual or a force is trying to master power over other individuals or forces in order to affect them and modify their behaviors, he or it is practicing power Chen 42 over himself or itself, too. Hence, it is proved that relations of power are presented by actions upon actions, and the productive nature of power cannot be overlooked in this view.
The accumulation of actions between forces in power relations results in the productive nature of power. Along with the proceeding of minutes or moments, an action will react to another action, and when another action returns, it will take another action to respond again. Following this model of operation of power, time cumulates, and so do actions of forces. On this point, the idea that power is essentially productive is somewhat explained. Foucault rejects the assertion of the juridical notion of power that power is negative and repressive, yet he argues power does not just have an appearance of negativity.
After taking off the juridical forms from power, Foucault makes power no more belong to any authorities, any privileged individuals or any institutions, and power thus is no more a force to prohibit, to punish, to control, and to say “no.”
Foucault claims:
[w]e must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in
negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’
it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces
reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The
individual and knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this
production. (qtd. in Merquior 109)
Yet, here we must also notice a fact that though Foucault claims the effect of power is positively productive, he doesn’t deny that repression is one form power takes. What Foucault tries to say is power is not established on the basis of negativity at all.
For Foucault, power definitely serves to lead people to suffer; on the Chen 43 contrary, it can be an interrelation to be enjoyed. The nature of power is suggested to be positive and productive. Focusing on this point, Thomas
Wartenburg claims, “the present actions of a dominant agent count on the future actions of the aligned agents being similar to their past actions” (Gutting
107). From here, we observe the circulation of time and sense the production of power. Foucault raises a question that why people would totally submit to the repression if power were always negative, and it just said no to people.
Foucault affirms, “What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse” (PK 119). In addition, Foucault believes if power only functioned to repress, it would be very fragile. Why would it be fragile?
Since it is not convinced that if the techniques of repression, prohibition, law-constraining and any censorship really work so well, then the power relations should be very stable. However, the real situation we detect is not what the critics of juridical notion of power suppose. The power relations in our societies remain unstable. In terms of juridical notion, neither the dominant agent constantly sits in the site of controlling, nor the subordinate agent absolutely submits to the control of the dominant agent. What we see in the reality is that the subordinate agent, which is temporarily in its
“disempowerment8,” still challenges and rejects the dominant agent. Under this situation, how can the notion of juridical-discursive model of power successfully decode the structure of power with the assertion that power is
8 This is the usage Thomas Wartenburg used. See Joseph Rouse, “Power/Knowledge,” The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge UP) 108. Chen 44 merely repressive?
To provide us with more complete analysis of power, Foucault proposes a conception of resistance in the discussions of relations of power. Resistance is always accompanied with power. Foucault expounds:
Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather
consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in
relation to power… Their [power relationships’] existence depends
on multiplicity of points of resistance: they play the role of adversary,
target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of
resistance are present everywhere in the power network… there is a
plurality of resistances… (HS 95-6)
As I have stated previously, the conception of power, which is added to
Foucault’s analytics of power in his later work, seems to complete the mechanism of power. Nearly in every relation of power, the forces of support and resist co-exist. It is rare to see a single force to rule, oppress, or dominate in a power relation. Most of the time, there’s also a force to rebel against the other force which intends to modify it. In other words, we can draw a conclusion that power, the multiplicity of force relations, is paralleled by multiple forms of resistances.
Aiming at this sentiment of resistance, Jana Sawicki provides her own interpretation that “power relations only arise in cases where there is conflict, where on individual or group wants to affect the action of another individual or group” (DF 25). It is like when A wants to modify or affects B’s action, if this modification or influence is just in B’s interests, then there will be no
Chen 45 exercise between power and resistance; however, if A’s modification or influence is confronting to B’s interests, then a conflict appears in the meantime. On this occasion, a relation of power starts to exercise. One side desires to affect by forms of domination and control, yet the other side refuses those forms and resist the dominating force coming from the opposite side.
Furthermore, the roles of the side of supporting as well as the side of resisting are never fixed. Their roles or locations are flexible, and in the hierarchy of power, the subjects within it are able to change their positions. Power relations are proved again to be unstable, and they are not always unchangeable.
Foucault emphasizes that:
[a] power can only be exercised over another to the extent that the
latter still has the possibility of committing suicide, of jumping out
of the window or killing the other. That means that in the relations
of power, there is necessarily the possibility of resistance, for if there
were no possibility of resistance – a violent resistance, of escape, of
ruse, of strategies that reverse the situation – there would be no
relations of power. (Bernauer and Rasmussen 12)
The relations of power surely are unbalanced, even though maybe there’s some agent which is occupying an over-all powerful position. Still the necessity of the existence of resistance should not be ignored as long as relations of power show up. The possibility of resistance also manifests the positivity and productive nature of Foucauldian power.
Most importantly, power fundamentally is never a force to violate.
Within relations of power, neither the force of supporting nor the force of resisting is meant to violate other forces, though the employment of violence sometimes is adopted. “In itself the exercise of power is not violence”; Chen 46 explains Foucault:
[n]or is it a consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total
structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites,
it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the
extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a
way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of
their acting or being capable of action. (AM 427)
Violence definitely is neither the nature of power nor the single effect of power relations. Lois McNay gives definitions of violence and relations of power in order to set boundaries between the two. He considers that relations of power are a set of actions upon actions which do not act “immediately and directly,” yet violence acts upon bodies or things not actions, and its actions are always immediate and direct. To speak it more frankly, “violence allows no opposition to arise and, should resistance occur, it seeks to crush it” (McNay
126). Moreover, with the observation Philip Barker points out, violence might result in limiting “the possibility of the self-creation for both self and other” (Barker 81)
As far as the issue of free choices is concerned, Foucault expresses the view that “power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free” (McNay 126). He keeps on adding, “[t]he relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot, therefore, be separated” (McNay
126). It is realized that freedom is a substantial element in the exercises of power. Subjects within any relations of power need freedom to decide the next actions in order to react to the last actions of other forces. Like the quotation from Foucault which is illustrated in the former paragraph, subjects are free to decide what they are going to do next, and at the same moment, Chen 47 there are many possibilities of their choices. They can resist or even take violent actions. However, if not so, there will be no relations of power constituted. David Couzens Hoy reaches a conclusion that, “freedom is both the condition and the effect of power. It is a condition because power is only exercised on free beings, and it is an effect since the exercise of power will invariably meet with resistance, which is the manifestation of freedom” (Hoy
139).
The most significant characteristic of Foucault’s conception of power is the way of analyzing the mechanism. Unlike the conventional critics, who insist power is a fixable thing which belongs to certain persons or agents, and thus the direction power works is from top to bottom of the power structure,
Foucault, who rejects to let power become a possession of the privileged people and agents, asserts that “power comes from below” (HS 94).
According to the conventional notions, juridical-discursive conception of power works in a descending direction. That means the exercises of power spread their effects from the higher position to the lower one. Nevertheless, it is noted that Foucault’s analytics of power suggests us to analyze the mechanism of power from the lowest position, since most of the time this power works in an ascending direction. Foucault proposes to tell us how power works and where to start the analyses of power rather than who has power and what power is. Foucault indicates:
Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and
all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of
power relations, and serving as a general matrix – no such duality
extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited
groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose Chen 48
rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and
come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited
groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of
cleavage that run through the social body as a whole. (HS 94)
Foucault’s bottom-up analysis manifests that to fully understand a mechanism of power, one should inspect from the force coming from the bottom first.
In light of this ascending power structure, Simon During also gives his own interpretation. He explains that since in Foucault’s views of power,
“societies do not possess a single ‘ideology’ or a single agency of domination
(the bourgeoisie, the state…) which work in a single direction, the analysis of power is more effective when it starts ‘from the bottom up’” (Foucault and
Literature 133). Here comes an intriguing issue that there is no conception of ideology in societies in Foucault’s view. Abandoning the assumption that power is a fixable property, Foucauldian notion of power follows on and doesn’t hold a view of centralized sources of power. Therefore, if there is no centralized power located in some specific agents, there will be no production of ideologies, either. Ideologies, according to the traditional thoughts, are usually used by specific authorities or agents to proceed with the jobs of controlling and dominating. And this is why there’s no conception of ideologies in Foucault’s analytics of power. Without the domination which ideologies intend to produce, Foucauldian power still certifies the effects of power to us. It is evident that there’s no need of certain subjects in relations of power. All the network of power needs is a set of an action which carries intention upon other intentional actions. Through the circulation of actions, effects of power are developed. Concerning this gist, Foucault claims, “power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective… there is no power that is Chen 49 exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject.” (HS 94-5)
Insofar, a map of Foucault’s network of power relations has been given a general view. First of all, we have learned that power is redefined as a set as well as an effect of an action upon another action rather than an object to be possessed. Based on this point, power is never negative or repressive yet productive and positive. Moreover, there’s no society without power; therefore, no one can live outside relations of power. Subjects in this mechanism of power must be free, and in this way it is observed that where there is power, there is resistance. The most crucial characteristic of
Foucault’s analytics of power is in the bottom-up-directed way power works.
Since, by using the expressions of juridical power, there is no power-centralized agents sitting at the highest position in the hierarchy of power, for Foucault, there exists no problem of some certain subjects’ seizing power to lead an intentional and one-way-directing exercise of power.
Foucault’s power is an intentionality without subjects in fact.
In the next two chapters of this study, I plan to provide my observations on two of Mamet’s business worlds in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo with my reading of Foucault’s conception of power.
Chen 50
Chapter Two
Betrayals as Resistance: Glengarry Glen Ross and Foucauldian Power
Willy Loman: In those days, there was personality in it, Howard.
There was respect, and comradeship and gratitude in it.
Today, it’s all cut and dried, and there’s no chance for
bringing friendship to bear –- or personality…
-- Arthur Miller, The Death of a Salesman
At the very end of Glengarry Glen Ross, Aaronow, a fifty-year-old businessman, laments, “Oh, God, I hate this job” (108), but the response he gets from one of his colleagues – Roma, who is much younger than he is, is
“I’ll be at the restaurant.” This eccentric dialogue takes place in a real-estate office, where Aaronow seems to be the only broker who would honestly express his true feeling about his job, while his colleague, Roma, an aggressive salesman, at this moment still thinks about doing the “job” even though knowing there’s a big mess – a robbery in the office. As a result of the lack of the “leads” coming into the office, Roma decides to go to the restaurant where he can keep on driving his business and closing deals with his clients. The image of restaurant strongly suggests the need for subsistence, thus David
Mamet seems to tell us that no matter how they dislike their jobs, the businessmen still have to keep on working in order to earn their bread. A cruel but realistic business world is vividly presented by Mamet. In addition to this fact, if we examine the lines of these characters closely, we shall find what David Mamet intends to portray is a male-cast business world, in which female voices are asked to be silent. The sales contest that is held by the two bosses thus triggers an unstable power struggle in this capitalism-oriented Chen 51 world. Since the outcome of the contest directly relates to the chances of gaining the fee which enables one to survive in the men’s world – business world, each protagonist has to struggle for securing his own position, or he will lose his job and therefore be repelled by the winners. Although on the surface each salesman seems to share a fair chance, in fact, only two of them can win the chance to survive in Mamet’s Darwinian business world.
For Mamet’s salesmen, being able to survive in the business world means not only the assurance of earning one’s bread but also the approval of one’s male-identity. This idea is confirmed by Levene’s statement, “A man’s his job” (75). The self-worth and self-identity of a businessman are judged by the performance of his business achievement. In other words, if a businessman fails in his job, his identity as a man will be seriously jeopardized. And the worst situation is he will be excluded from the male-cast business world because he makes less value on his job. Such a man deserves an identity of a
“non-man” (McDonough 202) or a valueless woman in the patriarchal view.
To preserve one’s own masculine identity, each salesman has to struggle hard in this competitive business world, which manipulates the exploitation of their identities and jobs through conducting a sale contest as a tool. As far as the issue of struggle is concerned, I intend to point out the three types of struggles which are defined by Michel Foucault in his later essay “The Subject and
Power.” He remarks:
Generally, it can be said that there are three types of struggles: either
against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious); against
forms of exploitation which separate individuals from what they
produce; or against that which ties the individual to himself and
submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, Chen 52
against forms of subjectivity and submission). (AM 421)
Accordingly, Mamet’s businessmen are arranged to experience the three types of struggles for the sake of survival. They always want to occupy the positions of the dominators, exploiters, and subjection-holders; however, at the same time, they are dominated, exploited as well as subjected by others actually.
The scheme of the sales contest in Glengarry Glen Ross leads us to examine the power relations between the real-estate company and its employees. If we apply the idea of the “Panopticon” in Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power to the business world of the play, the practice of power between employers and employees is easily detected. In accordance with the design of architecture of the Panopticon, the two invisible characters of the company-runners, Mitch and Murray, are just like the guards who are put in the inner watching-tower to be responsible for keeping the surveillance, while the objects of the gazers are the four salesmen, who are separately put in a cell of the outer ring-formed building. Foucault highlights, the one who is put in the cell is “the object of information, never a subject in communication” (DP 200).
In this way, the objects/subjects in the cells are only visible to the invisible watch guards, and they do not have any connection with each other. A subtle relation of power between the gazers and the gazed is thus created. As I have mentioned in the former chapter, the visibility of the guards is not necessarily important in this design, since their watching has been taken as a constant operation by the gazed objects. What’s important in this design is through the surveillance the objects in the cells automatically discipline and normalize themselves. In this way, the effects of disciplinary power are accomplished.
Like the invisible watching guards in the Panopticon, Mitch and Murray, who Chen 53 are known merely through the mouths of the other characters, never show up in the play, yet the scheme of the sales contest helps preserve their function of surveillance. The contest does the job of gazing. Foucault further claims that, “An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself” (PK 155). The pressure of winning the contest is always present for the four protagonists of salesmen, and it pushes them to close deals as possible as they can. The sales competition becomes a strategy of the disciplinary power. Anyone who accepts the rules and disciplines of the strategy and achieves the aim of this design will be praised; on the contrary, anyone who fails to follow the rules and disciplines will be punished in Glengarry Glen Ross. The rewards for the former are a Cadillac and a set of steak knives, yet the punishment is the dismissal from the job. These salesmen, who exist in this system of disciplinary power, lose communication with each other, as if they are individually put in his cell in the Panopticon. However, once there are profits to make, they will walk out of their own individual cells to gather as a team, and the peership built at this time is only meant to take the most advantages.
Under the premise of owning freedom to make choices, the four salesmen do not choose to escape from this capitalistic system of business, but all of them stay in it to participate in the sales contest and take it as a discipline.
“Free subjects are subjects who face a field of possibilities. Their action is structured but not forced” (DF 25), Jana Sawicki interprets Foucault’s point that power exercises on free subjects. And David Couzens Hoy also points out, Foucault once explains, “a slave in chains has no real options of alternative action or escape, such a degree of slaver could not be called a power relation, Chen 54 especially since it would not make sense to think of anyone desiring to be a slave in this sense” (qtd. in Hoy 139). Mamet’s businessmen differ from slaves for they have options of being salesmen or not. These salesmen, who decide to exist in the competitive business world, have to accept the outcome of the contest. It is ruled that the champion wins a Cadillac, the runner-up obtains a set of steak knives, and the other two get fired. As a result, the four salesmen assume the contest as a discipline to discipline themselves. The disciplinary power is constituted by the masterminding of the managers and the recognition of the employees. For the employees -- the salesmen, they would better provide great presentations on their jobs, since the discipline advises them that only successors will be praised, yet the losers punished. Mamet’s salesmen are judged, measured, and examined by the consequence of the board under the operation of disciplinary power. No wonder Levene, a salesman who refuses to be an object which will be tested by its ability of selling, announces, “you can’t judge on that [board].” Frankly speaking, within such a competitive business world, people are treated as resources for benefits only.
They are asked to be “productive” for the firm. However, power here is not entirely negative and repressive as it shows above since these businessmen’s following reactions open up the possibilities of proposing a positive and productive power.
We have to keep in mind that an individual is supposed to be a desiring and speaking subject as I have pointed out in the previous chapter; therefore, the fact that subjects in any power relations have their own freedom cannot be overlooked when the issue of resistance is concerned here. Foucault avers that there are no power relations without resistance. It is not suggested that resistance exists prior to power, but resistance comes out with the exercise of Chen 55 power. Making resistance is one optional action for the free subjects to take.
Therefore, for the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, although the rules of the contest cannot be changed – that is better sales-done breeds better leads, and ultimately a success breeds another success, some of them still try to make resistance to change their situations on the “board.” The theft of leads and the sale of them to John Graff, who runs another firm, are acts of resistance out of these salesmen’s free choices. These salesmen consider they should make resistance to the force of the system/contest by any effective means. They are willing to do anything only if they can secure their own identities and positions in that office. Crimes can be excused in the name of business, and the betrayal of the system/company is authorized in terms of resistance. To conclude, the confrontation between the executives and the participants – the salesmen actually help create each other’s subjectivity while the disciplinary power relation is developed between these two forces.
In this regard, another thing noticeable is Foucault’s emphasis that power comes from below just mirrors the resistance of these figures of salesmen in
Glengarry Glen Ross. On account of the non-centralized characteristic of power, it is problematic to say that the runners of the real-estate office in this play seize the possession of power, and by that they proceed one-way operation of power. On the other hand, it is also not always true that power is a privilege which belongs to people who take the inferior positions in the hierarchy of power. Foucault stresses that power is not invented to be an object to be reserved by anyone, so the analysis of power should not merely be a descending analysis. To fully understand the operation of power, we should make observation on the force of resistance first. Consequently, if there’s a hierarchy of power in Mamet’s business world, there must be an above/top and Chen 56 a below/bottom: influential subjects take the above/top while others the below/bottom. In this way, Mitch and Murray are supposed to take “the above,” and the employees “the below.” Following Foucault’s analytics of power, we realize that to examine from the force of resistance at the bottom up to the force of dominance at the top provides us with a more complete view of exercises of power. This ascending analysis also corroborates the truth that power is constructed by forces of support and resist. Meanwhile, it is construed that power is exercised through the network of relations, in which forces of support and resistance cooperate.
The resistance which comes from “the below” is implied to be the crime of stealing the leads and selling them to other companies in this play. The act of pilferage means to challenge the order of the power relation between the company/ observers and the salesmen/ the observed objects. As Foucault suggests, though power has an objective or a goal, it is non-subjective but certainly intentional. In the processes of analyzing the relation of power between the system and the subjects of it in this play, there is no need to know who commits the crime. All we need to notice is the intention of the action of stealing instead of the criminals’ names. Characters who are involved in this conspiracy attempt to struggle against the form of exploitation which is disguised with the design of sales contest. These salesmen assume they have been exploited since they work so hard but most of the premium belongs to the firm. In Foucault’s words, they are suffering from the exploitation which separates themselves from what they produce. Moreover, the result of losing the contest will lead them to other forms of exploitation -- the job-losing and identity-shaking. Thus, the exploitation of the contest is manifold: the productions and subjectivities of the subjects are deprived. The action of theft Chen 57 explains these businessmen’s desire of fighting against the exploitation and domination which concerns their capacities of establishing their subjectivities.
Although they seriously betray their loyalties to the company, the thievery is
“justified” by themselves as the needed resistance. Out of this need, the notion that “someone should stand up and strike back” (37) is accepted.
We recall that Foucault asserts power relations arise only when there’s a conflict. I’ve previously displayed the confrontation between the capitalistic system of business and the businessmen who live within it, and the reason why the confrontation appears and how power relations work between the two forces from the angle of disciplinary power. Nevertheless, under the pressure of the business achievement, isn’t there any conflict among the colleagues in the real-estate firm? It is for certain that the power relations among these salesmen exist simultaneously as the power relation between the company and its clerks comes into existence. Corresponding to Foucault’s assertion, relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations1. The pressure coming from the order of the board is as omnipresent as the relation of power is. For instance, in the second act of this play, which takes place in the robbed office, Roma’s common asking as “how are you” yet jars on Aaronow’s nerve so much that he sensitively answers, “I’m fine. You mean the board?
You mean the board…?” (56) Additionally, the most significant example which illustrates the businessmen’s great anxieties from the pressure of the sales contest is shown on Moss in Act II. Since presently Roma holds a top position in the contest board, his “triumph” becomes a great threat to Moss, who doesn’t have a “big month.” Out of anxiety and jealousy, Moss refuses
1 Gary Wickham, “Power and Power Analysis: Beyond Foucault,” Toward a Critique of Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1986) 152. Chen 58 to approve Roma’s authoritative speech and sarcastically yells to Roma,
“You’re hot, so you think you’re the ruler of this place?” (70), “you genuine shit, because you’re top name on the board,” (70) and “ Who’s my pal?… I never liked you” (71). Furthermore, after knowing that Levene just closes a big deal and this achievement directly menaces his order on the board, Roma instantly changes his original plan. He decides to go out to work instead of going home. There is a hierarchy in these businessmen’s world, in which one who earns more money will be recognized as a successful and powerful man; while one who earns less profits for the company will not only be fired but also be viewed as a powerless non-man. Resulting from the cause that only two of the four salesmen can stay in the men’s world – the business world, every colleague now becomes a hostile competitor as well as an obstacle on the way of success to each other. Hence, we reach a conclusion that the conflicts among these businessmen are led by the conflict between the system and its members. The conflicts among these salesmen occur while their benefits and the sense of security are threatened by their peers. Ironically, they isolate themselves from the communication with others as if they lived in their own cells, so that they think they can protect themselves from the exploitations by others, though they also contradictorily attempt to exploit others.
These protagonists of businessmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, as free individuals, always intend to influence others’ actions and decisions. As
Foucault declares that power is a set of an action upon another action, Mamet’s businessmen act in order to modify or govern others’ actions and responses.
In the business world, most of them enjoy the feeling of being superior to others. Out of a strong sense of insecurity, each wants to obtain the authority to dominate the whole situation, yet he also has to face the possible resistance Chen 59 from other free individuals or to resist others’ attempted dominance at the same time. To make it more clearly, inside this sophisticated business world, everyone, except Mitch and Murry, is not only an exploiter/ dominator but also the exploited/dominated. The weapon they apply to protect themselves or offend others in these power relations which are full of competitive air is the
“talk.” The sales contest makes this real-estate office a battlefield where subjects are supposed to fight and struggle for the sake of surviving.
Foucault’s concept of power avers that social field is a field of struggle, and it is just like a battlefield2. Power exercises and spreads in the battlefield when these businessmen arm themselves with the weapon – language to combat.
As a salesman, each of them is supposed to be good at talking, since that’s the main skill of closing deals. A talk inspires another talk from others, and
Mamet’s men make languages become actions. As if following the pattern of exercise of power – an action upon another action, these businessmen act by delivering a talk upon another talk. The usage they use must be carefully chosen in order to make effects of driving the addressees to listen, be persuaded, or be insulted. Hereby we are once again reminded of Mamet’s greatness in developing a dramatic and poetic language in his work.
In this real-estate office, where relations of power construct like a network, we find that almost all the conversations start with deals-providing and end with deals-done or deals-undone. The so-called “sales-talks” are detected everywhere through the whole play. Most of the characters make themselves sellers when they plan to affect others’ determination and actions; on the other hand, they are made to be clients when their listeners try to reject the deals they
2 See Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991) 25. Chen 60 provide. They believe leaving the smallest space for negotiating to the addressees is the best policy on making a deal. Mamet’s businessmen need to assure that they are heard, so usually they don’t let others have chances to make announcements. They think only when they attain the authority of speaking can they become dominators in power relations. As a result, most of the time, the dialogues are fragmented, and the syntax is broken. Having the fear of getting the rejection from his “clients,” a businessman has to use affective terms and seize the time of talking as much as he can. The best situation is that listeners become sheer listening-objects for them. These businessmen intend to leave no room of speaking for the listeners so they frequently interrupt others’ speech. Even though they understand that to hide their fear is crucial while doing “business,” their fragmented speech and broken syntax honestly reveal their anxieties. Moreover, the sentences like, “all I am saying,” “I want to tell you,” and “if you are listening” substantiate the speaker’s terrible need to talk and to be listened. By David Worster’s count, utterances like these appear at least twenty-eight times through this play, and twenty-five times out of this record are uttered by the three most aggressive salesmen – Levene, Moss and Roma. They firmly believe only when the authority of speaking is confirmed is an individual considered as the dominator of the conversation. However, in fact when one who does the most talk occupies the position of the “dominator” and the other who only listens is assumed to be the subordinated, the relation of power between them is still unstable. Thomas Wartenburg states, “subordinate agent is never absolutely disempowered, but only relatively so… The subordinate agent is always in the position of being able to challenge the aligned agents’ complicity in her disempowerment” (Gutting 108). Like the unstable relations of power Chen 61 between the firm and the employees, the power relations among these colleagues are changeable, too. Betrayals are proposed as acts of resistance in the former relationship; within the later relations, they also take places often in the name of resistance.
To carefully detect the relations of power among these businessmen and their “clients,” I would like to discuss these power relations from the act of resisting. As I’ve stated above, Foucault declares each relation is constituted by two forces: one supports and the other resists. Both forces signify the productive and positive nature of power. Mamet’s businessmen need to talk a lot to confirm their authorities, and also by the skills of talking they close deals to prove their self-identities. Mamet indicates that each of the characters in
Glengarry Glen Ross “uses words to influence actions. They build what’s called a line of affirmatives” (Dean 212). To talk is to act. Hence, most of these businessmen consider that to talk much usually equals to stand at the positions of dominators in a power relation. However, does this suggest that the listeners who usually talk little must be dominated without making any resistance? The relations of power between Levene and Williamson, Moss and Aaronow, and Roma and Lingk expose the fact that silent listeners still effectively exercise resistance.
The most notable thing in common among these relations is each of them contains a deal. Mamet’s characters in this play are used to talking in pairs because most of the time they are doing business. The clients they strive to exploit are not only land-buyers but also their colleagues; the commodities they sell are not only lands but also trust, friendship and themselves. Each conversation aims to make a deal. When a deal is provided by one side, the other side unquestionably has the right to accept it or not. According to Chen 62
Foucault, a relation of power starts whenever there’s a conflict. If a deal is suggested by A, yet it is not in B’s interests, then a conflict between A and B appears. In order to successfully close the deal, A will try to take any action which can affect B; for B, it is important to stand firmly with his attitude.
From the three relations of power which are mentioned in the former paragraph, we shall canvass how the struggles occur in the conversations in the following discussion. Every seller considers his would-be-buyer as an object to exploit, but usually the non-seller rejects to be a potential buyer and makes powerful resistance. What strikes us is most of these acts of resistance carry plans of betrayals. These betrayals include retaining the “deal” which the seller and the potential client make previously and overthrowing the “companionship” which is built by two people. In the later discussion, we shall learn that the relation of power between Levene and Williamson is established through the patterns of persuasion as well as negotiation; the relation of power between
Moss and Aaronow is proceeding with an intention of blackmailing; like the relation of power between Levene and Williamson, Roma and Lingk also build their relationship through the procedures of persuasion and negotiation, yet Mrs.
Lingk’s involvement in this relationship changes the whole situation at last.
In the conversation with Williamson, the younger office manager, Levene, the aging salesman, considers that constant talking reserves a speaker’s authority, and only by this linguistic authority can one manipulate his listener.
As a listener, Williamson never forgets to react upon the talking action of
Levene. Although Williamson speaks so little, his verbal resistance makes great effects. His betrayals of “deal” and “peership” are done in terms of resistance. In this relation of power, the unfixable dominant position is always open for subjects, and it also proves Foucault’s idea of unstable power. Chen 63
Levene and Williamson’s relation of power is shown in the first scene and the second Act. I intend to provide my observation on the first scene primarily.
The opening scene casting these two protagonists is set in a booth at a Chinese restaurant. Being eager to win the right of survival in the company, Levene, who is in danger of being fired due to his imperfect performance on business, goes to Williamson, who is in charge of giving leads, in order to find himself a chance of coming up to the board. Concisely, it is a scene of request and appeal, and it is also a reminder of the begging scene that casts Willy Loman and Howard Wagner in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman for us. Under the same pressure of survival, Willy asks Howard for an opportunity of working in New York, yet even giving Howard the evidence of the past glorious achievement in his career, Willy is still refused. Shelly Levene, like
Willy Loman, boasts his past glory in his business and what he has done for the company to Williamson, who is the real and only manipulator in the first scene of Act one.
In Levene’s opening speech, sentences containing strong motive of dominating, such as, “all that I am saying” (15, 17) and “I don’t want to tell you” (15), appear five times. Ironically, the real intention behind the words “I don’t want to tell you” actually means “I am going to tell you,” “I want to tell you,” and “I must tell you.” For Levene, the constant talk affirms his dominance in the conversation, so he keeps on interrupting Williamson’s speech. In spite of the fact that he is the person who begs for help, Levene challenges Williamson’s authority of speaking in the relation of power. He explains that his inferior presentation in his recent career is just the upshot of
“bad luck” (16), but interestingly as well as self-contradictorily, his past fulfillment on his business depends on his “skill” (18). Levene repeatedly Chen 64 claims that he is the man to sell rather than other colleagues are, and it is the false rule of the sales competition, which says only the more one sells the hotter leads he will get, drives him to such a terrible situation. In this cycle, those who are at the bottom of the board will never be able to reverse the order or own any possibility of getting to the top. Joining in Foucault’s world of power, Levene at this moment tries to resist the possibility of being punished under the disciplinary power of the system since he believes the power relations are never stable and they can be transformed. Williamson is the one who takes care of the management of these leads, which contain the addresses of potential customers. Levene knows clearly that he cannot change the rules of this economic system, but he can affect Williamson’s “action.” Therefore, the aim of their conversation for Levene is to make a deal with Williamson and then affect him to accept the deal by persuasion.
Shelly Levene considers that he is in the position of the dominator because of his non-stop talk, and in this way he supposes his action of talking has exercised power over Williamson’s action until Williamson objects, “You are saying that I am fucked” (19). Williamson voices to make resistance to
Levene’s humiliation of his job. Levene, in order to preserve his chance of getting up on the board, immediately puts himself at the inferior status than
Williamson’s in their relation of power. He gives his apology at once.
Williamson takes his action upon Levene’s action of talking by delivering an assertion which reveals his “unwillingness” to help Levene:
Williamson: Let me tell you something, Shelly. I do what I’m hired
to do. I’m … wait a second. I’m hired to watch the leads.
I’m given … hold on, I’m given a policy. My job is to do that.
What I’m told. That’s it. You, wait a second, anybody falls Chen 65
below a certain mark I’m not permitted to give them the premium
leads. (1.1. 19)
Learning that Williamson has to abide by the policy since he is hired, Levene, as he labels himself – a skilled businessman, instantly changes his strategy of this exercise of power. Williamson’s words inspire Levene with an idea that he can also set his own “policy” and “hire” Williamson, because Williamson can be told. Levene’s position in this hierarchy of power soon gains a promotion when he proposes the bribery to Williamson:
Levene: I’ll give you ten percent. (Pause.)
Williamson: Of what?
Levene: Of my end what I close.
Williamson: And what if you don’t close.
Levene: I will close.
Williamson: What if you don’t close…?
Levene: I will close.
Williamson: What if you don’t? Then I’m fucked. You see…?
Then it’s my job. That’s what I’m telling you. (1.1. 23)
Williamson can be bribed, but he also has to maintain the security of his job.
Recalling to Foucault’s thesis on power, it is verified that in the process of making a request, the order of power relation is unstable. While the speaker talks, it seems he has the authority of linguistic control over his non-acting addressee; however, the truth is that the addressee, as an active subject in fact, is free to agree or refuse, and he also attains an authority over the speaker to some extent. Foucault tells us that “the relationship between power and freedom’s of refusal cannot, therefore, be separated” (AM 428). Williamson, as a free subject who stands for a force of refusal, asks for promising him a Chen 66 guarantee that their “partnership” will make no damage to his job.
Williamson’s struggle against Levene’s dominance also explains his fear of the exploitation of his job. He doesn’t want to take any risk. It is proved that this partnership is built upon the base of a mutual-profited relationship.
Being questioned about the capability of closing deals, Levene, who now is just like an object to be examined and be exploited later, loses his seemingly superior stands of a “hirer” and a “strategy-setter” in front of his “partner” –
Williamson. Williamson comprehends that Levene cannot show any assurance; therefore, he, as a typical and professional businessman, seizes this rare opportunity to heighten the percentage of the profits he can make in this
“deal” from ten to twenty. Williamson, the “client” of Levene, soon manipulates the whole situation, and after knowing Levene wants “two” leads instead of one, he goes further to raise the premium of one lead. There’s left no room for negotiations or bargains of the “payment” to Levene. It’s an unbalanced relation of power, but the only choice for Levene is to accept
Williamson’s “deal” if he wants to secure his order from bottom to top on the board. The powerful image of Williamson becomes more and more strongly strengthened especially when he is informed that his “new boss,” Levene, cannot pay him right away. In order to prevent himself from being an object to be exploited, Williamson doesn’t allow his benefits be not assured and not cashed right away. Despite the fact that Levene repeatedly promises he will bring the money the next day, Williamson insists that his benefits cannot be belated for even one day. He intends to make business simply business.
Levene’s next action upon Williamson’s threats turns to a strategy of winning sympathy. He mentions his daughter, but for Williamson, other people’s family burden is always none of his business. Williamson informs Levene Chen 67 that outside the filed of business there’s nothing they can share with. The circumstance is that money talks rather than “emotional” Levene talks, or in other words, it’s intentionality communicating instead of subjects speaking.
Briefly, the order of this power relation reverses: at the beginning, Levene considers he is the one who takes charge of the “deal”; however, Williamson, who does the less talk, retains his authority over the requester, Levene.
Williamson dominates the exploitation, and though Levene tries to resist, he finally fails. Robert Vorlicky’s comment that “to rob from other is also to rob from oneself”3 explains the unstable relation of power between these two protagonists.
The pattern of the transformation in the power relation between Levene and Williamson repeats again in the second Act. The only difference is that
Levene does not show up as a requester in front of Williamson at first, yet their conversation finally leads to a negotiation, and it turns to be a parallel to the first scene. Levene, talking much more than usual, appears victoriously in the office with his new contract. Now he also becomes the man “sittin’ on top of the world” (70). Before this deal is done, Levene lives under the pressure of being “fucked up” by the leads that are on the B list. Along with his being
“raped” by the leads, Levene is “fucked” again by Williamson’s humiliation for his lack of money to “hire” him. Nonetheless, the situation transforms in the second Act when Levene comes back to the trashed office and announces that he “fucks” the lead already. The next step he plans to do is to take revenge on
Williamson by “fucking him” in return. When Williamson questions if the contract will stick, Levene irrationally responses:
3 See Robert Vorlicky, Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinity in American Drama (Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1995) 35. Chen 68
Why should the sale not stick? Hey, fuck you. That’s what I
am saying. You have no idea of your job. A man’s his job and
you’re fucked at yours. You hear what I’m saying to you? ….
You cannot run an office. I don’t care. You don’t know what it
is, you don’t have the sense, you don’t have the balls…. (2.2.
75-6).
Levene challenges not only Williamson’s presentation on his job but also his male-identity. Being suspected of his ability of selling in the opening scene,
Levene loses an opportunity of occupying the superior stand in the power relation between Williamson and him; nonetheless, after proving to others that he is truly the man to sell, Levene turns back to Williamson and endeavors to win the superior stand by insulting Williamson.
Williamson, who still speaks little as usual, never submits to Levene’s dominance. As Foucault insists, power is never simply a system of dominance in which the dominated are always subordinate and disempowered.
The chance to drag Levene down from the top position in the hierarchy of power comes after the exciting play-within-play which casts Levene, Roma and the poor client, Lingk. Williamson betrays the peership among his colleagues; he lies to Lingk that his contract has gone out to the bank. His betrayal arouses Roma’s and Levene’s great rages. Levene, continuing to use filthy language to insult Williamson’s “profession,” lectures as if he was an experienced and professional business“man.” Levene judges by his own view that Williamson doesn’t belong to this men’s business world. Meanwhile, it is also suggested by Levene that only the man like him, he who knows how to make deals and get along with partners, is qualified to exist in this sophisticated business world. Williamson, who now is considered to take “the below” in Chen 69 the hierarchy of power, is always interrupted by Levene’s self-recognized authoritative speech until Levene advises him that, “you’re going to make something up, be sure it will help or keep your mouth closed” (98). Ironically,
Levene’s open mouth brings no help to him at all. Williamson realizes that only the leads-robber knows Lingk’s contract actually hasn’t gone to the bank but gone out with those stolen leads. No one will know if he tells a lie to Mr.
Lingk, except the thief. The truth has been revealed that Levene must have been the one who robs the office, or he will not know that Williamson lies to the client. At this moment, the order of the power relation between Levene and Williamson transforms again. Similar to the opening scene, Levene goes back to the inferior position as the one to appeal, and Williamson who successfully makes resistance to Levene is the dominator of the situation.
Williamson’s powerful assertion – “If you tell me what you did with the leads, we can talk” (100) – controls Levene’s action upon it. Considering the danger of losing the job, Levene fully understands that the only way to secure his job is to cooperate with Williamson at this time. Following the pattern of negotiation, Levene practices his strategy of power to preserve his job. He wants to “buy” Williamson again, yet he fails this time, and his card of “his daughter” in this power game still cannot work out. Williamson’s rejection of the bribery this time shows his powerful resistance, and his revealing of the truth that Levene commits the theft reaches the apex of his resistance. It is proved that his action cannot be affected by Levene’s strategies of power at all.
As I have mentioned in the introduction to this study, there are some similarities between Mamet’s Levene and Miller’s Loman. Both stress their own past brilliant performances in their business, and they conceive those are the most powerful chips for them to close the “deal,” which serves to secure Chen 70 their jobs, with their bosses. In the process of making their requests, both of them do not forget to reveal how much they have done for the addressees.
They try to alter the relations of power by affecting the other force with sympathy and emotion; however, their strategies do not succeed. Henry I.
Schvey identifies Shelly Levene as a Willy Loman of the 1980s4. It is observed that both Levene and Williamson, in spite of using talking as the tool to produce a power relation, do not expect to make any emotional communion with each other. The so-called “partnership” is actually an approach to make more benefits, and on this consideration, the power relation can be assumed positive and productive.
Concerning the struggle between the speaker/seller and the listener/potential buyer, the second scene, which casts Moss and Aaronow, just reverses the situation of the two forces of Levene and Williamson. This time the speaker seems to be successfully and steadily taking the position of the dominator; on the other hand, the silent listener, taking the position of the dominated, doesn’t take any apparent action of resisting, not to mention the act of betrayal. Then here a question is raised: Does the listener really submit to the dominator? Aaronow’s action yet provides us with a negative answer to this question. The second scene also proceeds with a conversation in pairs in another booth at a Chinese restaurant. It begins with Moss’ and Aaronow’s complaints about the great pressure of the sales competition. The gold motto
-- “always be closing” -- advises these real-estate salesmen that if deals cannot be closed, then the gate of men’s business world will be closed to them. “To get on the board” is the only way of surviving one’s self-identity, which is
4 Henry I. Schvey, “Power Plays: David Mamet’s Theatre of Manipulation,” David Mamet: A Casebook (New York: Garland, 1992) 104. Chen 71 measured by how much money one makes. Moss, like Levene in the first scene, does the most part of the talk; however, unlike Levene, Moss evidently gains the real manipulation over his addressee, Aaronow, the other aging salesman. Moss’ repetition of “I’ll tell you” always wins Aaronow’s subordinate affirmation like “yes” or “that’s right.” Being recognized of his authority of linguistic control, Moss stands at the position of a teacher and
Aaronow is his pupil. Moss’ role of an instructor generally parallels Teach’s and Don’s roles in American Buffalo. They all regard themselves very skillful in their “career,” and they believe people who listen to and follow their instructions will succeed.
Moss firstly shares his experiences of selling lands with silent Aaronow, and then he reveals his detection of the “abnormal” system of capitalistic societies. For Moss, he feels that being hired to work and making big money for the boss yet taking little money home make him like an exploited slave.
He wants to resist the exploiting system and be no more an object of the repression of the sales contest. Jerry Graff, who runs his own business and makes money by himself, is a good model of businessman in Moss’ view.
Moss: To say “I’m going on my own.” ’Cause what you do,
George, let me tell you what you do: you find yourself in thrall to
someone else. And we enslave ourselves. To please. To win
some fucking toaster … to … to … and the guy who got there
first made up those…
Aaronow: That’s right…
Moss: He made up those rules, and we’re working for him. (1.2.
35)
Moss senses how unbalanced the relations of power between the system/firm Chen 72 and them, the employees, are. He aspires to exercising resistance and struggles in order to cause some alternation in the order of power relations; moreover, his expectation of making improvement in his economic condition is also carried with his action of resistance. Refusing to be passively punished by the rules of the contest, Moss announces the contest itself, Mitch and
Murray, the firm, and the system of business deserve a punishment. On this point, it is this force of resistance that constitutes the positive as well as productive nature of power (relations). To rob the office and to sell the stolen leads to Jerry Graff are what Moss conceives to be the strategy of punishing.
Moss, as a skillful speaker, always speaks around the topic but never to the point; contrary to Moss, Aaronow, who talks without concealing any intention, innocently falls into traps Moss sets in their conversation. When Moss claims,
“someone should rob the office” (38), Aaronow makes no rejection or agreement with a “huh.” Moss grasps the chance and goes on his offensive action of “inviting” his obedient addressee to join in the plan of robbery.
Moss: That’s what I’m saying. We were, if we were that kind of
guys, to knock it off, and trash the joint, it looks like robbery, and
take the fuckin’ leads out of the files … go to Jerry Graff.
(Long pause.)
Aaronow: What could somebody get for them?
Moss: What could we get for them? I don’t know.…
Aaronow: How many leads have we got? (1.2. 38)
Trickily, Aaronow has been drawn into the linguistic trap Moss sets. The
“somebody” in Aaronow’s former line turns to be “we” in the last line after
Moss’s reaction of naming “somebody” as “we” upon Aaronow’s talk. The two free individuals now almost successfully and firmly establish their Chen 73 companionship according to Moss’ strategy of resisting exploitations and repression.
While Moss assumes he is overwhelmingly manipulating Aaronow’s mind and the whole circumstance, Aaronow, the only one who has the conscience in this play, queries Moss if this is just a topic of speaking or they are “actually talking” about it. It’s a crime as well as a betrayal to the firm, and no one should commit it in loyal Aaronow’s view. Aaronow, who is assumed to be a subordinate object to Moss, suddenly stands up and questions the truthfulness of Moss’ words. Unable to afford the shaking of his identity of the authoritative speaker, Moss finally overthrows his previous statement that he is just speaking on the robbery as an “idea.” He confesses they are actually talking about the topic of robbery, so he tells Aaronow the robbery must be taken into action. In other words, the act of talking must be taken into an action, and then action talks. This just corresponds to Don’s motto in
American Buffalo-- “action talks and bullshit walks” (4). Based on the pattern of question and answer, Aaronow falls into another trap and is “invited” to be the one who’s responsible for breaking into the office and stealing the leads.
Moss is such a cunning man that he leaves no space for refusing or negotiating to his poor and innocent “partner.” The reason why Aaronow must go for the theft is that Aaronow “listened” to the plan according to Moss’ logic. Frankly,
Aaronow is blackmailed by his “peer” – Moss. Moss realizes that Aaronow is a trustful person after questioning him if he will reveal the name of Moss in case the fact of the theft exposes. Loyal Aaronow answers that he will not turn Moss in; however, his kindness and faithfulness to Moss are abused by aggressive Moss later. Moss threatens his addressee that once the policemen come to him, he will make a declaration that Aaronow is his accomplice. It Chen 74 seems that Moss is practicing “ verbal violence” directly over Aaronow, and the poor addressee is repressed. However, even in the circumstance of being blackmailed, for the victims, who are free subjects in Foucault’s notion, there are still possibilities of resisting. Within the power relation between the two characters, Moss seems to be standing in a higher position, and he makes himself a force of forcing the other force to be affected by him; on the other hand, Aaronow, though speaks little, still has a little space to make resistance to the force which intends to affect his action. Foucault tells us that, “it would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape” (AM 431). It is observed that
Aaronow’s silence expresses his refusal, and being a non-speaker is also a good strategy of resisting. Aaronow doesn’t voice his insubordination, yet at the end of the play, we realize that he resists with his strategy of being silent.
While expanding the filed of power relations to the system of business, we can accuse Moss of committing double betrayals. Moss’ idea of robbery is certainly a betrayal, and his intention of bringing Aaronow into trouble if the action of robbery fails to illustrate the other betrayal of their peership. The double betrayals reveal Moss’ ways of living and struggling in the competitive business world. To Moss, friendship, peership, or companionship is only a
“fake” thing, and the communication among people is created to take advantages for himself; hence, like Williamson, when the advantages disappear or being taken, the betrayals to the “fake thing” become effective defenses for oneself.
The last relation of power I want to illustrate still takes place in the
Chinese restaurant. Following the pattern of sales talk, this conversation also contains a deal. Nevertheless, unlike the previous two relations in which Chen 75 businessmen themselves play both roles of sellers as well as customers, it casts a sharp salesman – Roma and a “real” and tame client – Lingk. The deal starts from selling the seller’s philosophy of life to selling land. This is entirely different from the deals of merely selling “ideas,” which are considered as commodities, in the previous two relations of power. We see the forces of resistance appear and work out in the former two relationships, but in the meeting scene of Roma and Lingk, there’s no distinct possibility of resistance observed in the power relation between the salesman and his client. Roma, as a skillful and tough businessman, knows very well about how to invite his listener to listen to him, so that he nearly does all the talk in this scene. On the contrary, Lingk is so silent that he even never says more than five words in his speeches. This power relation clearly demonstrates that Roma only by using voices creates the overpowering dominance over his poor client who never intends to struggle against the dominance. Facing with Roma’s constant actions of talking, Lingk applies silence as an action upon Roma’s.
Even not knowing the name of his addressee, or frankly, his hunting target,
Roma begins his conversation from the problem of insecurity in the life. This notion mirrors Lingk’s difficulties in his life; therefore, when he hears Roma’s words which are full of confidence, certainty and manhood, Lingk almost totally subordinates to the inducement of Roma’s speech.
Roma: … A guy comes up to you, you make a call, you send in a
brochure, it doesn’t matter, “There’re these properties I’d like for
you to see.” What does it mean? What you want it to mean.
(Pause.) Money? (Pause.) If that’s what it signifies to you.
Security? (Pause.) Comfort? (Pause.) All it is is THINGS
THAT HAPPEN TO YOU. (Pause.) … All it is, it’s carnival. Chen 76
What’s special … What draws us? (Pause.) We are all
different. (Pause.) …. (1.3. 50)
After giving a long overview of his own philosophy of life, of which the truthfulness is actually doubtful though, Roma then adds that opportunities do not come often, and he indirectly adduces Lingk to grasp the opportunity he proffers at the present time. What Roma sells to Lingk at the present moment is not only philosophy of life but also sympathy and understanding, which
Lingk probably needs most. Roma’s action of “selling friendship or sympathy” successfully gains Lingk’s reaction of “purchasing,” and the commodity is the fake friendship. Interestingly, despite that Roma tells his client that he himself is the “opportunity” happening to him, the real fact is
Lingk’s appearance in the restaurant is truly the opportunity for Roma. In this scene, there’s no conflict between the two protagonists, and the power relation between the two is shown to be stable. Roma successfully dominates the other subject in this relation of power, yet the closure of this land-selling deal only remains stable for a short while.
In my reading, Roma does not join in Foucault’s world of power. For having successfully persuaded Lingk to sign the contract of buying the land,
Roma’s order on the board becomes more firmly stable than others’. As Moss sarcastically comments, Roma assumes he himself is the chief of all because he stands at the top of the board presently. He considers that he gains the power to control his client and to maintain his top position in the hierarchy of power.
However, he fails to recognize that power is never a fixed possession to win; power is actually an action upon other actions of other subjects, and power is a relation in which multiple forces work and make it unstable. Roma never realizes the positive nature of power and conceives himself as a powerful Chen 77
“exploiter” who robs his client until Lingk’s retaining of the agreement.
In the second Act, while Roma is flattering Levene’s great presentation of closing a deal, he sees Lingk coming into the office. Roma senses that the only reason of his client’s arrival is to cancel the agreement. For the sake of keeping his order on the contest board, Roma gives Levene, who now automatically takes the role of his “partner,” a cue to stage a play-within-the-play. Lingk’s action of retaining of the contract is not permitted to happen. Neglecting the crucial characteristic of power that power exercises over free subjects, Roma intends to rob Lingk’s “freedom.”
He plans to leave his poor customer no time and no space to take action of resisting upon his action of dominating. Immediately Levene changes his real identity of a real-estate salesman to some “director of all European sales and services for American Express” – D. Ray Morton. The conversation in the office becomes a three-way pattern of dialogues. Roma tends to make himself a man of “busyness,” and Lingk’s speech is always interrupted as before. The client’s authority of delivering his opinion is exploited by the two crafty salesmen. Lingk can never finish his sentence, which is the objective of
Roma’s strategy of power. Though Lingk has no strategy of power to apply in his relationship with Roma, he remembers his intention of being there and he knows he has to speak out his intention. For Roma, he wants to maintain his position of the dominator in the power relation between his customer and him; therefore, he has to leave the limited space to his dominated in order to avoid the appearance of any struggle.
Lingk’s assertion that “my wife said I have to cancel the deal” (82) is predicted by Roma already, so Roma decides to continue practicing his strategy of power. He pretends he is in a hurry to leave with Mr. D. Ray Morton, who Chen 78 in fact is Levene, and he cannot talk to Lingk at this moment. The real intention of Roma’s strategy is to make Lingk reconsider about the deal in the next three days. Since the closure of the deal relates to Roma’s status in the hierarchy of power in the office, the nullification of the agreement is not allowed to happen to Roma. It seems that Roma is confident that for tame
Lingk, under the pressure of “warm” friendship which Roma shares with him, there’s still a possibility of maintaining the contract. Roma tells his customer:
It’s a common reaction, Jim. I’ll tell you what it is, and I know
that that’s why you married her. One of the reason is
prudence. . . . it’s also one thing women have. . . . Monday, if
you’d invite me for dinner again… (To Levene:) This woman can
cook… (83)
Roma obviously misses the keywords in Lingk’s line –“my wife said.” The appearance of Lingk is “authorized” by his wife, and Mr. Lingk at this moment is the advocate of Mrs. Lingk, who is assumed as an off-staged and voiceless woman in this play. In Roma’s view, Mrs. Lingk is only a “woman to cook.”
He, as a man to sell, convinces Lingk that it is he who is the “man to buy or to invest.” In men’s business world, women are supposed to take no parts in.
The relation of power between the salesman and his client now transforms to be that between a man and a woman when Lingk reveals it is not he but his wife who wants to cancel the deal. The powerful image of Mrs. Lingk is established by Lingk’s revealing the truth that he cannot negotiate.
Lingk: I don’t have the power. (Pause.) I said it.
Roma: What power?
Lingk: The power to negotiate.
...... Chen 79
Lingk (rising): I can’t talk to you, you met my wife, I … (Pause.)
Roma: What? (Pause.) What? (Pause.) What, Jim: I tell you
what, let’s get out of here … let’s go get a drink.
Lingk: She told me not to talk to you. (92-3).
Actually, through Lingk’s mouth the one who’s really speaking is Mrs. Lingk, and what is spoken out is Mrs. Lingk’s intention. The absence signifies Mrs.
Lingk’s refusal of making another deal with Roma anymore. She strongly informs her insistence that she wants to get her money back right away.
Under such a situation, not only Lingk is given no power to negotiate but also
Roma is not allowed to have the power to negotiate the preservation of the agreement with his client. Women are thus allowed to join in the business world with the appearance of Mrs. Lingk’s dominance over her husband. Mrs.
Lingk rejects to listen to Roma, and she also asks Lingk not to talk to him.
We all know that people who don’t listen won’t buy. Walking out of the kitchen, Mrs. Lingk shows Roma that she is not only a woman to cook. And though her husband subordinates to his dominance in the process of signing the contract, Mrs. Lingk also provides Roma with no possibility of making resistance to her decision. She gives a lesson to Roma that, “both power and resistance are synonymous with sociality; their respective forms may change, but a society without relations of power and therefore forms of resistance is ... inconceivable.”5 With the involvement of resistance in power relations, power is no more stable, and it is positive and productive rather than negative and repressive.
As I have mentioned in the introduction, some people accuse Mamet that
5 See Barry Smart, Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1985) 133. Chen 80 his female characters are usually designed to be non-speakers in his work; therefore, it seems that the imbalanced relation of power between men and women are suggested in Mamet’s patriarchal dramatic world. Do Mamet’s female characters always occupy the inferior positions in the hierarchy of power? The absent Mrs. Lingk in this play displays an influential female image to us. Through the invisible character of Mrs. Lingk, we learn that
Mamet’s woman is not that powerless as those accusers suppose. She, though absent and silent, takes an influential action upon Roma’s action of dominating.
Her consultation with the attorney general makes her force of resistance be disguised in the power of laws, which obviously becomes effective resistance to Roma. In Foucault’s concept of power, laws are not the only mask power wears, but through the practice of laws, the effects of power sometimes are successfully achieved. Mrs. Lingk, who even doesn’t show up, reminds
Roma of the force of resistance by using one of the techniques of power – laws.
The power relation between the salesman and the client thus totally reverses.
The one who is left a limited space to make any struggle now stands up and leaves the limited space to his “ex-dominator,” who now has to subject to his ex-dominated by control of laws.6 Mrs. Lingk action is acted on the basis that every subject has freedom in any power relations, and this is what Roma, who lives outside Foucault’s world of power, overlooks. Mrs. Lingk’s powerful
6 As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, Foucault makes two definitions 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.” See Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Art after Modernism (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984) 420.
Chen 81 voice just stresses the missing part of Lingk.7 In front of Roma, Lingk himself is incapable of making any resistance to Roma’s aggressive dominance.
Only by Mrs. Lingk’s audible voicelessness can Lingk change the power relation. Dorothy H. Jacobs suggests that Ann C. Hall’s analysis on Mamet’s
House of Games and Speed-the-Plow is also true to Glengarry Glen Ross.
Hall comments that Mamet’s female characters “create disturbance, admittedly behind the scene, in effect behind the ‘yellow wallpaper,’ but they succeed in creating subtle disruptions in these texts that tempt us to return, rethink, and reconsider” (DMs 120). Mrs. Lingk, shaking Roma’s conception of patriarchy, effectively makes the betrayal of the deal become her forceful resistance.
In the detection of the three main power relations in Glengarry Glen Ross, we have observed how power works and how unstable power indeed is. The characteristics of Foucault’s analytics of power lead us to realize that Mamet’s men are not necessarily fated to be repressed by the capitalistic system as well as the peers. With the possibility of resistance, they are able to progress from the bottom to the top. However, in the process of changing their positions in power relations, we also find that these men will do anything to preserve their advantages. They betray each other all the time, and what’s worse, they can commit any crime in the name of business. It is believed that each of their speech might contain an intention of conspiracy. On the surface, they intend to build friendship or companionship with others; beneath the surface, they calculate and plan to exploit or rob the benefits of those who are named
7 Hersh Zeifman states, “Excluded from the stage, she[Mrs. Lingk] is the ‘missing Lingk’ whose values could destroy Roma’s very existence.” See “Phallus in Wonderland: Machismo and Business in David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet: A Casebook, ed. Leslie Kane (New York: Garland, 1992) 132. Chen 82
“friends.” Mamet’s salesmen seldom reveal truth. They have to dream their own dreams first so that later they can dream their clients’ dreams, too.
Charles says in The Death of a Salesman, “a salesman is got to dream, boy.”8
Yet Mamet’s men are dishonest with their dreams as well as with the dreams they make for their clients. They don’t even share something called
“peership” unless there are profits to make together. There’s no trust in their relationship, because trust, friendship, and the self are also products to sell.
Plots of cheating, betraying and stealing are staged in turn. The definition of
“business” is redefined by Mamet’s businessmen. For each of them, business is nothing other than taking care of his own business.
Learning the possibilities of making resistance in power relations,
Mamet’s male protagonists presume that by making themselves personal material wealth, they can claim their self-identities and self-assertions.
However, from my observation, none of them can find their true self-identities, even they show their knowledge of struggles and resistance. As Roma tells
Lingk in the third scene, for a man like him, he who feels insecure out of fear of loss, the only way to feel that security concerns him is to do that which today he thinks will make him secure. Mamet’s salesmen only live at the present time. Their self-identities and self-worth are judged by what they present in their business today. Behind the title of their job, there’s no other
“business,” like conscience, emotion, or any type of humanship, in their life.
The whole business world is like a machine in which everyone is caught and cannot be outside of it. These businessmen accept the measurement which the capitalistic business world makes on them, and they never try to set their own
8 See Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949) 111. Chen 83 identities and self-worth not on the standard of the amount of deals they close or that of money they make. Anne Dean writes, for these salesmen, “selling is their whole lives, and they do not really exist outside the workplace”
(Language As Dramatic Action 220). In fact, as we see that each selling or deal is not done because of actions of betraying/resistance: Williamson refuses
Levene’s appeals and bribery twice; Aaronow doesn’t accept Moss’ blackmail;
Roma’s contract with Lingk is retained; and Levene’s final closure is concluded by Williamson to be ineffective. The only deal successfully closed might be the theft of the leads, by which Moss and Levene are finally announced to be the criminals. These salesmen still fail to make communication with each other, since what they express is never trust, sincerity and loyalty but conspiracy. They try to heighten their positions in the hierarchy of power, but what they actually do is to label their identities as a Cadillac or a set of steak knives. No one establishes his subjectivity other than the two prizes. No wonder “it is not a world of men.”9
9 Roma laments nearly at the end of the play, “I swear… it’s not a world of men… it’s not a world of man..” (105).
Chen 84
Chapter Three Where There is Conflict, There is Power1: American Buffalo and Foucauldian Power
Similar to the pattern of all-male-cast in Glengarry Glen Ross, American
Buffalo, premiering eight years earlier than the former play, primarily deals with all-male triangular relations of power. Some critics comment that
Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are companion pieces to each other, because both are set in mutual-deceptive as well as self-deceptive business worlds, in which loyalty, peership and trust are emphasized on the surface, yet beneath it unfaithfulness, conspiracies and distrust actually become essences of business. Differing from setting the Chinese restaurant and the messed real-estate office as working places where human relationships can only be established for business’s sake in Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo is set in Don’s Resale Shop, which, according to Leslie Kane, is like a “home” (WW
25). It is noticed that the junk shop reflects the parental-seeming relationship between Don Dubrow and Bob. Douglas Bruster remarks, “Don’s Resale
Shop in American Buffalo represents not so much a single store, but all business.” (DM 341) Apparently, what David Mamet attempts to dramatize in this play is not only a business-based relationship but also a friendship-based or parenthood-based relationship. The conflict between these relationships is the main concern which American Buffalo deals with. As I’ve mentioned earlier in this study, Foucault’s conception of power indicates where there is a conflict,
1 This notion is evoked from Jana Sawicki. In Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, Sawicki states, “power relations only arise in cases where there is conflict, where one individual or group wants to affect the action of another individual or group” (25).
Chen 85 there is a relation of power. A conflict provokes possibilities of dominance together with those of resistance. In this play, the chief conflict among the three on-stage protagonists arises from the incapability of departing pleasure from profession, or friendship from business. Though ironically the importance of the distinction between the two is strongly stressed by the characters, it is depicted that the three of them fail to recognize the boundary.
Therefore, the failure causes conflicts among them, and a contest of dominance provides us with a space to discuss delicate and complicated relations of power with Foucauldian analytics of power.
As its title reveals, American Buffalo starts its plot with a sale of a buffalo-head nickel. Beyond the meaning of a coin, “buffalo”2 in North
American slang means to “pressure” or “intimidate,” according to Bruster.
Bruster keeps on suggesting, “Usually this meaning carries with it some sense of tricking or fooling the person ‘buffaloed.’ Thus, the sovereign of
America’s business culture is indeed the buffalo, the mascot of the charlatan’s trade” (DM 343). Like in Glengarry Glen Ross, an ethics-lacking business world is also demonstrated in American Buffalo, whereas the aggressive are permitted to buffalo the docile in the name of business. The meaning that
American buffalo carries is not only a nickel but also a human being.3 In order to prevent themselves from being “buffaloed” by others, Mamet’s men rarely expose their real intentions in the talk. Communication, which Mamet
2 According to OED, “buffalo,” as a verb, is suggested to be as a North American slang, and it means “to overpower, overawe, or constrain by superior force or influence; to outwit, perplex.”
3 See Ruby Cohn, New American Dramatists 1960-1990, 163. Here she writes, “American buffalo is human as well as nickel in the tough talk that ‘buffaloes’ the meek, who inherit nothing.” Chen 86 assumes to be missing from our society,4 serves to cover the truth instead.
More frequently, an act of communicating is taken to express suspicions, plan conspiracies and lay out betrayals, while in these protagonists’ mind, what they truly long for is establish trustful and reliable relationship with others. It is finally proved that none of the three characters can separate business from friendship, and all of them cannot handle the confrontation between financial benefits and the individual’s true will. Nevertheless, does this convey the playwright’s purpose to tell the hopelessness in human relationship? I provide a negation as the answer to this question, and I would like to proffer my reason in the later discussion.
Don’s junk store signifies its marginal position in capitalistic American business world due to the antiquated commodities it sells. Additionally, Don, the owner of the junk store, Teach, whose occupation is not mentioned, and
Bob, a drug-addict, who get along in the store as a family, are labeled as the marginal in the society. Borrowing Robert Vorlicky’s gender-coded term, I conceive the three male characters as “the marginalized others” in consideration of their situation of economy. As the marginalized others in male-cast business world, they have to seek for an outlet and a space where they can reestablish their central positions in the community. Like the real-estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, whose conviction in patriarchy determines that no women should enter into the macho business world, men in
American Buffalo also attempt to exclude females from the male-cast battleground of business. And as the plot proceeds, it is observed that “the
4 See Anne Dean, David Mamet: Language as Dramatic Action, 33. Mamet claims, “What I write about is what I think is missing from our society. And that’s communication on a basic level.” Chen 87 marginalized others” tend to build their own identities as well as their authorities on “the other sex,” another marginalized other according to the patriarchal notion. Contrarily, under Mamet’s dramatization, Grace and
Ruthie, who even have no opportunity to be on the stage and appear only in the talk of the three male characters, still produce great influence over the opposite sex. The action of the female invisibly affects the action of the male, and based on the act of affecting, an exercise of power is in operation at that time.
In the discussion of exercise of power relations, I propose that the issue of position of female roles in power structure cannot be neglected.
In this chapter, I plan to examine the power relations in American Buffalo from the angles of the three main characteristics of power by nature in
Foucault’s view. First of all, I intend to point out that power is like a machine in which everyone is caught. And then my focus will be on how power relations in this play are proved to be unstable. To the extent, the relation of power between the two sexes will be included in the discussion. The last examination is based on Foucault’s assertion that power is exercised over free subjects. The question that in what way of thinking these protagonists define themselves as free subjects and in what way they exercise power will be explicated in this part. Finally, the answer to whether Mamet’s endeavor is to suggest no hope in human relationship will be provided.
Before initiating my discussion of power relations with Foucault’s concept of power, I would like to trace back to the basic principal characteristics of conventional thoughts of power, which in Foucault’s term is named
“juridical-discursive model of power” and, in this course of recall, the feebleness of analyzing power relations among protagonists of American
Buffalo with notions of juridical-discursive power will also be exposed. I plan Chen 88 to trace the unsuitableness from two aspects. The first one is, for critics who hold traditional views of power, as Foucault perceives, power is an object to be captured and possessed. Such an assumption pictures a fixed and unchangeable diagram of power structure, in which particular agents or persons who seize power occupy higher positions in the structure of power, and others who lack power deserve lower sites. The force that holds power firmly stands as dominators and allows none of the dominated to make any transformation in reverse on orders of power structure. Power relations, following this arrangement, should become stable; however, what the reality shows is unstable relations of power in human societies. American Buffalo represents us this reality, and in its cannibal world, multiple forces exercise constantly in order to modify or affect decisions and actions of each other due to their own desires and interests. In Don’s resale shop, it is not once who possesses power would he manipulate the whole situation permanently. The contest of being the decision-maker between Don and Teach is perpetually staged, and because of the mobility of identity of decision-maker, power should be treated as a relation or series of action upon another action rather than a thing to gain.
Besides submission, repression, as well as subjugation, which traditional critics claim as the only forms power takes, various possibilities other than these single-way and aggressive forms emerge by resistance of Mamet’s male roles in American Buffalo.
Another distinctive characteristic of juridical-discursive model of power I want to point out is that power is negative, repressive and unproductive essentially. This notion is proved not only by the forms power takes but also by the appearance power shows. As I have mentioned in the first chapter, power in juridical-discursive notions, generally speaking, becomes masks of Chen 89 laws, rules, taboos and order. Power is confirmed as a force to forbid, to prohibit, to say no, and to punish while someone breaks laws, rules, taboos or order. The threat of being punished informs individuals to maintain their manners and abide by all the constraints. Are the protagonists of American
Buffalo under such coercion? Evidently the answer is no. This play is centered on a conspiring robbery of a buffalo-head nickel, whose value is actually unsure. Even though the projected plan is not put into practice till the end of the play, among the lines and in the process of discussing details of committing the crime of theft, we smell no air of guilty sense from any characters at all. Succinctly, neither laws nor punishment reside at their life.
Any methods which mean to achieve their objectives are allowed and laudable in the name of business. For Mamet’s men in American Buffalo, as well as in
Glengarry Glen Ross, ethics, moralities and self-identities can be distorted for the sake of commercial benefits.
Ignoring the restrictions of laws, Don, Bob and Teach, who calculate the worth and importance of the burglary for themselves, naively and obtusely emancipate themselves from the inevitability of being punished once if they take the action of housebreaking. There is no other thing as important as being part of the planned robbery of a buffalo-head coin for the three petty thieves, who absurdly give themselves titles of “businessmen,” and the theft is coded as “the thing,” “business” (28), or the “job” (41) in their own terminology. The significance of the coin conveys different but important meanings to each of the three. For Don, the original owner of the coin, which has been sold at the cost of ninety bucks to a coin collector a few days ago, to steal the coin back retains not only his repossession of it but also his self-esteem. When he, as a shopkeeper, does not know the exact value of his Chen 90 commodity and is told by his customer, Don’s self-worth, which is established on the position of a professional businessman, is seriously challenged simultaneously. He irrationally believes that the buffalo-head nickel should be much worthier than ninety bucks, and such a fantasy convinces him that the buyer takes great advantages of the coin as well as himself. Hence, out of wrath which comes from fantasies of being disgraced and exploited, Don intends to take his revenge by stealing the nickel back together with the customer’s coin-collection in order to show his own importance and dominance to the seemingly all-known customer. To confirm his own importance and dominance over the purchaser, Don decides to fight back at all costs, even the action of violating the laws is approbated. Don doesn’t enter the system of juridical-discursive model of power, since manifestly his action of making a conspiracy shows no submission to the constraints of laws.
More than functioning to provoke a conflict between Don and the coin-buyer, the nickel also opens up another battlefield in which Bob, Don’s gopher, and Teach, a friend of Don, in order to accentuate their own importance, must compete with each other. The theft for both becomes evidently a tool of establishing self-worth. Like Don, regardless of the force of laws, Bob and
Teach never consider about the negative repression of laws, and in so doing, they impede the expected accomplishment of stable power (relations), which is the aim of juridical-discursive model of power. The relation of Don and Bob is suggested to be similar to a father-son relationship or a mentor-disciple relationship. Don shows great paternal concern to slow-reacted Bob by lecturing on philosophy of life to him and supporting his financial needs.
From the dialogues between Don and Teach, we learn that Bob is a drug addict, and this elucidates Bob’s strong dependence on Don. Only by Don’s Chen 91 economical supports can Bob have a nonstop of shots. Therefore, for Bob, to join in the plan of robbery and to succeed it become significant methods of building his own self-worth and occupying an important position in Don’s mind. Furthermore, from the perspective of personal affection, Bob, who is portrayed as a loyal guy, proposes to retain the buffalo-head nickel in consideration of Don’s parental daily concern with him. Egoistically and emotionally speaking, Bob has every reason to be Don’s confederate, even though their contrivance will violate the laws. Laws, as the mask of power, make no intimidation to Bob, either.
The other one who direly requires an opportunity to assert the importance of oneself is Walter Cole, who is ironically nicknamed Teach. As we detect,
Teach appears with a strong feeling of being humiliated by Grace and Ruthie, the off-stage yet influential female roles, and along with the proceeding of the story, we also learn the fact that Teach is a card game loser. The rage from the humiliation and the want of money galvanize Teach into the action of proving the importance of self. Joining into Don’s plan of robbery will provide Teach with a chance to make money, and more than this, replacing the position of Bob in the plan will not only present his importance and capability but also win him
Don’s friendship. On these accounts, Teach believes he has to be a member of the projected burglary, since it certainly will bring him great benefits. In
Teach’s mind, benefits of business always take the supremacy over ethics as well as the conception of law and order. Power, according to the principles of juridical-discursive notion, is as laws (HS 82), and its effect is defined as obedience (HS 85). Teach obviously refuses to subject to the law-repression, which merely suggests negativity and anti-energy of legislative power. His desire of asserting his importance stands for a productive and positive force in Chen 92 power structure, though, in effect, such a desire contains illegalities. Not existing in the world of juridical notions of power, Teach absolves himself from the punishment of violating laws, or to speak it more accurately, he overlooks constraints of laws, the representation of power, at all. Teach, yet, is depicted to be self-contradictory when he finally realizes that the whole thing -- the plan of thievery is based on Bob’s lies. He moans nearly at the end of American
Buffalo that:
The Whole Entire World.
There is No Law.
There is No Right And Wrong.
The World Is Lies.
There Is No Friendship.
Every Fucking Thing.
Every God-forsaken Thing (103).
Teach’s origin plan is to “buffalo” others; however, he at last understands that there are also possibilities for him to be the subject of being buffaloed; thus, he concludes, “We all live like the cavemen” (103). Teach, on the one hand, wants to escape from juridical power, so his determination of being the robber of the coin is never obstructed by his consideration; on the other hand, he also pursues the protection of legislative power while he stages himself as a criminal.
By foregoing discussion, we have comprehended the significance of the burglary for the three on-stage characters of American Buffalo. Mamet’s men, being eager to assert self-importance, cannot hear the voices of prohibition from laws, so functions of repressing and restricting, which juridical power contemplates, do not fulfill. David Couzens Hoy makes the clarity of Chen 93
Foucault’s idea that “power would be a fragile thing if its function were to repress” (Hoy 130). Mamet’s three petty thieves reveal the fact that power is neither simply negative nor fragile. In addition, by their insisting that power should not only be a force to negate and forbid, Don, Bob and Teach corroborate that power is an unstable relation in which everyone takes actions to modify and affect others’ action rather than a privilege which is obtained by particular agents or people. Mamet’s men in American Buffalo are not subjects of juridical power, since they, as businessmen who care only self-interests, have no conception of abiding by laws or rules. Actions of violating laws and rules are forgivable in the name of business; besides, most of the time, they make up laws and rules themselves. Mamet remarks, “Law is chimerical. Rules are anarchistic. Whenever two people have to do something they make up rules to meet just the situation, rules that will not bind them in future situation” (Demastes 78). On all accounts, to analyze the meticulous exercise of power in American Buffalo, in which conspiracies and betrayals always occur, I conceive the best way is to abandon the juridical treatment of power and employ Foucault’s conception of power (relations).
As I have mentioned above, in the first stage, I want to point out that the system of power in our society, in Foucault opinion, is like a machine, of which everyone becomes a part. There is no society without power unless that society is merely an abstraction. Foucault informs us that power is not a thing for individuals or organizations to chase anymore, yet it’s in fact a network of relations among all subjects of power. Power thus can be observed through any relations, and in this way, it is noticed that power comes from everywhere and is omnipresent. In Don’s Resale Shop, mentor-disciple relationship, father-son relationship, and relationship of partners on business are interlocked Chen 94 and interfere with each other somehow. The operation of power in American
Buffalo constantly exercises in relationships that are stated above.
Nevertheless, as for the discussion of the delicate practice of power in these relationships, I plan to talk about it in the later part of this chapter. So far as the conception that power is everywhere is affirmed, whereby we also learn that no one can be outside power. Foucault declares:
It seems to me that power is ‘always already there’, that one is never
‘outside’ it, that there are no ‘margins’ for those who break with the
system to gambol in. But this does not entail the necessity of
accepting an inescapable form of domination or an absolute privilege
on the side of the law. To say that one can never be ‘outside’ power
does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter
what. (PK 142)
Don, Bob and Teach exist permanently in power relations, yet in the meantime they do not act under compulsion from laws or rules. Indeed, though their intention and action of carrying out the plan of robbery nearly bring them to the verge of committing a crime, the failure of the plan does not result from constraints of laws or the awakening of conscience. The real reason for the failure is the absence of Fletcher, who, in Don’s mind, is a tough and skilled guy. In Don’s view, the plan will be added to some depths (51) with
Fletcher’s participation. What we should notice is the three thieves-would-be never trap themselves with domination of laws while they arrange the burglary.
Corresponding to Teach’s final lament, they do live in a world without laws since they’ve overlooked the restricting of laws first. To the extent of restrictions of rules, we detect that for the three main protagonists, rules or agreements are not necessarily obeyed. With the changing of interests or the Chen 95 appearance of conflicts, rules and agreements transform. Teach’s replacement of Bob on “working” with Don comprehensively reflects this point. Don is successfully persuaded by Teach; hence, he breaks the partnership with Bob under the consideration of self-benefits. Betrayals do not deserve culpability.
It seems, to Mamet’s men, rules, agreements and even laws are made to break, yet they do not live outside the territory of omnipresent judicial power at the same time.
When he claims that power is always present, Foucault means power appears when it’s in action. Within the structure of machine-like power, multiple forces exercise with each other, and by this action of exercising, power shows up and mobilizes, too. “The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective;” writes Foucault, and “it is a way in which certain action modify others” (AM 426). Precisely, power is exercised in effect of a set of an action upon another, and it operates in the way of affecting and modifying actions of others. In American Buffalo, Don’s motto is “Action Counts” (4). He continues to signify its implication to his docile gopher, Bob, that, “Action talks and bullshit walks.”5 It is apparent that to Don only by taking actions can one’s importance be elucidated. In power relations, a subject’s supremacy is especially and easily confirmed by initiatively taking actions to alter or influence others’ (re)actions.
Thomas L. King dissects Don’s utterance and suggests it should be rephrased as “‘action talks and talk acts,’ for ‘bullshit’ is a kind of talk and walking is a kind of action.”6 The act of talking has turned into a real “action” in
5 David Mamet, American Buffalo (New York: Grove, 1976) 4.
6 See Thomas L. King, “Talk and Dramatic Action in American Buffalo,” Chen 96
American Buffalo, and this is also true in Glengarry Glen Ross. Jeanette R.
Malkin notes that, “to ‘talk’ is to act, talk is power, [Mamet’s] men know how to ‘talk.’”7 Through the action of talking, Mamet’s characters react with each other, and it is found that the contents of conversation veil real intentions of the addressers. The talk is voiced; however, exercises of power are acting in silence. A man in order to assert his importance must talk well so that he can succeed to dominate others’ action according to his personal interests.
William H. Macy8 tells Leslie Kane in an interview that American Buffalo is
“about a man is his word. If a man’s word is useless, then the man is useless.
A man’s character is defined by his action” of talk (WW 26). Aside from this,
Anne Dean also infers that David Mamet’s talent for writing verbal communication makes language become a dramatic action. In the introduction to her book – David Mamet: Language as Dramatic Action, it’s stated:
Words are used for more than communication in Mamet’s world;
they become the action, the prompt deed. Quiet often, it is simply
because a character says something that he must act upon it.
Language is thus used to dictate the action, rather than merely
describe what takes place.
Clearly, the communication among Mamet’s absurd but pitiable thieves spins
Modern Drama, 34.4 (1991): 539.
7 See Jeanette R. Malkin, “Language As a Prison: Verbal Debris and Deprivation,” Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 156.
8 William H. Macy portrayed the role of Bob in the premiere production of American Buffalo in the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1975. The director was Gregory Mosher. Chen 97 the web of human relationship, and verbal expressions are needle and thread.
Once there’s an emergence of conflicts in the communication, power is in action right away. To talk smartly therefore becomes the best strategy to claim one’s dominance over others in the structure of power. We discover the three guys teach, persuade, bargain, deal, deceive, cheat, boast and scold with the aim of eliminating conflicts and getting the upper hand over the opposed.
Therefore, if we find out the conflicts among these characters, through the inspection of their act of talk, we will have a full view of power in Don’s junk shop of American Buffalo.
So long as the issue of conflicts in power relations is mentioned, I propose to enter into the discussion of the second chief characteristic of Foucauldian power along with American Buffalo. Power, in Foucault’s view, has no possibility to be stable and fixed due to the reason that power only occurs where and when conflicts are. In other words, power relations, in which conflicts arise and the dominant war with the resistant on the battleground of language for subjugating the other, are unstable. Concisely, the force of resistance appears at the concurrent moment when power acts. The competition of holding dominance or being a decision-maker among the three characters is the main theme of this play, and the struggle as well as resistance of the subjects disclose evidence of delicate dynamics of power. In the former paragraphs, we have examined the individual importance of stealing of the coin collection for each character, but to explicitly analyze the unstable power relations, we must probe conflicts and struggles or resistance among characters in consideration of the significance of robbery for individuals. I would like to provide three types of intense relations and let the existence of resistance in power lay out, so that the perception that power is unstable is ascertained. I Chen 98 intend to commence the examination from the relation of power between Don and his customer, the coin-shopper, and next that between Don and Teach, and finally the relationship of Teach with Grace and Ruthie, who are physically absent from the stage.
Recalling Foucault’s affirmation of the three types of struggles, which are cited in the previous chapter, we can effortlessly realize the fact that Don’s hardy determination of taking the action of burglary is out of vindictiveness and desire of resisting. The coin-buyer’s action of purchasing should’ve been a sheer beneficial deal to Don, as a shopkeeper; however, Don’s reaction upon it is imaging he is deceived and identifying the deal is not a good one.
Foucault claims that struggles are inspired to act against forms of dominance, exploitation and subjugation. In American Buffalo, firstly, Don rejects the dominance of the coin professional – the customer. When the customer walks into the shop, purchases a buffalo-head coin with a probably arguable price from Don, and at last asks Don to contact him later if Don has “some other articles of interest” (31), Don feels his self-esteem of being a shop-owner is sensitively challenged. His repetition of the appearance of the professional buyer divulges his rages and furies in his conversation with Teach.
Don: He comes in here like I’m his fucking doorman.
Teach: Mmmm.
Don: He takes me off my coin and will I call him if I find another
one.
Teach: Yeah.
Don: Doing me this favor by just coming in my shop.
Teach: Yeah.
Pause. Chen 99
Some people never change.
Don: Like he has done me this big favor by just coming in my shop.
(1.1. 31-2)
Don believes the customer’s words are meant to insult him as a doorman rather than a professional shop-runner for him. As a result, Don wants to make struggles against the customer’s repression which takes the form of dominance.
Furthermore, the process of bargaining for the antiquated buffalo-head nickel annoys Don so much that he hypothesizes he has been taken advantages of, or speaking more briefly, he has been exploited by the coin-collector, who clearly knows the coin well enough while Don, the owner of the coin, doesn’t.
Certainly, Don is not willing to accept this event, which perhaps is just his fantasy actually. Under Mamet’s description, it is absurd of Don that he suddenly realizes the “true” price of the sold nickel after the deal has been done for the buyer. Don impulsively tells Teach that he is sure that the nickel is five times the profits he makes. Feeling ungratefully exploited, Don decides the deal is not over yet. For him, the deal is not a good one; therefore, he will repay his exploitative customer with a better deal in his own benefits this time.
The better deal, in Don’s idea, is the theft of his original-possessed buffalo-head nickel as well as the customer’s valuable coin-collection. The stiff belief that one deceit deserves another leads Don to make the plan of housebreaking. He considers that the action of housebreaking is rationally authorized as the action of resisting upon the customer’s earlier action of exploiting.
In order to assert his own self-esteem to his customer, Don plans the spotting and the robbery, and only by the success of the plan can he reestablish his image of authority as a coin professional or a shop-runner. He has to Chen 100 struggle against the subjugation of his customer. The way he takes to influence the power relation between the customer and he himself, in which the former stands the “above” while the later stands the “below,” is illegal though.
As I have stated, Mamet’s men neglect laws at all. For “business’s” sake, all means of making material benefits are allowed and are free-acted with a license from business. Don endeavors to resist the domination and subjugation from the other subject of power; however, in the course of proving the unstableness in the power relation between his customer and him, Don loses his standard of ethics.
The theft of the buffalo-head nickel and the coin-collection not only stands for a battlefield of power in which both Don and his shopper attempt to occupy a higher position in the structure of power and exercise supremacy over the other, yet it also inspires a power game which welcomes only Don and Teach to be the players. Generally speaking, the conflicts between Don and Teach are represented in two events: one is that they hold different opinions on the borderline between business and personal emotion, and the other is their competition of gaining the upper hand in the process of carrying out the plan of theft. Interestingly, the two events interweave with each other most of the time. Through the acts of talking, these two characters react in turn as the forces of consent and disagreement, and such a mutual-acting operation manifests Foucault’s assumption that power is productive. In the proceedings of modifying or constraining another’s action, one can always say no to those who are at the same time taking the same action as the one is. Consequently, power relations are never steady but unstable. The power relation between
Don and Teach well accords with the previous description of Foucault’s dynamics of power. Chen 101
The main conflict between Don and Teach, namely the controversy between business and pleasure or friendship, is caused by Teach’s strong intention of taking the position of Bob not only in the plan of robbery but also in Don’s heart. At first, Don does not want to reveal the plan to Teach, yet facing Teach’s forcible questioning, Don finally unveils anything about “the mark” (28) and “the business” – the theft. Entering Don’s shop with an empty wallet due to the card-game-losing in the last night, Teach finds “the business” will be a chance for him to fill his wallet with cashes again. Teach knows clearly that the only way to make the most benefits from this “business” is to let the least number of persons join in this plan, and the only precondition is that he himself should be one of the members. Nonetheless, the dominator of this plan is Don, who has a special affection to Bob, his son-like gopher.
Based on the consideration of personal emotion, Don lets Bob be his partner in his “business world.” Teach, in order to accomplish his intention of joining in this “business,” starts to shake Don’s confidence in Bob and to help Don establish great confidence in him instead. In their discussion of whether Bob should be out of the plan, we inspect that Teach acts to influence and to dominate Don’s decision or reaction, but in the meantime we also observe
Don’s action of resisting from Teach’s modification.
Teach (Pause): Don’t send the kid in.
Don: I shouldn’t send Bobby in?
Teach: No. (Now, just wait a second.) Let’s siddown on this.
What are we saying here? Loyalty.
Pause.
You know how I am on this. This is great. This is admirable.
...... Chen 102
Don: No. I don’t do anything for him.
Teach: In your mind you don’t, but the things, I’m saying, that you
actually go do for him. This is fantastic. All I mean, a guy can
be too loyal, Don. Don’t be dense on this. What are we saying
here? Business. . . We both know we’re talking about some job
needs more than the kid’s gonna skin-pop go in there with a
crowbar . . .
Don: I don’t want you mentioning that.
......
Teach: Yes. And I’m sorry, Don. I admire that. All that I’m
saying, don’t confuse business with pleasure. (1.1. 33-4)
By the action of “lecturing” a lesson about business versus friendship to Don,
Teach supposes that he has successfully promoted his position to an upper hand because of his identity of a “teacher” to Don presently. However, Don’s mind is not easily changed as Teach assumes. Don still seems to emphasize loyalty and friendship rather than economical benefits. Evidently if Don’s action cannot be influenced, he will remain the role of dominator, and Teach thus will become the subordinated.
Teach surely desires to influence the order of power structure in which only Don and he are there. His action of persuading is also an action of resisting upon Don’s action of dominance-claiming. Once Teach almost triumphantly occupies the role of dominator in the plan of robbery, and Don then becomes the dominated. The conversation below possibly is the funniest passage through the whole play, yet it again fully expresses the unstable nature of power.
Teach: The shot. I go, I go in … I bring the stuff back (or Chen 103
wherever…)
Pause.
Don: And what do I do?
Teach: You mind the fort.
Pause.
Don: Here?
Teach: Well, yeah… this is the fort.
......
Don: Well, hold on a second. I mean, we’re still talking.
Teach: I’m sorry. I thought we were done talking.
Don: No. (1.1. 36-7)
Teach induces Don to fall into the trap he sets when Don asks Teach what his job is then. Don suddenly works for Teach, and the original order inside the power structure has reversed meanwhile. Not until Don senses that the plan should not be set in this way does he maintain himself being subordinated to
Teach.
Although with the retaining of dominance, Don finally replaces Bob with
Teach. Not entirely resulting from Teach’s instigating speech but also from the inspection of Bob’s slow reaction, Don decides to exclude Bob, his loyal gopher, from “the business.” Now that Teach turns to be Don’s partner, he strives to make himself a decision-maker in this business too, so that his self-importance can be more distinctively assured. With the absence of Bob,
Teach conjectures that he has asserted his self-importance and won Don’s friendship, which he has always been longing for. Nonetheless, Don, out of distrust on Teach’s capacity of fulfilling the plan, insists that he himself is the only decision-maker. After quizzing Teach about his way of housebreaking Chen 104 and getting dissatisfying answers from him, Don determines to invite another real “standup guy” – Fletcher into the plan. Hence, a conflict between Don and Teach appears again. Teach wants to take the action of “educating” Don again. He advises that they should not deal with Fletcher as they have abandoned Bob. This time, his action fails to make an effective struggle in his relationship with Don, who now, under Teach’s previous “education,” desires to build a purely business-based relationship with Fletcher. The discords between Don and Teach remain and come to a climax when Don unreasonably forgives Fletcher’s non-arrival. Teach imagines that Bob and Fletcher have conspired a treachery together, so he stresses his loyalty to Don, “I don’t fuck with my friends, Don. I don’t fuck with my business associates. I am a businessman, I am here to do business, I am here to face facts…” (83). It is extremely ironic that it is Teach who firstly teaches Don the importance of departing business-based relationship from friendship-based relationship, and this issue is where their conflict arises once; however, at the present time,
Teach contradicts himself since what he asks from Don is a relationship which is based on both business as well as friendship. Teach, who always has reasons to justify his acts of betrayal, doesn’t permit others to react upon him with the action of betraying. Ilkka Joki comments that “Teach is a character who insists on having everything his own way” (Joki 195). Teach cannot complete the function of “teaching,” as his nickname implies, because he has already trapped himself at the beginning of his confrontation with others.
Like his argument of business and friendship with Don, Teach is indeed the one who is incapable of make differences between the two. Although either his action of resisting or that of supporting upon Don’s action specifically proves the fact that the relation of power between them is unstable, Teach finally still Chen 105 cannot get to the “above” over Don, due to his stumbling and falling himself at the starting point of conflicts.
Teach’s aggressiveness and intolerance of any contradiction to him are not only visible in his relations with other male characters but also observable in his relationship with women. Recollecting the appearance of Teach, we find that he shows up with severe reprimands on Ruthie, an absent female role in
American Buffalo. Teach’s five-time repetitions of “fucking Ruthie” reveals his anger on her “ingratitude” and “disloyalty” to friends. Being a loser in the porker game last night and being insulted at the Riverside by Grace and Ruthie,
Teach perceives that only by practicing a verbal abuse on the “winner” can he gain himself a supremacy over them in the battlefield of language. In this way,
Teach imagines that he occupies the higher position while the two female characters have to take the lower sites in the hierarchy of power, but the true reality is “Ruthie is fucking, and Teach is fucked.” Teach never realizes all his actions of abusing are spurred by Grace’s and Ruthie’s dominance, and unfortunately his actions are effortless in effect. He attempts to “teach” Don and Bob to believe that Ruthie is not a good card player, since “She is a mooch and she is a locksmith and she plays like a woman…” (14). By asserting the self-gender, Teach considers the power relation of the two women and he himself can thus become unsteady, and he, as a man, ought to be superior to
Grace and Ruthie. However, it is still true that Ruthie is a good card player, since she is one of the two winners last night. Mamet doesn’t make his female roles entirely voiceless. Moreover, the only way for us to know about them is indeed not merely through the reproach to them from his male characters. Like influential Mrs. Lingk in Glengarry Glen Ross, Ruthie and
Grace, through Don’s voice, informs the reliable news about wounded Chen 106
Fletcher’s presence in Columbus hospital. Their phone call ends Don’s and
Teach’s violent interrogation to Bob and terminates the actionless burglary.
Plainly, Mamet’s female roles also take importance positions in power relations between the opposite sex and them, in which exercises of power are always in action.
As far as the unstable characteristic of power is concerned, we remember
Foucault’s another declaration that the direction power exercises is multiple.
Power does not only work from the top to the below but also from the bottom to the highest. As has been previously mentioned, power is a network of relations. Therefore, when power is in action, subjects who stand at the top of the echelon of power also receive the powerful force from the bottom up. The top and the bottom, as rivals in a tug of war, propose to influence and to win over the other, according to its own interests. Due to this reason, power is suggested to be unstable. Bob in American Buffalo, in my view, is the best person who presents for a strong force coming from “below” in his power relations with other bellicose characters.
Ruby Cohn’s statement that “For Mamet’s characters, silence is retreat, but speech empowers” (Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama 63) surely cannot be sustained in Bob’s case. Don and Teach are depicted as Bob’s
“educators,” and in their communication, usually speechless Bob is the object over whom both loquacious instructors exercise domination. Bob’s slowness of speaking results in Don’s and Teach’s betrayal in regard to material profits in business. It seems that Bob falls from the worse to the worst situation: from being arranged to take the bottom position by his perfidious friends as well as mentors in their relation of power to being dismissed from the plan of theft, which is a kind of representation of power structure. For Don and Teach, the Chen 107 name of “business,” which in reality is a crime—a theft, is as a license that permits them to perpetrate any collusion or conspiracies. They think their act of betrayal is based on the postulate that business should not be confused with friendship, so they do not deserve any compunction for Bob. Meanwhile, they do not allow others to take any actions of betraying upon them. As the proceeding of the plot, Fletcher’s absence ambiguously suggests Bob’s possible betrayal of them. Even though having not assured the truthfulness of the betrayal, both Don and Teach agree that what Bob should deserve is verbal and physical violence according to their own judgement. For them, the only action to act upon Bob’s action of “reintruding” into the structure of power and his seemingly action of betraying is the action of abusing. In so doing, they conceive they still maintain the role of dominator in the relation of power, and
Bob, the hit, cannot alter his position from the below to the top. In Don’s and
Teach’s imagination, if Bob really betrays them, then they are preposterously stumbled by their earlier great talks about business and friendship.
Don: Well, that very well may be, Bob, but the fact remains that it
was business. That’s what business is.
Bob: What?
Don: People taking care of themselves. Huh?
Bob: No.
Don: ‘Cause there’s business and there’s friendship, Bobby… there
are many things, and when you walk around you hear a lot of
things, and what you got to do is keep clear who your friends are,
and who treated you like what. Or else the rest is garbage, Bob,
because I want to tell you something.
Bob: Okay. Chen 108
Don: Things are not always what they seem to be.
Bob: I know.
Pause.
Don: There’s lotsa people on this street, Bob, they want this and they
want that. Do anything to get it. You don’t have friends this
life…. You want some breakfast? (1.1 7-8)
If Fletcher did become Bob’s confederate of betrayal, obviously Bob should’ve owed his sudden cleverness to Don’s remarkable lesson.
However, as the reality is unveiled, Bob is proved to be the only one who would like to pursue true friendship rather than material “success.” Though
Bob “betrays” Don at first, since all things about “the mark” (28) probably are lies, his motive of lying is out of his kind-heartedness and friendliness to Don.
Teach, who cares only benefits, is the opposite of Bob. In the contest of occupying the upper hand in Don’s mind, Teach loses by his destructive speech, while Bob wins by his precious friendship to Don. In respect to the power relation of the three characters, the order has turned upside down.
Slow-reacted Bob’s powerful force – the lie about the coin collector, comes up to the top of the hierarchy of power at last, while Don and Teach, knowing nothing about the “truth,” are buffaloed and take the bottom positions.
In the light of Teach’s irrational abuse of verbal and physical violence over obedient Bob, we are led to relate his fierce action to the last main characteristic of Foucault’s power – power is exercised only over free subjects.
In relations of power, subjects acquire freedom to take every action upon other’s actions. As I have stated in the first chapter, subjects are freely opting for approving or resisting the operations of other forces. Despite the fact that violence can be one of the ways of proceeding domination, Foucault clearly Chen 109 tells us that the exercise of power is not violence. In other words, power is essentially not a force to violate, and it is not violence by nature. Lois McNay defines violence as a force which “allows no opposition to arise” (McNay 126), and if some forces of resisting arise, it will destroy them by all means. Once there is an appearance of violence, there is no possibility of disobeying it.
Indeed, such a power contradicts Foucault’s power whose subjects are free to make choices.
In American Buffalo, Teach is the one who wants to preserve his freedom but tends to remove freedom of other subjects. Most of the time, he uses violence to achieve his aim of exercising dominance over others. “Actually” writes Ilkka Joki, “Teach abuses every other character in the play” (Joki 196).
For Teach, everyone whose action opposes his intention should be stopped by any means; hence, freedom of individuals is robbed by dictatorial Teach.
Sarcastically, when Teach insists that “the only way to teach these people is to kill them” (11), he inconsistently exalts the significance of freedom at the same time.
Teach: You know what is free enterprise?
Don: No. What?
Teach: The freedom…
Don: …yeah?
Teach: Of the Individual…
Don: …yeah?
Teach: To Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit.
Don: Uh-huh…
Teach: In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit. Am I
so out of line on this? Chen 110
Don: No.
......
Teach: The country’s founded on this, Don. You know this.
(2.1.72-3)
Jack V. Barbera interprets Teach’s speech that, “ ‘In America one is free to make a fortune for himself’ turns into Teach’s definition of free enterprise.”9
Deeply believing the notion that each one has the freedom to accomplish a success, Teach, without thinking more for a while, attempts to join in the plan of theft, when he overhears the conversation between Don and Bob. He wants to produce himself a chance to make his self-assertion as well as wealth.
Based on the notion that each individual possesses an equal chance and freedom, Teach justifies his criminal action. Teach’s misunderstanding of exertion of freedom lets “the mode of success become not hard work but theft.”10
In fact, not only Teach miscomprehends the meaning of freedom, but both
Don and Bob also make the same false understanding. They are the original
“team” which prepares to make their own “success” by committing the theft, but they don’t even show any scruples about being punished. All of the three consider themselves as free subjects in the network-like power relations; therefore, when they feel being threatened, exploited, repressed or mistreated, they take actions to struggle against. With the protection of “licensed”
9 See Jack V. Barbera, “Ethical Perversity in America: Some Observations on David Mamet’s American Buffalo.” Modern Drama 24.3 (1981): 275.
10 See Schlueter, June and Elizabeth Forsyth. “America as Junkshop: The Business Ethic in David Mamet’s American Buffalo.” Modern Drama 26.4 (1983): 493. Chen 111 individual freedom, their action of infringing other’s freedom is deviously termed for an action of resisting or self-defending. Teach’s carrying with a revolver in the action of burglary exposes his aggressiveness and his fearfulness. Teach claims that the gun helps relax him, and in case he encounters “some crazed lunatic” (85), his security will depend on that gun.
Who Teach actually defends from is another Teach, a crazed lunatic, who abuses others arbitrarily in order to freely exert his own freedom. Teach’s abusive and corporal violence over Bob is another example to demonstrate
Teach’s inaccurate interpretation of individual freedom. Teach, on the one hand, cooperates with Don to exclude Bob from the “business”; on the other hand, he employs verbal and physical violence to announce Bob’s exile from
Foucault’s world of power, in which everyone is free to take actions at his will.
Yet, at the end of the play, Bob, coming back and empowering himself with the truth about “the mark,” not only regains Don’s friendship but also claims his upper hand in this triangular power relation.
After examining the delicate operation of power in American Buffalo, we note that the core of this play is a series of betrayals, just like the essence of
Glengarry Glen Ross. Ethics is not fixed in these “businessmen’s” mind.
What fills their mind is the idea of making themselves large fortunes. Any means to achieve personal material success is permitted in the name of business, so that human beings have false rights and freedom to abuse each other.
Men’s exploitation of others is proffered to be commendable. However, does
Mamet really intend to advise us that we don’t have friends this life, as Don tells Bob? I would give a negative answer. In my view, Don’s addressing of his apology toward Bob at the very end ascertains his firm friendship in the past and true closeness with Bob in the future. Don apologizes for not Chen 112 stopping Teach’s attack on Bob and his disloyalty to Bob. In a word, Bob’s final confession as well as Don’s apology convey a hope in human association instead of a dark vision of communication. Christopher C. Hudgins writes,
“Mamet emphasizes then, that he intends his audience to learn something positive about ethical behavior by watching a negative example” (DM 203).
In American Buffalo, though being buffaloed by each other, Don and Bob retrospect themselves and face their faults. Hudgins adds, “In the Schvey interview, Mamet says that he sees all of his works as optimistic, not cynical, about the possibilities of self-knowledge” (DM 211). According to my modest observation, Mamet does insinuate that the friendship between Don and
Bob will last long while that between Don and Teach, who seems to be wanting of self-knowledge,11 probably will not be real and still. In spite of this,
Mamet indeed has successfully brought his readers an optimistic view of human relationships.
11 At the end of this play, Teach yells to Don, “You fake. You fucking fake. You fuck your friends. You have no friends. No wonder you fuck this kid around” (100). In my opinion, it is Teach himself who “fucks” his friends and has no friends. He is neither a skillful “businessman” nor a loyal friend. What’s worse is he does not have the capability of self-reflecting. His accusation of Don should be addressed toward himself. Chen 113
Conclusion
George: The Law of Life. Emil: That’s what you say now. George: Some must die so others can live. Emil: But they must die, too. George: Some must die so others can live in a little longer. That’s implied. Emil: And then they die. George: Of course. So that others can live. It makes sense if you think about it. -David Mamet, Duck Variations1.
In an interview David Savran conducts with David Mamet in 1987, while being questioned why the subtext is always about power, buying and selling,
Mamet answers, “ Why not? …I guess most American literature – the
American literature that I love, that I grew up on – is about business. That’s what America is about” (Savran 137). In Mamet’s view, the American society comprises human life from the regard to business, and by proposing delineation of the sophisticated business world, Mamet demonstrates the import of human community as well as the inevitability of conflicts among people.
The myth of the American Dream2 intends to convince people that everyone has an equal chance to achieve his success, especially material success.
1 David Mamet, Duck Variations. David Mamet Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1994) 35-6. 2 In an interview with Matthew C. Roudanè, Mamet avers, “That American myth: the idea of something out of nothing. And this also affects the spirit of the individual. It is very divisive. One feels that one can succeed at the cost of someone else. Economic life in America is a lottery. Everyone’s got an equal chance, but only one guy is going to get to the top… So one can only succeed at the cost of the failure of another, which is what a lot of my plays – American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross – are about.” See “An Interview with David Mamet,” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, 1.1(1986): 74. Chen 114
However, Mamet intends to expose the fact that part of such a myth brings not only a possibility of the conflict on benefits among people but also that of the blur of boundaries between businessmanship and friendship. Being losing the measurement of moral principles and commercial concern, most people, out of greed, abandon personal relationships with others for financial profits, and they act unethically in order to make their own material wealth. In the way of seeking for individual’s success, conflicts arise due to the difference between two people’s wants,3 and in accordance with Michel Foucault’s thought, meticulous power dynamics occur where conflicts are. Mamet’s Glengarry
Glen Ross and American Buffalo delicately elucidate both operations and effects of power, which are caused by discordance of his characters’ financial interests and needs. More than offering an observation of the exercise of power of the two plays, Mamet, as an American playwright, also represents a reflection of the ruthlessness and gracelessness4 of realistic and materialistic
American business world.
In both plays, Mamet provides his readers with jungle-like business worlds
3 Concerning that subtext is usually defined as a power dynamic, Mamet asserts, “It’s all about two people who want something different. If two people don’t want something different, what the hell is the scene about? Stay home. … If two people don’t something from each other, then why are you having the scene? … If the two people don’t want something different, the audience is going to go to sleep. Power, that’s another way of putting it.” See David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988) 137.
4 These two words --“ruthlessness” and “gracelessness”—are borrowed from Hersh Zeifman’s comment on American Buffalo. Zeifman states, “The world of American Buffalo – the world of American business—is literally ruthless and graceless.” See Hersh Zeifman, “Phallus in Wonderland: Machismo and Business in David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.” David Mamet: A Casebook. (New York: Garland, 1992) 129.
Chen 115 as miniatures of human community stereotype. The law of life in the “jungle” is to exploit, dominate and subjugate other people, who are imaginary rivals to each other. From Foucault’s viewpoint, the acts of exploitation, domination and subjugation produce possibilities of struggling against the force that takes these acts. The intention of struggling turns to be concrete with the action of resisting, by which power relations are substantiated to be unstable. In other words, Mamet’s businessmen believe that the order of hierarchy of power, or that of the sales contest board in Glengarry Glen Ross, is changeable instead of being fixed. When needed, they sacrifice others for the sake of survival. All relationships among them are commercial-and self-benefited-oriented.
Succinctly, Mamet’s businessmen, though actually long for close and non-commercial relationships with other people, decide to make themselves competitors to each other rather than loyal companions for the sake of surviving in the jungle of human community.
The sales competition in Glengarry Glen Ross and the qualification-possessing of being part of the coins-robbery in American Buffalo generate the fact that Mamet’s mercenary men define success in terms of work or business. The affirmation of success, frankly, is gauged by one’s capability of making him fortunes from business-dealing. These characters’ achievements are not suggested to be happening outside a business world. As a consequence, one’s self-assertion depends on individual business achievement only. Unlike Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, whose self-assertion is finally completed by the insurer’s payment of insurance to his family, Mamet’s businessmen consider they can only complete their self-values in the battlefield of business. Loman, as a salesman, at last establishes his self-assertion on family affairs instead of on achievement in the workplace, yet Chen 116
Mamet’s businessmen seem to turn their life into a pure business-centered life.
Dennis Carroll points out that one of the similarities between Glengarry Glen
Ross and American Buffalo is that “they have all-male casts and deal with particularly male pressures and social dynamics5” (Carroll 31). The male pressures purely come from business, which stands for a dimension of the public society. In this regard, Mamet’s (business)men intend to make their self-assertions and successes in public rather than in private spheres, like family or friendship. Like Levene’s claim that “A man’s his job” (75) in
Glengarry Glen Ross, Don and Teach in American Buffalo also agree that one person, as a man, proves his self-value by his skills and talents of achieving a material success in his “job” (4). Therefore, a man should assert himself from a business concern, and his failure in his job means a negation of himself.
Under Mamet’s depiction of these male characters in both plays, it is observed that these salesmen, rejecting self-negations of themselves, welcome any means of making successes, and they justify their illegal and unethical actions in the name of business. Most of them entitled themselves as businessmen; however, they are essentially liars, robbers and thieves.6
5 She continues that, “they are set in Chicago and are suffused with the street idiom and driving energy of that city; the dialogue is more prominent than usual; the scenic metaphor of a ‘trashed’ workplace forms a significant comment on the action; the main characters trap themselves as they become impaled on one precipitate, ill-considered action; a potential friendship between ‘partners’ is subverted by competitive one-upmanship and the forces it unleashes. There is one more similarity too: these plays have been Mamet’s most commercially and critically popular, and they are the only two of his plays to date which have enjoyed notably long Broadway runs.” See Dennis Carroll, David Mamet (London: Macmillan, 1987) 31.
6 June Schlueter and Elizabeth Forsyth state, “Mamet’s low-life character may represent ‘the refuse of American capitalism,’ but the playwright cynically suggests that there is no distinction between his petty thieves and more Chen 117
The main issue which Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo deal with is these characters’ fierce competition in self-assertion. As the competition proceeds, it is found that conflicts among them arise; thus, in order to be the winner of the competition, they take actions to react upon others’ actions of offending, exploiting, and dominating. Foucault declares such a series of actions upon other actions is the exercise of power.7 The focus of this study is to examine the subtle power relations among these profits-oriented characters in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo with the reading of Michel Foucault’s conception of power. Additionally, through such an examination, it is shown that these characters’ strategies of power do not succeed in their aim of self-asserting but do expose the truth that they have been trapped by these strategies. Hence, in the first chapter of this study, an overview of Foucauldian analytics is proffered from the distinction between the notion of juridical-discursive model of power and Foucault’s conception of power to the introduction of fundamental characteristics of Foucault’s ideas of power.
With basic understanding of Foucauldian power, the second chapter is proposed to analyze the complicated power dynamics between off-stage employers and the on-stage employees and that among colleagues, the employees of the real-estate office, in Glengarry Glen Ross. The design of
respected ‘lackeys of business.’” See “American as Junkshop: The Business Ethic in David Mamet’s American Buffalo,” Modern Drama 26.4 (1983): 493.
7 As I have mentioned in the first chapter of this study, Foucault stresses that power is not violence by nature, and it is “a set of actions upon other actions.” See “The Subject and Power,” Art After Modernism (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984) 427.
Chen 118 the Panopticon just reflects the power relation between invisible yet influential
Mitch and Murry and visible yet restrained real-estate businessmen. In the
Panopticon, the speculators do not have to be seen by the gazed; nonetheless, the effects of surveillance still can be accomplished. Mitch and Murry, like the guards in the central tower in the Panopticon, by holding a sales contest, impel their employers to sell as much land as they can, and meanwhile the objective of making themselves the most profits succeeds. Under the pressure of surviving in the business world, these businessmen struggle with the repression from their bosses, and their action of betraying the company opens up possibilities of exercising resistance. The theft of leads and the telephone implicitly suggests the criminals’ challenging to the force of repressing from the owner of the company. As Foucault emphasizes that, “there are no relations of power without resistances,” (PK 142) Mamet’s businessmen take the action of betraying as their force of resistance to the competitive system of business.
These businessmen take actions of betraying not only upon the company but also upon their colleagues. The rule of the sales contest, which insists that only two of the four businessmen can survive while the others will receive dismissals as punishment, causes subtle power relations among these businessmen. There are three scenes constructing the first act, and each scene contains a deal. Ostensibly, these deals are founded on the basis of peership, partnership or friendship, which are actually established with a personal financial benefits consideration. To be plain, these relationships are originally exploitative.8 The lack of ethics in American business world is depicted by
8 Carla J. McDonough suggests, “The ‘partnership’ which Roma is setting up [with Levene] is actually completely exploitative.” See “Every Fear Hides Chen 119
Mamet’s portray of the talk/the action9 of his protagonists in this play. Anne
Dean’s comment that “Treachery is everywhere, and everyone is a potential target” (DMs 61) realistically mirrors the capitalistic business world. The acts of betrayals and deceptions, which are defended as the strategies of resistance, become commendable in business world.
The discussion of the image of invisible but influential female character –
Mrs. Lingk is also included in this chapter. The role of voiceless Lingk functions more than a female role that challenges the patriarchal order in business world; to some extent, it implies Mamet’s arrangement of a force of law.10 Mrs. Lingk’s consultation with some attorney general stands for the powerful defense from laws and shows a rejection of being conned by Mamet’s
a Wish: Unstable Masculinity in Mamet’s Drama.” Theatre Journal 44(1992): 203. In my view, the notion of exploitative relations reflects not only the partnership between Roma and Levene but also the peership between Levene and Williamson as well as the “official” friendship between Roma and Lingk. Each relationship in this play is basically exploitative and deceptive.
9 The idea that to talk is to act in Mamet’s play has been discussed in the previous chapter – “Where There is Conflict, There is Power: American Buffalo and Foucauldian Power,” and this idea is also true in Glengarry Glen Ross. These real-estate businessmen use language to take action of deceiving, bribing, blackmailing, abusing and so on. Meanwhile, their actions are taken out of no consideration of ethics.
10 This inspiration is based on Steve Price’s notion that both Baylen, the detective, and Mrs. Lingk are representatives of legal institutions. There he indicates, “A second and parallel structure of surveillance is enforced by the public legal institutions. The marginalized detective Baylen is the occasionally visible representatives of these institutions, but is treated with notable contempt by the salesmen…that these official institutions have real authority is demonstrated not only by the threat of Lingk’s wife to contact the state’s attorney general, but also by the salesmen’s tendency to project themselves into the shoes of those in power over them.” See “Negative Creation: The Detective Story in Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: Text and Performance: 13.
Chen 120 con (business)men. Without any ethical and lawful consideration, most of these characters, attempting to exploit others but contrarily being exploited in power relations they compose, obtain neither financial benefits nor assertions of subjectivity in the surprising denouement.
Likewise, stemming from the confrontation of individual self-assertion, the triangular human relationship of Don, Teach and Bob deteriorates into a friendless and “coins”-oriented relation of power in American Buffalo. The discussion of exercise of power in American Buffalo, which is aroused by an out-of-date buffalo-head coin, is the main theme that the third chapter of this study deals with. For the sake of material advantages, Don and Teach, the two elder characters in the play, prefer to abandon friendship rather than partnership in business. They, on the one hand, underscore the greatness of loyalty to friends and partners in their talk; on the other hand, they make themselves agents of treacheries in their acts. Both people and the real-estate businessmen in Glengarry Glen Ross take similar vicious acts to forbid others to enter the business world. However, ironically, the “deal” upon which Don and Teach cooperate is a sheer robbery of coins in fact, while they assert themselves as businessmen.
In this chapter, the analysis of complex practices of power in American
Buffalo is illustrated with the sequence of the power relation between Don and his customer, that between Don and Teach, and that between Teach with the two off-stage female characters—Ruthie and Grace, and finally that among
Bob, Don and Teach. The power relation between Don and his customer results from Don’s imaginary experience of being exploited by his customer.
The intention of making resistance to the exploitation from the customer urges
Don to make a plan of stealing the sold buffalo-head nickel back, by which he Chen 121 believes he can claim his self-assertion and self-esteem in front of the coin-purchaser. As for the power relation between Don and Teach, it starts after Teach successfully persuades Don to allow him to take the place of Bob in the plan of theft. The course of Don’s and Teach’s competing for being the dominator of the “business” corroborates Foucault’s assumption that power is unstable. Teach’s endeavor to join in the crime of thievery is actually spurred by Grace’s and Ruthie’s contempt for him. In order to assert his self-value,
Teach needs a chance to make himself a big fortune. Interestingly, when
Teach scolds the two off-stage women11 and asks for some “loyalty” in friendship with them, he himself disloyally betrays Bob. Bob’s final confession of the lies about “the mark” (28) alters the order of the power relation of Don, Teach and Bob. Teach and Don are “buffaloed” by slow-worded Bob, who is excluded from the plan. Bob works from the bottom up in the power structure which is composed by the three on-stage protagonists. To conclude, confusing the boundaries between friendship and business, all of the three characters fail to make self-assertions from
“achievement on business”; nonetheless, fortunately, Don and Bob build their self-assertions on the base of their retained friendship. Other than providing his readers with an ethics-losing world, Mamet presents a hope in broken human relationships. Mamet announces, “My job is to create a closed moral universe, and to leave the evaluation to the audience.”12 However, in both Glengarry Glen
11 Teach says, “What the fuck do I care (Pause)… Cunt (Pause)… There is not one loyal bone in that bitch’s body” (American Buffalo 14).
12 Quoted from David Kennedy Sauer’s “The Marxist Child’s Play of Mamet’s Tough Guys and Churchill’s Top Girls.” See David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: Text and Performance, ed. Leslie Kane (New York: Chen 122
Ross and American Buffalo, what have been represented are closed business universes which lack moralities, ethics, and any companionship. By demonstrating such brutal yet realistic business worlds, Mamet attempts to let his readers learn the import of positive goodness and virtues in human relationship. The analysis of power relations in both plays is helpful to comprehend the significance of claiming self-assertions for Mamet’s businessmen and how hard they struggle and strife to establish themselves self-worth under some economic pressure. Some critics accuse that it is the system or the environment that results in human’s wants of moralities, ethics, and close relationship with others.13 With the analysis of power in this study, it is proved that these businessmen trap themselves rather than be trapped by the environment in which they exist. They are free to take actions to promote their situation, but they choose to use illegal and unethical methods to adjust the order of power relations. Business turns to be a license which allows them to take any unlawful means to achieve material success. David Mamet adduces business worlds of Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo for highlighting the distortion of relationships in human community. Hence, as his readers realize that it is human beings who trap themselves and cause this distortion, Mamet’s aim of reminding his readers of the actualities of human relationships in society is achieved.
Garland, 2000) 131.
13 David Kennedy Sauer writes, “critics and audiences seem to agree that the characters’ lack of morality comes from the completely environment in which they are places—the economic system that forces one worker to compete against, and defeat, the others” (See DMs 131). Chen 123
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Casebook. New York: Garland, 1992. 123-35.
Reference:
The Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford UP, 1992-. Available on
CD-ROM.