Arthur Miller: Dream, Schizoanalysis, and Subalternization

In his theatrical works, Arthur Miller creates a counterimpulse toward power existing in different political institutions as well as in everyday relationships. At times by dragging his characters into direct power-oriented situations and engaging them in a mortal effort at facing different mechanisms and effects of power, and at other times by exposing the microphysics of power at work on their sovereignty as individuals, he shows how human consciousness eventually acts as a power machine.

The book approaches the American Dream as a mythified expression of American desire for capital and control and the pan-German dream of the Nazis as their design to grab multinational capital. The German dream became the most devastating nightmare of human history, the cause of transnational genocide. The American Dream has also turned into a nightmare; the American self-made man is ‘no longer a hero, but an unprincipled villain who succeeds by exploitation of others and the suppression of his own better nature.’ Both of the dreams utilized capital in its extreme as an instrument of castrating their subjects.

Plays studied in this work include: Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, The American Clock, The Last Yankee, Incident at Vichy, A Memory of Two Mondays, The Price, All My Sons and Broken Glass.