Severance SPOILERS!!!

Sleek, stylish, and brilliantly ambitious, the TV series Severance (2022) is a sci-fi parable for the alienation of the modern office worker. At the heart of the series is a megacorporation known as Lumon industries, where employees on what is called the “severed” floor have undergone a procedure that splits their consciousness in two: one self for work (“innie”), and one for life outside it (“outie”). Access to either the innies’ or outies’ memories are spatially dictated — when the innies clock out, their next memory is of the following morning at the start of a brand new workday, and vice versa. Both selves know of each other, but otherwise lead separate existences, harboring no knowledge or memory of life past Lumon’s elevator doors. 

Even by reading the premise alone, it is evident that Severance offers a dystopian critique of labor alienation, corporate control, and the fragmentation of selfhood in capitalist society. But what is notable about this particular bifurcation between the two selves is that it raises essential  questions about identity, autonomy, and humanity at large. In Frames of War, philosopher Judith Butler posits that political structures determine which lives are deemed grievable — worthy of recognition and mourning — and which are erased from the sphere of human concern. Social and political institutions are often designed in part to minimize such conditions of precarity, instead seeking ways to enhance unity amongst their subjects; a sort of collective identity. And within the first few episodes of the show, it seems that Lumon is no outlier to this generality. But as we make our way through the first season, it becomes increasingly evident that Lumon seeks the opposite: to maximize conditions of precarity such that their workers are situated in a politically induced condition of maximized vulnerability, rendering their lives wholly ungrievable. 

 It is important to note that the operations within Lumon are predicated not on subjugation but first and foremost reproducibility. The structures that seek to contain, convey, and determine precarity depend on the conditions of reproducibility within the corporation itself. As Butler details in Frames of War, a replicable set of social conditions is needed to suggest that life itself requires specific conditions in order to become liveable life — in other words a “legitimate” life — and indeed, in order to become grievable. This is the paradox that haunts the innies throughout the majority of the show. Their precarity determines their value, yet at the same time delegitimizes them. Butler asserts:

“Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.” 

The innies, by design, are denied this condition. Because their lives are never expected to be mourned, they are stripped of value and care. Their suffering is rendered invisible since only Lumon dictates which forms of suffering are acknowledged and which are erased. We may place this in context of Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, in which power is exercised through the ability to determine who lives and who is reduced to a state of “social death.” The innies, though physically alive, exist in a liminal state of non-life, or what Helly, in Season 2 finale, refers to as “half a life.” The severed floor is a state of exception, residing outside the normal state of law — a corporate necropolis — deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.”

The fact that Lumon is composed of constant, reproducible systemic violences is further reiterated by how Lumon treats the dismissal of their employees. The day after Peter “Petey” Kilmer was fired, their manager Milchick insisted that the Macrodata Refinement department (MDR) take new photos immediately. When Irving was dismissed, he was completely erased from all photos on the MDR office desks. Milchick (and presumably Lumon at large) didn’t want to acknowledge Irving’s departure, so Irving was erased as if he “never existed”. They also reconfigured the desks instead of leaving one seat empty, as if it’s always been just the three refiners — Mark, Dylan, and Helly.

It was Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, who argued that the photographic image has a particular capacity to cast a face, a life, in the tense of the future anterior. As such, the photograph operates as a visual chronicle: it “does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.” The photograph acts on us in part through outliving the life it documents; it establishes in advance the time in which that loss will be acknowledged as a loss. The photograph is inexplicably linked through its “tense” to the grievabilty of a life, anticipating and performing that grievability. In other words, it “argues” for the grievability of a life because it represents and proves its material existence. As Barthes eloquently put: “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”

Season 2’s finale is a particularly violent one, with harrowing and grotesque imagery and bloodshed. Mark kills Mr Drummond, one of the Lumon executives, in his desperate bid to reunite with his wife. The producers don’t shy away from showcasing Mark’s animality. At its core, human animality is synonymous with the essence of humanity, a mere cogwheel in the ongoing construction of the innies’ lives. Those who are well-versed in Butlerian theories might be familiar with this idea. If we consider their broader theory on performativity in Gender Trouble, for instance, Butler suggests that our gender reality isn’t a mere fact, but a phenomenon that’s being produced and reproduced all the time. And if gender is performing a repeated set of norms without an original essence, then humanity, too, is an ongoing construction. “Humanity” becomes a double: both norm and residue, both identity and excess. When we speak about “humanity” in such a context, we refer to the “double” or “trace” of what is human that confounds the norm of the human or, alternatively, seeks to escape its violence. 

When the innies display this form of “excessive” humanity — via grieving, remembering, and resisting — a certain incommensurability emerges between the limited life they’ve been given, and the life they now imagine. A life not yet made available by the norms of recognition is suddenly apprehended. It is near the end of Season 2, post-discovery of the Glasgow block and Mark S’s reintegration procedure when it becomes possible to apprehend a future for the innies, who have living but have not been generally recognised as a life. What kinds of lives are available to us under capitalist democracies? How does Severance serve as a larger commentary to our cultural devotion to work and the places we work? If Lumon ends, what happens to every innie on the severed floor? Do the outies possess any memory or knowledge of their innie, and if so, do they grieve for a part of themselves that they lost? Do we as viewers grieve for the half-life of these innies? Say, if this were in the real world and not just some TV series, would we grieve? For our families, friends, ourselves?

Though unable to give a definite answer to the question they start their book with, ultimately, what Butler invites us to do, as is consistent with their many works on defiance and resistance, is to accept that resistance is immanent to life itself. If precarity is the condition of being conditioned, there is a condition of life for life to emerge from, and to be sustained within. Precarious life is still life — to be grievable is to be seen, felt, and remembered — traits that the innies are so relentlessly fighting for. Traits that we ought to fight for. Time after time. They cannot crucify you if your hand is in a fist. 

Contributed by Valerie Ng

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang, 1981

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. 

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2016

Mbembé, Achille and Libby Meintjes. Necropolitics, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003). Duke University Press