FEELING INCREASINGLY severed of late, I was hardly alone in my sympathy for Mark S., Helly R., Irving B., and Dylan G., the four central characters of Apple TV+’s surprise hit Severance. Or more accurately, eight characters, as each has undergone a neurological procedure that severs their “innie” work consciousness from their “outie” off-the-clock “real self.” Developed by their nefarious employer, Lumon Industries, “severance” creates two entirely separate identities who, while aware of each other’s existence, have no real knowledge of their respective counterparts beyond the tidbits and lies they’re told. As curious as the innies are about their outies—the feeling isn’t especially mutual—they’re even more curious to know what it is, exactly, that Lumon makes. Turns out, we discover in the season two finale, they manufacture workers. “What am I building?” Mark S. (Adam Scott) asks his former supervisor, the diabolical Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette). “Every file you’ve completed,” she explains gravely, “is a new consciousness. . . . A new innie.” But if the big revelation is that the evil corporation builds employee consciousness from the ground up, the larger point is that they do so to solve some of the more intractable problems of wage labor.
Take, for example, the way in which the logic of severance makes explicit the fact that labor is a commodity, bought and sold on the open market: I sell Lumon my severed innie, who has about as much say in the matter as an iPhone at an Apple Store, and in exchange my outie gets a steady income and never has to work another day in his life. Lumon gets an even better deal: an employee whose entire existence literally depends on work, who can’t quit, has no rights, and can be abused, humiliated, and even tortured with complete impunity. Everyone wins. Except, of course, my innie, who gets none of the benefits from working, all of which go to my slacker counterpart: earning a paycheck, having a family, watching TV, going on dates, painting mysterious dark paintings, and doing all of the many other things prohibited by the Compliance Handbook, that most sacred of texts.
But if labor is a commodity, it differs from other forms of commercialized goods. For unlike a physical thing, work not only produces value for whomever we sell it to, it produces more value—“surplus value,” Marx calls it—than it costs. And this is a problem not only for workers, who inevitably get screwed under this arrangement, but also for employers. Why? Because employers want to pay as little as possible to workers while maximizing surplus value (profit) through things like longer workdays, shorter breaks, less chitchat, high productivity goals, and so on. Employees, however, want the exact opposite: higher pay, shorter days, longer breaks, more waffle parties, etcetera.1 This inherent tension between employer demands and employee grievances can, and often does, lead to reduced profits through the costly concessions of collective bargaining and strikes. In one fell swoop, severance eliminates a significant portion of this employer-employee discord. For if my innie consciousness does nothing but work continuously with no pay, and no conception of outie concerns (higher salary, family leave, retirement savings, health insurance, child and elder care, and so on), then—ding!—problem solved: All aspiration for a shorter workday at a higher salary with benefits magically disappears. Severance allows Lumon to maximize its surplus value while eliminating all the simmering discontent. Or at least that’s the idea.
The other important difference between selling an exchangeable commodity and selling my labor is that unlike buying a tangible thing—I give you money, you give me the object I bought, and we go our separate ways—labor is a package deal with the worker’s mind and body. Which again creates problems. As anyone who has worked a nine-to-five job knows, it’s a deeply alienating experience to act, talk, dress, and even sit or walk one way at work and another way entirely in “real life.” Making matters worse, we also have different experiences of work time and not-work time, one for my boss, one for me. One reason Severance struck a cultural chord (read: nerve) is that “innie” and “outie” put double names to these double faces. Adding to this sense of non-severed severance is the worker’s obscure understanding of their labor’s purpose and result. It’s widely known, for example, that industrial workers are alienated from the steady stream of gewgaws cranked out by their assembly-line production. But white-collar bullshit jobs are every bit as alienating as manual shit jobs. Worse. Shit jobs, as anthropologist David Graeber stresses, are at least necessary; bullshit jobs feel soul-destroyingly pointless.2 “The work is bullshit!” Helly R. launches at Mark S. during one of their debates over the inscrutable “macrodata refining” process that fills their never-ending days. “The work,” he retorts, “is mysterious and important,” even though, he concedes, “we deal with the uncertainty it brings us.”
If non-severed workers like me feel increasingly like innies with each late-night email or Sunday-morning text from the office, then severance is just the logical conclusion to an already sleep-deprived working life.
And then there’s sleep. Bad for business, “sleep,” as art historian Jonathan Crary put it in his 2013 book 24/7, “is the only remaining barrier, the only enduring ‘natural condition’ that capitalism cannot eliminate.”3 And although severance doesn’t eliminate sleep altogether—outies can sleep as little or as much as they want, so long as they show up for work on time—it does create a form of consciousness that is awake and working 24-7. Or so it feels. “I find it helps to focus on the effects of sleep, since we don’t actually get to experience it,” Mark S. explains to Helly R. after her first blink-of-an-eye return trip to the severed floor. “A weekend just happened?” she asks, stupefied. “I don’t even feel like I left.” “Yeah, that’s how nights and weekends feel here.” “Like nothing?” If non-severed workers like me feel increasingly like innies with each late-night email or Sunday-morning text from the office, then severance is just the logical conclusion to an already sleep-deprived working life.
Abundantly clear from the get-go, the key to innie success is focusing on the job, and the key to focusing on the job is focusing on their feelings. “Should this mean something to me?” Helly R. asks Mark S. during her first training session, bewildered by the pulsating numbers on her computer screen. “No,” he chortles, the numbers have no meaning. Rather, “each category of numbers presents in such an order as to elicit an emotional response in the refiner.” Certain numbers, for example, “feel a certain way on sight. They’ll be sort of disconcerting, scary,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense until you see it, and it takes a while to see.” Macrodata refinement requires turning inward, focusing on affect and not meaning.
Why Severance resonated as it did and why it matters that it resonated as it did are, of course, different questions, easy and hard to answer, obvious and obscure in equal measure. On a certain level—this is the easy, obvious part—it clearly spoke to those of us who feel more and more dissociation between our innie and outie selves. The same can be said of the way in which the creepy care of Ms. Casey—part alternative-health practitioner, part Nurse Ratched—in Lumon’s “wellness room” mirrors the corporate wellness programs that have become not only omnipresent and increasingly coercive since the pandemic but even more nakedly concerned with profits through employee productivity as the route to happiness. And then there’s the way that pandemic-era remote work for white-collar workers really meant nonstop work, as home offices became home severed floors. For these reasons and more, we easily identify with the plight of our innie soulmates.
But there’s a darker flip side to this recognition: We see ourselves not just in the innies but also, far less comfortably, in the outies who clock off each day with a willful indifference to the work they’ve turned their back on. Having sold their innies into slavery—what else could we call this unpaid labor that is coercive, void of rights or recourse to justice, abusive and cruel while pretending otherwise?—the outies profit from their “passive income” while deluding themselves as to its source. In the same way, we also know but choose to ignore or block out the expropriated labor that produces our $50 sneakers, sweatshop clothes and textiles, less-expensive coffee and chocolate, counterfeit Gucci bags, knockoff AirPods—indeed, actual AirPods—cheap lithium batteries, etcetera. But more than the expropriated and child labor in Kinshasa or Dhaka, Americans also turn a blind eye to the precarity of gig workers, legally classified as independent contractors in a bid to preclude health insurance benefits, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance, but most importantly to block unionization.
Which brings us back to how Lumon, as with neoliberalism at large, wants its workers to focus on the individuality of their affects, rather than the necessarily collective agreements and disputes that establish or contest meaning. Embracing a “micropolitics” of self-transformation rather than the collective politics of organized labor—sound familiar?—these ideal Lumon workers focus on changing themselves rather than changing the conditions under which they work. So how, then, are we to take the final scene of the second season, in which Mark S. has to choose between escaping the severed floor with his outie’s wife, Gemma, or remaining with Helly R.? When he decides to stay, is he following his heart, tilting at the windmills of his mind as he runs hand in hand through Lumon’s labyrinthine hallways with the innie he loves? Or is he choosing to stay and fight for a better life for workers? Both, surely. But just as surely, the fight comes first.
Gordon Hughes is an increasingly severed associate professor in the department of art history at Rice University.
NOTES
1. Marx puts it like this: “The capitalist is asserting his rights as a buyer when he tries to extend the working day as much as possible and, where possible, turn one workday into two. On the other hand, the special nature of the commodity [labor] purchased here implies a limit to how much of it a buyer can consume, and the worker is asserting his right as a seller when he calls for the workday to be limited to a certain normal magnitude. We have come to a theoretical impasse: right versus right, each about as legitimate as the other under the law of commodity exchange. In such situations, whoever has more power will decide which right is enforced.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Paul Reitter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 207.
2. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (London: Penguin Books, 2018), at 9: “A bullshit job,” writes Graeber, “is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
3. Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013), 74.
