What if staff have been absolutely alienated from their labor? That is the query posed by severance, the titular process on the coronary heart of the Apple TV+ hit, by which staff of the fictional company Lumon, divorced from their non-work selves, toil at meaningless labor in a basement-level jail. If the central metaphor of season one was that you just can not really separate your self out of your job, even with a bifurcated mind, season two tackles what occurs after that data turns into inescapable. Estrangement from the self have to be addressed — and overcome.
The method of severance is posed as an answer to staff: Obtain work-life steadiness by not remembering your work day — actually leaving your job on the office doorways (or elevators, because the case could also be). However like each technological development flowing from companies downward, this innovation doesn’t assist staff a lot as their bosses. Having no histories and context of the outer world to attract on, the severed staff of the Macrodata Refinement Division are simpler to control and abuse, they usually don’t perceive simply how meaningless their work is. Whereas the work might really be essential in addition to mysterious, they’re simply sorting scary numbers, completely unaware of the purpose of their labor. This disaffection follows them house, exacerbated due to severance, not diminished.
As season two expands to spend extra time with the outies, a fuller image emerges of how their severance impacts them throughout what ought to be leisure time. Dylan (Zach Cherry), particularly, is a sobering case research: Regardless of his loving spouse and three good youngsters, he’s chronically sad together with his lot. For Irving B. (John Turturro), his outie’s actions stay essentially the most opaque, however he appears to spend most of his time portray the identical ominous scene of the Exports Corridor, making an attempt to recapture what he supposedly left on the workplace. Helly R. (Britt Decrease), in the meantime, seems to have a extra fulfilling life than her outie; Helena Eagan quickly takes that life over, stealing the pleasure of Helly R.’s relationship with Mark S. (Adam Scott). She could also be an Eagan, the corporate’s inheritor obvious, however the obscenely rich company class nonetheless suffers the consequences of alienation — estrangement from their human nature.
Mark took the severed job in an try to neglect about his lifeless spouse, Gemma, in the course of the workday, however that hasn’t appeared to translate into something good for him. He drinks alone, he goes on dangerous dates, and each infrequently his well-meaning sister drags him to a cocktail party he hates, the place it’s simply as doubtless that there’s nothing to eat.
However the purpose Mark underwent severance — Gemma — can be the explanation he’s making an attempt to un-sever himself. Having beforehand refused to interact together with his innie’s plight, outie Mark is now present process “reintegration,” whereby Mark S. and Mark meld, so he can bear in mind his experiences inside Lumon and save Gemma, who’s trapped because the wellness counselor Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Reintegration turns into a metaphor: The work self has lastly gotten by way of to the remainder of you that situations are in truth insupportable. And the more serious the situations, the higher the liberation of overcoming them.
Reintegrating / The you you might be
“Rise up,” wrote Albert Camus, “is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible situation.” Mark S. has a type of moxie missing in his outie, born of his significantly unjust and incomprehensible situation. However Outie Mark’s gradual dip into reintegration offers him a few of his innie’s verve, as if the 2 selves reinforce one another’s chutzpah. By participating together with his work life, Outie Mark turns into extra alive.
In a throughline that started within the pilot’s foodless dinner scene, Mark is out of the blue hungry on a regular basis. His fridge is usually empty apart from bottles of beer and small jars of what seem like a hen soup Soylent product, drinks that train their customers to know meals as mere energy to be swiftly consumed in pursuit of a extra optimized life. Mark appears to have internalized this — till he’s within the throes of reintegration, and the hen soup Soylent produces a grimace and a visit to a neighborhood Chinese language restaurant, the place he scarfs plate after plate of actual meals. The method of changing into his entire self is exhausting and requires sustenance, however this starvation — this pleasure in meals — represents one thing bigger.
Mark is changing into much less optimized — much less keen to know himself as a product of effectivity. The forces of late capitalism would have us all self-optimize into an infinite hustle tradition of nonstop work, however meals is one human pleasure that forces us to deal with ourselves just like the fleshy our bodies we’re, and meals require spending time in an area the place alternatives might come up — in Mark’s case, a suspicious run-in with Helena Eagan that propels Mark onto the sooner however harsher model of reintegration.
Mark feeding his starvation, then, reveals he’s much less keen to contort himself, much less keen to sacrifice the stuff of life to a productive scheme that teaches us to know ourselves as staff always.
The other of alienation / The we we’re
Mark’s not-so-late spouse, Gemma, engaged in this sort of nourishing exercise. When he misses her significantly badly, Mark opens her field of crafting provides, tucked away within the basement; we see a slipshod candle in Christmas pink and inexperienced. Crafting “gave her time to suppose,” Mark explains, an exercise falling outdoors productiveness tradition.
That is the alternative of alienation. Karl Marx known as it the life-being or the species-being, however in the present day his wonky German translations are largely distilled to “essence”: the concept of every human as a part of humanity writ giant, and the flourishing that comes once we individually and collectively manage our lives and selves outdoors of the merchandise of capital.
Work takes one thing from you, one thing intrinsic and literal, making you much less. You possibly can replenish this loss with pleasurable pursuits: for Marx, this meant consuming, consuming, shopping for books, going to the theater or the pub, considering, loving, theorizing, singing, portray… and the much less you do of these issues, the higher your capital. The essence of life, in different phrases, comes from pleasures and socializing, whereas the estrangement from our human nature comes not simply from work, however from understanding ourselves as staff.
As a result of work can’t be compartmentalized and cordoned off. If we’re divided from our work selves, we’re divided from ourselves. The trail by way of that is one we should stroll collectively. It’s no coincidence that the Macrodata Refinement Division’s massive second of dissent is a collective motion born out of the person paths of office radicalization (with the assistance of Mark’s brother-in-law’s self-help tome, The You You Are). Subjugation begins at work, however so does radicalization. As I’ve written beforehand, it is a lesson many staff who have interaction in collective motion be taught. We don’t go into work radicalized. We turn into radicalized at work, and even the smallest style of collective motion gives a potent sense of our energy.
Like reintegration, that energy carries into life outdoors of our jobs, making us much less keen to take dangerous conditions from others who equally search to take advantage of us. This helps clarify why the wealthiest and strongest folks combat unionization efforts so laborious: Compliance at work doesn’t simply maintain staff beneath the thumbs of their bosses; it retains extractive labor capitalism as the established order. The office is on the coronary heart of alienation as a result of it’s the place we be taught to be subjected — to know ourselves as literal topics. Once we settle for that our livelihoods exist by the unfathomable whims of a C-suite, we’re extra more likely to perceive ourselves as equally passive inside different unequal dynamics, be it landlords elevating hire simply because they’ll or divestment in public schooling resulting in life beneath insurmountable scholar mortgage debt. And when staff name bullshit on the situations of labor, it’s not too lengthy earlier than they problem the very nature of the work itself — and the way in which its ethos spreads its tendrils into all elements of life.
You don’t have to look at a science-fiction present like Severance to know that the office is the central web site of all that’s soul-crushing and spiritually immiserating in life — you simply should go to work. The other is true, too. Participating within the easy pursuits that give texture to life — consuming actual meals, participating in nonproductive hobbies like crafting, socializing with folks you like — replenish the soul, appearing as a counterbalance to the estrangement of the office. Absolutely realizing the self is almost as laborious in our actual world as it’s within the grimly fantastical world of Lumon Industries, even when going to city on a bowl of wonton soup isn’t fairly as revolutionary an act. Right here and there, reintegration into the entire self brings with it a potent sense of self-determination, pleasure, and energy. A style of that makes us hungry for extra.
