Taking the elevator out of Plato’s cave – Severance, Capitalism, and Student-Workers
Descending…
Endless white corridors and retrofuturist furnishing constitute the severed floor’s architecture of despair. Imagine big, empty rooms and labyrinthine hallways drenched in clinical white light, accented at random corners with nondescript elevator doors. Something is off about this whole place, and its workers can feel it. A pervasive feeling of uncanniness and Mid-Century modern furniture reminds one of the 1950s white picket fence, squeaky clean facade of The Truman Show. All of the above elements link Apple TV+’s Severance to a long-standing genre of plato’s cave allegories and media that sharply criticize the capitalist structures casting their shadows over our lives.
The basic premise of the show is this: megacorporation Lumon has invented a brain implant that allows one to separate their work memories from those of their personal life, effectively splitting these employees into two people, neither of which have any recollection of what one does when the other’s away. While the person on the outside retains their previous memories and leads an evidently work-free life, the person on the inside, the worker, dubbed an “innie,” is left grasping at the bars of their cubicle enclosure, guessing at what might exist without. In essence, the memories of a person become spatially dictated, meaning that the switch from one personality to the other happens as soon as they take the elevator down to the severed floor, where the innies work their lives away, bringing new meaning into the phrase “born to work.”
The main characters are initially Mark, Irving, and Dylan. When their former colleague Peteydisappears, the introduction of new recruit Helly, armed with an unusual sense of curiosity and a rebelliousness that seems to do her more harm than good, causes things to go (even more) awry. When they decide to unionize and discover what’s out there, revolutionary ideas whispered under one’s breath and pregnant silences constitute this group’s manifesto.
While Lumon may outwardly appear as a benevolent entity, holding dance and watermelon parties for their employees (and probably using the Corporate Memphis art style in its pamphlets), its mask is peeling off at the edges. Its severed floor is nothing if not a place of harsh discipline, supported by cult-like catechism, brute enforcers, and a strict quota that has to be met, by whatever means necessary. Foucauldian ideas, such as that of the Panopticon, popularized by Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish, enter into play. “Maybe it’s enough to think that we are being watched,” guesses Mark, referring to the ever present security cameras spread all over the basement of the Lumon building.
TRUMAN
– – You never had a camera in my head.
–The Truman Show (screenplay by Andrew M. Niccol), 1998
Students as workers
Contemplating the notion of work and class struggle has been one of my main subjects of rumination these days, since I started my internship and I am now clocking my first ever eight-hour shifts. Beyond intern- and traineeships though, students themselves, I think, can be considered workers, as the two groups share many problems, including being exploited by capitalism. Let’s not forget that, in many tertiary educational institutions, the university owns all intellectual property rights of what the student produces while enrolled. What is produced by the student during an internship period will most definitely belong to the internship provider (see RUG’s Addendum Guideline on IPR).
Stacked-up 3-hour lectures, pulling all-nighters and 24-hour operating libraries are some of the phenomena reminding us that a perfectly balanced work-life ratio is extremely hard to maintain, even when it comes to studying without being otherwise employed. For students who work a part-time or full-time paying job on the side, such a balance often becomes the stuff of dreams.
The question of students being workers comes around time and time again in social media and in my personal social circles. The main counterargument is always that being a student is a privilege, one that we are making the most out of, moved by our sheer passion for knowledge. On the other hand, however, in Marxist terminology, education is basically increasing the value of our labor, while also rendering us unpaid producers of knowledge. While Althusser puts emphasis on the nature of educational institutions as state apparatuses reproducing the dominant ideology, Mario Tronti considers students to be workers already, as their intellectual labor contributes to the reproduction of capitalist structures, such as universities.
CLEMENTINE (CONT’D)
And life is more interesting than that. Or should be. Jesus God, I hope it is. . . Someday.
–Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (screenplay by Charlie Kaufman), 2004
While it was Severance that brought all these matters to my attention again, it itself can be argued to support capitalism in an implicit way. Adorno was a Marxist theorist who spoke about pop culture. Even though his criticism concerned popular music, I believe it can be applied to TV shows today: “the whole structure of popular music is standardized, even when the attempt is made to circumvent standardization” (Adorno, 1990). One can argue that, despite its criticism of capitalism, Severance is a standardized good produced by the culture industry to maintain social order, and, in the long run, sustain the current global capitalist socioeconomic structure. Let us not forget that Severance is produced and distributed by Apple, one of the biggest, most powerful international megacorporations, an indispensable part of the machine of today’s culture industry.
One can find many “standardized elements” in this show, as far as it abides by the conventions of the genres it touches: sci-fi, dystopias, Plato’s cave allegories, Orpheus and Persephone myths, etc. Mirrored selves, for instance, have been a regular motif in popular sci-fi, with one early example appearing in Star Trek (s2 e4 “Mirror, Mirror,” 1967), and one recent example being satirical body horror The Substance (2024).
This question rightfully arises: is the capitalist culture industry strengthening itself by producing counter-cultural objects loved by the working class, or are shows like Severance ultimately undermining it? Could those two notions coexist?
“The prisoner is then dragged out of the cave, where the light is so bright that he can only look at the shadows, and then at the reflections (…)” (Burton, 2024)
At various points of the show, the workers are likened to inhabitants of hell and inmates in a prison structure. As in the classic German expressionist film Metropolis (1927), the workers must maintain a physical difference of altitude with their bosses. Therefore, they reside underground. The underground is the place for poverty, the dead, the trapped, the enslaved, and the zombies, who often emerge from it as the half-resurrected undead, or are glued to it through an intricate system of filament, as in The Last of Us (2023). And zombies, of course, cannot form trade unions (Žižek, 2015).
Although Severance might still be firmly bound within the bunker of science fiction, brain chips are not. No one knows what is going to come out of Elon Musk’s new braintech applications or the impact they will have on our lives. However, concerning both the ending of season 2 of Severance and our current tumultuous socioeconomic situation, one thing is true: The only way is up.
Sources:
Adorno and pop culture https://libcom.org/article/pop-music-theodor-adorno
Plato https://neelburton.com/2024/09/25/platonic-myths-the-sun-line-and-cave/
Žižek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Y1nKkHnQA
RUG IPR Addendum https://www.rug.nl/society-business/collaborating-with-the-university-of-groningen/ipbd/ier-flowchart-en-dec21.pdf