The Severance Compliance Handbook on perpetuity in workspace design

Have you walked into work anytime in the last week feeling like you never left? Does it seem like your commute to the office was at least 100 hours ago, only to find yourself back on the same route the next day? Didn’t you hear that colleague talk about the same episode of the same new TV show at lunch just yesterday? Was that the sixth or tenth cup of coffee you poured yourself in your third mandated break of the day (meant to be precisely 15 minutes long)?

Everything about you seems to have this unchanging quality to it, almost unnoticeable in its neverending repetition. It pervades not only your routine but the very fabric of the office in which you work. You realise that the slow erosion of the division between your work and life has accrued into feelings of ennui. The truth is, in late-stage capitalism and especially in a world where digital technology is pervasive, you never really leave your work in the office, creating a sense of temporal disjuncture.

More often than not, for people in information-based jobs (practically most people with a college degree), the sense that our work does not contribute to anything meaningful heightens the sense of precarity about it¹. But let’s put a pin in that thought. What if the answer to alleviating this heightened sense of precarity about work was to forget that it existed altogether, creating a clear separation between who you are outside the office and the you you are at work? That’s essentially the premise of the massively popular Apple TV + science fiction series, Severance. The appeal of the show hinges not only on the lens through which it views the perversity of corporate culture and the mysterious and important work executives do, but how it manages to use the built environment to cultivate an ambience of the eerily familiar, yet surreal landscape of Lumon Industries.

The characters in the show have their memories surgically altered so that their work selves are separate from their private (or outside) selves – innies and outies. The ‘innies’ never experience life outside of work because they are always on company time, and the ‘outies’ never remember what they did for eight hours a day. The ideal scenario for any employer, where no personal life can disrupt the task at hand, don’t you think? The show seems to provide a logical conclusion to the conundrum of dyschronia in everyday life, your time out of joint, unfixed to a defining culture. As Mark Fisher points out in his book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative (2019), the postmodern world has done away with the meta narratives of modernity—with the abundance of pastiche in our culture meaning that it has become increasingly difficult to imagine a different future or better tomorrow. French sociologist Henri Lefebvre makes a similar argument in The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (1973), writing, “eurhythmia aspires to an almost glacial timelessness, seeking to sustain ‘metastable equilibrium’ between spatial bodies”. The endless repetition of aesthetics and cultural markers in a postmodern society becomes a means to prolong the present².

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the idea of repetition or duplication is explored through the device of a scientific technique for cloning humans, Bokanovsky’s Process. Authority controls not only the number of humans produced but also their function. Transposed to the architectural setting for Lumon, we could draw a connection between repetition itself as aesthetic to the architectural quality of symmetry and proportion in design, invariably a chief design philosophy associated with modernism. Take the sleek glass panels of Bell Labs where the show is filmed; the order of the cubicles laid out in the office, their modular design, the symmetry in the spatial design of the lobby.

The presence of cubicles and the endless hallways on Lumon’s severed floor further point to the implicit mechanisation of the corporate workforce. In Nicholson Baker’s debut novel, The Mezzanine (1988), readers follow the protagonist around on his lunch break as he gets something to eat and buys new shoelaces. The protagonist, in his narration, speaks about humans as if they were machines, carrying out repetitive tasks, like tying a tie or the aforementioned shoelaces. Upholding the technological advancements that have made humans more mechanical, the text shows readers how the office building they work in requires them to perform in certain manners. Work orders your life, not the other way around. In Severance, the mechanisation of the body takes place not just by design but also in the manner in which employees’ time is divided. Take, for instance, the games or ceremonies they are required to participate in. The very (re)invention of their personal self is regulated by the corporation in the form of a ball game.

To dwell on the architecture of the severed floor and its fabrication of the ideal employee, what’s worth noting, in particular, is the office’s segregation from the ‘normal’ workings of Lumon. Located in the basement³ of the sprawling headquarters, the occupants are not allowed access to natural light, let alone ventilation. Save for the break room and a particular room that brings to mind the Australian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, there is no sign of vegetation. But when you think of a typical corporate office, there will certainly be potted plants in every available corner. Almost a standard answer to the stop motion Lumon Branch 501 asking, “What makes a building truly happy?” Plants, of course, are a reminder that the outside world exists. Their absence on the severed floor renders the production design even more uncanny. Not only is there no access to the outside world, but even the presence of corporate paraphernalia like art or posters is limited to the common ‘break’ spaces.

Highlighting the absurdity of this imposition of order by modernity and the sense of alienation it engenders is PlayTime (1967) by Jacques Tati, which was a massive influence on Severance as production designer Jeremy Hindle has previously noted. The uniform spaces in Tati’s film are meant to represent the idea of modernist progress. Look at all the skyscrapers! Look at the use of advanced materials like glass! Look at the efficiency of the offices laid out in cubicles!⁴ The absurdity heightens when Mr Hulot stumbles onto a trade exhibition also selling office designs and furniture indistinguishable from the original office setup. The use of trade shows to further the notion of the repetition of aesthetics, as seen with most design trade fairs today, where nothing is new, but the idea to sell an aspirational lifestyle could also be what led to the exhibition-like party at the end of season 1 with Britt Lower’s character acting as trade mascot for the severance procedure.

Think of an office where nothing but paperwork is carried out, and you will inevitably picture an open plan with cubicles. This sense of seeming productivity is effectively used in Severance’s set design. Any hint of personal life is barred. The use of the cubicle setting in Jill Sprecher’s Clockwatchers (1997) also highlights this very idea. In the movie, our point of reference character, Iris, even goes so far as to emote, “I once read that there are two kinds of time: mechanical and human. You could say my story began at 8:59 the day I started that job and ended months later when I left it. But I’d tell you it began in the past, with my old self, and ended in the future, the new one.” The time within the office is mechanical. No ‘human time’ is allowed to seep into the workplace. We are only allowed a glimpse into Iris’ insights on bus journeys to and from work, underscoring the idea of constant movement, a forever return to our working lives.

The corridors in Lumon could be thought of in this way. While disorienting, they force you to move, never standing still, the perfect liminal space. That, along with the relentless set-up of the office, four cubicles, plenty of open space, makes one so disconnected from everything else, that all they can do is work. Add to that the use of glass in the show. In season 2, there are particular moments, especially with Lower, where the viewer is removed by the presence of a glass facade that makes a sense of being watched by the Eagans particularly palpable. This brings to mind the way in which Tati also uses the alienating architecture of the office. The glass facades of Tativille, instead of heightening a sense of transparency, make one feel vulnerable, like they are being constantly surveilled.

To dwell on this idea of a sanitised interior, where you are constantly isolated, could in some sense be tied back to how Beatriz Colomina writes about the origins of modernism as a reaction to sickness in X-Ray Architecture (2019). In the book, Colomina argues that the X-ray had the greatest impact on architecture in the 20th century. Just like X-ray technology, glass architecture brought the mystery of the interior to the surface, like the body being turned inside out. She has expanded on this idea of transparency—that the modern glass facade represented—linking it to surveillance in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), writing that modernity was about the publicity of the private. We could also look at Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) for these ideas, particularly the tedium of corporate bureaucracy and the feeling of being watched by the state (in this case, managers). In the world of Brazil, technology and bureaucracy go hand-in-hand to mould people into isolated cogs for a dysfunctional system, serving only their personal interests.

Also of note is the fact that in most of the media discussed above, the nature of the work carried out itself is murky. The women in Clockwatchers are temps, we don’t know exactly what Howie from The Mezzanine does, we don’t know what Sam Lowry does in effect and come to think of it…what exactly is Macro Data Refinement (the department the characters in Severance work in) for? Perhaps we could conduct an audit. In anthropologist David Graeber’s text, Bullshit Jobs⁵, he writes about the proliferation of jobs under capitalism that instead of using technology to figure out ways to cut back work hours, “figure out ways to make us all work more”. As Graeber explains, “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the 60s). [The fact is] anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”

In some way, this complements the argument Fisher makes in the essay, All that is Solid Melts into PR. It is the system of reviews, audits and surveys that keeps up the illusion that white collar workers are being productive and progressing. This idea, that big companies are tracking what we do through the technology we use, is the core argument for Shoshana Zuboff’s illuminating book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). Zuboff argues that the massive amount of data that cyberspace generates about its users (us) is used to undermine our autonomy. Interestingly, in the episode of Severance that aired a few weeks ago, Mr Milchik reaches out to Natalie before a planned review looking for a moment of solidarity in their experiences as marginalised voices at Lumon, whereas as Fisher notes in his lecture, the very notion of the audit disables people from enacting real agency.  

These semiotic devices—the adherence to a code of conduct in the office through a set of corporate values—are also how corporations diminish agency. What stands out most in Severance is the use of corporate art to create a unifying history for the company. The perverse and pervasive nature of Lumon is such that they have an entire department dedicated to manufacturing ‘history’. It becomes not only a way to make the worker feel like a part of something bigger but a means of mass subjugation and indoctrination. Feeling fatigued by work? Just visit the Perpetuity Wing, let Kier guide your hand.

Corporate culture then seems inescapable, so much so that it’s still around in the 22nd century as Olga Ravn posits in The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century. The narrative presents a series of interviews that the management of a spaceship is conducting with its employees after what the reader must assume is a distressing incident. While the literary style employed by Ravn is meant to satirise corporate language, what’s notable is the fact that practically nothing changes in the relationship between management and employees through the course of the interviews. Any resilience on the crew’s part is co-opted in the narrative toeing the line between truth and propaganda, as at the beginning of the second season of Severance. In Hello Ms Cobel, a documentary jarringly titled ‘Lumon is Listening’ promises change in the workplace environment for the innies. Corporate jargon and empty platitudes that only serve to make the employees feel more disconnected from each other are used as perks of the job.

Think of it this way: Look how modern your office is now; look at the sleek furniture and the latest software for your systems, all so you can work more efficiently. Look at all the snacks in the break room, the table tennis table, the comfy recliners and the flat-screen TV, all so you can relax while you are at work.  Doesn’t it make you want to perform the tasks you are given with love?  Don’t you see that the work you are doing is in service of a greater good (determined by us) ? Are you not grateful to be in the invigorating company of your corporate family? Why would you want to go back home?  After all, every time you find yourself here, isn’t it a choice? 

References

^1.As theorist Mark Fisher points out in his lecture Cybertime Crisis, the temporality imposed on humans by cyberspace, leads to a constant state of precarity, where if you’re not working to make money, you feel like you’re wasting time. Life becomes “a frenzy of activity where nothing really happens”.

^2.As Lefebvre elaborates, “The concept and theory of reproduction brings out one of the most prominent but least noticed features of ‘modernity,’ the prevalence of repetition in all spheres. This poor little world…is condemned not only to reproduce in order to reproduce itself, together with its constitutive relations, but also to present what is repeated as new, and as all the more new (neo) the more archaic it actually is.”

^3.Note here the fact that such a hierarchical division is mostly maintained to denote class differences in media, such as in Bong Joon-Ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite (2019).

^4.The appropriation of modern design for corporate offices, particularly to create a sense of community, is the focus of Nikil Saval’s 2015 book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. In the book, he dwells on the history of the cubicle and how Robert Propst’s design for an office that would increase efficiency was knocked off and mass-produced to give us what we know as the standard cubicle today.

^5.