Dan Erickson’s Severance (Apple TV+, 2022) and Ling Ma’s Severance (FSG, 2018) are namesake cultural productions deploying elements of science fiction and dystopian horror to rigorously critique contemporary capitalism, its debilitating effects on the modern worker, and its paradoxical ableism. In other respects, they could not be more different. Despite their differences, they notably both use memory and nostalgia to accomplish their similar critiques. Memory is, in these artifacts, an objective correlative for infectious or neurological disability. In the novel, an infection renders people catatonic beings trapped in the past; while in the show, grief or mental illness are disabilities that get in the way of efficient work.
The shared title of these productions—evidently playing on the “severance package,” or compensation disbursed upon being removed from the workforce—provides these artists with a suggestive semantic node that can encompass a host of alternative meanings. On the one hand, the show imagines a “severance” between home and work memories through direct manipulation of the brain: in the wake of this biological intervention, memory is dictated by spatiality and the person at home and the person at work become, in effect, different people. On the other hand, the book’s deconstruction of the word “severance” is more subtle: it is a fugitive presence in this disturbingly prescient novel that imagines a world destroyed by a fungal infection, “Shen Fever,” emerging from China. It appears in passing at a few points: for instance, the Chinese American protagonist describes her immigrant father’s separation from their country as severance. But it is also notable that the author Ling Ma completed a good chunk of the book while living on severance pay, a condition of precarity that strongly informs her critique of global capitalism in the novel.
For all these different approaches to a word and a concept, there is a notable similarity between these texts.“Severance” in these narratives is not just a spatial separation—from the mother country or from the place of employment—but also a temporal rupture between past and present. In Ma’s novel, the survivors wonder whether “nostalgia” may be a risk factor for catching the debilitating infection: “Memories beget memories. Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories” (Ma 160). The “zombies” infected by Shen Fever are therefore severed from the present and only inhabit the past. Conversely, in Erickson’s show, the protagonist Mark Scout—played with understated verve by Adam Scott to further underscore the eerie quality of the character’s otherwise quotidian-seeming dystopian world—agrees to undergo the procedure of severance to medically correct his immense grief over his wife’s recent death. Intriguingly, prior to joining the “severed floor” of the sinister corporation Lumon Industries, he was a professor of history, a field centered on how we remember and narrate the past. Mark’s temporal severance, unlike that of Ma’s zombies, is aimed at keeping him in the present. This severance therefore uncannily mirrors the commercialization of “mindfulness” today in the corporate world, a world that has from the beginning ostracized disability while paying lip-service to modern notions of “self-care” and “wellness.”
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Capitalism and disability are inextricably entwined. The academic field of disability studies and the disability rights movements that emerged in the Global North have often ignored the economic base of the ableist superstructure, even as they have rightly critiqued the “medical model” of disability and emphasized attention to the built environments that make impairment a disability. As advocates of the new “disability justice” movement have pointed out, earlier models of disability liberation were couched in the neoliberal language of individual rights that glossed over the material conditions undermining the flourishing of disabled lives.
Scholars such as Nirmala Erevelles have opted instead to examine disabled embodiment through a historical materialist and global lens, tracing the emergence of disability back to the debilitating logics of the Middle Passage and other modes of racial capitalism.[1] These modes of unfree labor necessarily presage the “slavery” of today’s wage labor. In her essay collection Capitalism and Disability, late author and activist Marta Russell points out that “even the most grassroots disability organizations in both the US and Britain … have yet to adopt an anti-capitalist agenda that sees disablement as a product of the class system.”[2] In the United States, the very term disability “came to be defined explicitly in relation to the labor market.” Even in Social Security law, “disabled” refers to someone who cannot engage inwork activity due to medical reasons. Because disabled bodies are not as exploitable to capitalism as nondisabled ones, they are shunned, segregated, and isolated from the workforce. Thus, ableism or discrimination against people with disabilities is not some “natural” inclination of the “normal,” but an attitude conditioned by the labor market: we fear disablement because we fear unemployment. This fear is then further perpetuated by the medical profession. “By placing the focus on curing the so-called abnormality and segregating the incurables into the administrative category of disabled,” Russell writes, “medicine bolstered the capitalist business interest to shove less exploitable workers with impairments out of the workforce.”[3] Mark Scout of Erickson’s Severance is just such an unexploitable worker, disabled by virtue of his melancholia.
The two Severances advance this labor-based understanding of disability. The show and the novel get at the heart of capitalism’s central paradox: it creates disability even as it shuns or attempts to “fix” it. In Ma’s novel, Shen Fever is a direct consequence of unsafe working conditions at the outsourced factories in China from where the deadly fungal spores emerge. Similarly, Marx’s chapter on “the working day” in Capital describes how industrial capitalism destroys the health and wellbeing of workers. For instance, in his analysis of the pottery industry of Staffordshire, Marx copiously cites medical professionals attesting to the decreasing life expectancy of the potters. One recounts:
The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population, both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped, and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and are certainly short-lived … But of all diseases they are especially prone to chest-disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis, and asthma.[4]
The “fevered” of Ma’s novel, on the other hand, display quite unusual signs and symptoms—those of nostalgia. One particular passage merits quotation at length:
For the most part, from what we had seen, the fevered were creatures of habit, mimicking old routines and gestures they must have inhabited for years, decades. The lizard brain is a powerful thing. They could operate the mouse of a dead PC, they could drive stick in a jacked sedan, they could run an empty dishwasher, they could water dead houseplants. On the nights when we stalked their houses, we wandered through their spaces, looked at their family albums. They were more nostalgic than we expected, their stuttering brains set to favor the heirloom china, set to arrange and rearrange their aunts’ and grandmothers’ jars of pickles and preserves in endless patterns of peach, green bean, and cherry, teo play records and CDs and cassette tapes they once must have enjoyed. Familiar songs drifted out at us from strange rooms. Bobby Womack, “California Dreamin’.” The Righteous Brothers, “Unchained Melody,” possibly the most beautiful song I have ever heard, more hymnal than anything. But it was not the emotional content of the songs that they registered, we deduced, only the rhythm, the percussive patterns that had worn grooves inside their brains. (28)
Just as nostalgia is hypothesized by the characters as a risk factor toward catching Shen Fever, it also appears as one of the disease’s symptoms. In framing nostalgia as a kind of disability, Ma evokes that affect’s long and often unacknowledged medical history while also showing how the transformation of capital and consumption dialectically transform the experience of nostalgia as a “modern” illness. While today nostalgia is thought of as an innocent longing for the past that may even be therapeutic, it was not always so. As historian Thomas Dodman writes in What Nostalgia Was, nostalgia was coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician as a portmanteau of the Greek nostos (return home) and algia (pain), in effect referring to the debilitating and often fatal homesickness that European soldiers experienced in foreign lands.[5] Nostalgia is thus a severance from home and from the past; Shen Fever, emerging from Ma and the protagonist’s native China, would thus seem to symbolize the diaspora’s longing for home. But in the passage cited above, there is also a notable commercialism in contemporary nostalgia: cars, computers, CDs, cassettes from our childhoods. As Gary Cross writes in his delightful book Consumed Nostalgia, we have a kind of nostalgia in the late twentieth and twenty-first century different from “what it was” before: one inseparable from what Cross calls “fast capitalism” and “fast consumption” of goods.[6] Modern capitalism has augured a rapid turnover rate for the goods we enjoy, so that when they disappear from the market, they produce an angst or anxiety in the modern subject. In other words, when consumed with “consumed nostalgia,” we attempt to regain that ineffable past through the goods—toys, cars, and other consumer goods—that shaped our childhoods. The symptomatology of Shen Fever, a near automatization of nostalgia for the consumer goods of the past, illustrates how capitalism is able to both ostracize and transform nostalgia and, by extension, disability.
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And yet capitalism also wants to cure disability. In Ma’s novel, severance from employment and from the present is a disease, but in Erickson’s show it is a form of cure or what theorist Jasbir K. Puar would call “capacitation.” In her important book The Right to Maim, Puar disrupts the easy binary between disabled and nondisabled by operationalizing the terms “debility” and “capacity,” suggesting that capitalism and wage labor have put us all on a spectrum of debilitation and capacitation.[7] Debility therefore resembles what other disability theorists have called “cripness,” a term that reflects how disabled people have taken back the slur “crip” to destabilize easy binaries between abled and disabled.[8] In Puar’s theory, capitalism’s continuation depends on debilitating some bodies while capacitating others. In Erickson’s show, Mark Scout’s neurobiological severance is just such a capacitation. If memory or nostalgia is a form of disability that capitalism both produces and shuns, then Mark’s traumatic memory of his dying wife is a problem that must be rectified. Not only that memory, but all connection between home and work memory is severed so that Mark is completely different people in the two spaces, what in the show’s lingo are referred to as the “outie” (the person at home) and the “innie” (the person at work). As we see in the show, the employees of the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) division must meet their quotas to meet the profit motives of the organization. They can only accomplish this feat without the burdens—and memories—of home life. In the show, severance is therefore a very literal intervention into nostalgia, seeing that nostalgia is etymologically a longing for home.
In addition to biomedically extracting any memory of home, in creating two people out of one, severance can fulfill what Marx recognized a century and a half ago as one of capitalism’s most pernicious goals: to squeeze as many working hours out of workers as it can, encroaching further and further into “home” life. The show brings this into terrifying and disorienting relief for the audience when we transition from the outie’s perspective to the innie’s. Time for the innie is one endless loop of work. As a form of capacitation, severance not only removes any trace of disability in these workers but in fact creates a whole other organism whose purpose in life must be to work and only work. The home itself is a liability—nay, a disability—of capitalism.
Further testifying to capitalism’s simultaneous debilitation and capacitation of workers, the show eventually reveals to us that Mark’s wife Gemma isn’t even dead. In fact, she is right there on the “severed” floor, working as a wellness counselor named Ms. Casey. It is telling that this woman, whose supposed death has led Mark to be severed in the first place, is unknowingly conducting wellness sessions at Lumon. In Gemma/Ms. Casey, the contiguous debilitation and capacitation of modern capitalism are embodied; the simultaneous production of disability, its disavowal, and finally, its erasure through cure. Mark and Gemma, both severed, of course do not recognize each other. As Ms. Casey, Gemma personifies corporations’ neoliberal postures of individualized “wellness” and “mindfulness,” even as the same corporations refuse to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled people that would allow them to be a part of the workforce. Notably, these wellness sessions are premised on providing innies with information about their outies. The innies are not mere automatons, but desire knowledge of home life: characters engage in numerous acts of rebellion to flout Lumon’s draconian laws that forbid the innies from acquiring much information from the outside world, with one even going so far as to attempt suicide. Lumon, in its logic of capacitation, microdoses the innies with outside information not as an act of benevolence but to assure that the employees remain docile.
As the rebellious activities of the characters show, Lumon fails in this endeavor. The “severed” workers retain a degree of agency to fight against the capitalist powers that be. By contrast, in Ma’s novel the “fevered” (read: severed) are automatons whose mechanistic nostalgia for consumer goods perpetuates the profit motives of capitalism. Meanwhile Erickson’s characters retain certain remnants of their severed memories and can organize against the corporation. They are not like the automatons of Ma’s novel, even though their severance was intended to make them so. They illustrate, in the last instance, that capitalism’s aversion to disability and its attempts to erase it are bound to fail.
Notes:
[1] Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[2] Marta Russell, Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell, edited by Keith Rosenthal (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 10.
[3] Russell, Capitalism and Disability, 17–18.
[4] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 355.
[5] Thomas Dodman, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3–4.
[6] Gary Cross, Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 10–12.
[7] Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
[8] See Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: NYU Press, 2006).