Severance, Foucault, and the Quiet Power of Resistance at Work

'The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others.' – Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power

Spoiler Alert: There are some acts of resistance from season one described briefly in this article.

In Apple TV’s Severance, employees at Lumon Industries undergo a radical procedure: their consciousness is split in two. One self lives outside the office, free from the burdens of work. The other exists only inside the building, unaware of life beyond it. It’s a dystopian twist—but also an uncannily accurate dramatization of Michel Foucault’s later writings on how power operates through the production of subjects

Foucault is often remembered for the panopticon. Its relevance to Severance is written about in an article posted by Dr. Cécile Van de Voorde It’s a great article and I recommend reading it. I will include a link to it in the comments below. The panopticon is often explained in terms of the power relations it creates between guards and prisoners. It is a helpful concept for studying power and control in the workplace.

About Foucault

While often seen as a scholar focused on ‘power’, Foucault himself claimed he was concerned with the formation of subjects.

In his later work The Subject and Power Foucault argues that his work has always been about the formation of the subject, how institutions, disciplines, and practices shape individuals into something intelligible, governable, and productive. In that essay he outlines three processes: objectification through the sciences (as when psychiatry classifies people as mad or healthy), dividing practices (such as those that separate people from others or internally from themselves), and subjectification (the ways we turn ourselves into particular kinds of persons). Foucault asks in this essay if what we really need is a theory of power. He goes on to suggest that we need what he calls a new economy of power relations, one that begins not with theory, but with forms of resistance. He proposes identifying acts of resistance to make visible those techniques which act on individuals so as to make them subjects.

Is resistance futile?

Severance gives us a fictional space to observe that resistance in action. Petey’s failed reintegration is not just tragic; it is a refusal of the institution’s authority to divide him. Helly’s rebellion, including her suicide attempt, is a visceral rejection of the institution’s moralizing discourse. She refuses to be optimized. Mark’s gradual awakening, both as innie and outie, hints at a more tactical resistance, he is unlearning his assigned role. The first season climax, the activation of the overtime protocol, cracks the seal that keeps work and life apart, exposing how thoroughly identity is managed and contained.

This matters now more than ever. Today’s workplace doesn’t need surgical severance. With time tracking software, productivity dashboards, biometric emotion detection, and AI-generated performance scores, there are many techniques available. These tools don’t simply monitor, they divide, classify, and constitute us. They produce workplace subjects whose metrics become their identities. Severance exaggerates the logic of this system to reveal its contours. It helps us follow Foucault, to trace power not where it is declared, but where it is disrupted.

#WorkplaceSurveillance #Foucault #Severance #AI #DigitalSubjectivity