Mapping the Subject Through Severance’s Corporate Architecture and Design

This chapter examines the set design and cinematography of Severance. Engaging with architectural theory, it takes up the production of new forms of subjectivity through the repetition of architectural norms and controlled movement through space, using Guattari’s “subjectivation” to understand the relationship between self and architecture. Severance’s quiet visual engagement with corporate architecture and design makes visible this process of subjectivation via the production of a “Severed” corporate subjectivity that comes to be via corporate architecture’s structural marriage of work, family, and religion, which characterizes our particular moment of extreme neoliberal capitalism. Next, this chapter turns to an analysis of mapping as a fugitive act of collective resistance undertaken by the severed workers. Severance interrogates the quotidian architectural practices that shape us every day in ways beyond our recognition, questions how much of ourselves is shaped by the capitalist environments we navigate every day, and gestures toward possibilities for resisting them.