Late Capitalism is eating you alive and making everything the same: on Ling Ma's Severance and Byung-Chul Han's Burnout Society

Severance reads as factory lines of sentences, queues of commas lined up with ideas leading to a fevered apocalypse. It is a text that fully inhabits its ideas, in plot and form. It is full of modern-day malaise, detailing the experience of living after capitalism has stopped progressing and is instead manifested through monotony, automation, and homogeneity. How capitalistic structures have reached a complacency of new corporate-slop-shop-restaurants and the poverty cycle. Ma attributes this to the homogeneity in society - everybody does the same thing and wants the same objects - which corrodes a sense of self. Thus, this essay seeks to explore how Ling Ma portrays monotony, routine, and the loss of individuality as consequences of late-stage capitalism through various, symbolic forms of repetition in her book, Severance. This will be analysed through language structure, zombie imagery, and contrasting diction and semantic fields. Severance bears similar themes to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s collection of essays The Burnout Society, which will be compared as well.

Capitalistic structures have reached the peak of their growth and no longer affect just graphs and stock prices but psyches and the characteristics of the soul too. Such is the scale of the systems that loom over and their significance in our lives. Byung Chul Han provides a good basis for understanding Severance’s complex critiques about life as a cog. In his essay, Neuronal Power, Han argues that society has moved past the "immunological age of the past century” that promoted scrutinizing Otherness and differences as a way of protecting values that were deemed good and moral. This world used to be a disciplinary society. Now, the postimmunological age has come, where negativity of difference is superseded by the violence of positivity. Rather than be encouraged to not do certain things, one is encouraged to do more. “The violence of positivity does not deprive, it does not exclude, it saturates.” Ling Ma describes this in Severance, the way New York City, for example, has become suffused with “Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers”, how the “future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles”, “more overpriced Pabsts at dive-bar simulacrums.” As everything becomes the same, the excess of positivity, the “obesity of all current systems” of information, communication, and production, according to Baudrillard, stand to hurt more than help. “Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.” The “new commandment of late-modern labor society” is the constant imperative to achieve more; but when faced with monotony - a barren job market, limited upwards trajectory, and a stagnant, social sphere, it leads to burnout. Perhaps burnout is Shen Fever, as Severance is certainly set in the world Han delineates. It is a literary world that emulates the real one, suffused with brands, marketing, boredom, and disillusionment with what the world says and what it has to offer in truth. Candance Chen presents herself as a liminal figure; though the facts of her life as a Chinese woman who works in publishing and runs the NY Ghost are clear and stark, she is characterized as ambivalent and hard to define, somebody who who is swept in by the tide and unable to define her surroundings, nostalgic of a past that is redolent of the future, where it is all

ends in the futility of repetition.

Ma adroitly (and ostensibly) uses the monotony of the language to immerse the reader in the ineluctable monotony of corporate culture. The reader never finds respite from the enfilade of the repetitive sentence structures (that is not to say the prose is not gorgeous in moments; “she had grown dreamy, her brain flea-bitten by an early onset of Alzheimer’s”). There is no other punctuation but commas and full stops, nothing like a semi colon or an inverted comma breaks from the monotony of punctuation. The scenes she describes convey the same theme, for example, the visit to the Shenzhen factory of Phoenix Sun and Moon Ltd., the supposed origin of the Shen Fever, where Candace observes the degrading monotony of the factory workers’ labor. The narrative is parsed as a steady stream, interrupted by buzz words, bright diction and fancy proper nouns. In describing her visit to Hong Kong, Candance elaborates on her and Blythe’s Harbor City” buying “Banana Yoshimoto Novels”, “Arnold Palmer satchels”, “a silk blouse and a T-shirt at A.P.C.”, “ and scarves at Uniqlo.” Earlier in the book, Candance describes her mother’s “Clinique 3-step lotion” including a “Liquid Facial Soap Mild”, a "Clarifying Lotion 2”, and “the Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion”; her pedantic detail to brands even in memory and nostalgia is startling. The constant mention of brands shows how vain and materialistic culture is and how it is a direct consequence of commodity fetishism, where a human is more consumer than individual, and values the idea of the object and the way people will perceive them having that object with lust and admiration, more than its utility. Candance is drowning herself; losing her individuality to associations with brands and images.

What the Wix AI Image Engine produces when given the prompt "Late Capitalism". It's scary, disturbing, maybe because of how similar it is to our reality; the only distinguishing factor is the misspelling.

Structures beguile further when considering the nonlinear narrative of the book, where chapters alternate between the current in the apocalypse and the past, pre-Shen Fever. The first sentence foreshadows the shape of the narrative, “After the End came the Beginning. And in the Beginning there were eight of us”. The repetitive use of Google as a means to survive at the end of a civilisation represents how strong the presence of technology and habits used to be. This structure is repetitive, it is cyclical, constantly switching between two opposite sides of the story. The past - before the end - and the current - after the end. Such structure is emblematic of thenotion of routine, a post-capitalistic notion that enforces habit - or zombiesque repetition - under the pretense of productivity, when efficiency, in truth, only seems to increase profits for the firms that loom over like greedy, indifferent monoliths and the diminish the individuality in people. Ling Ma’s description of the modern day human at the end of life is one where consciousness is reduced to routine. A Cartesian-esque, mind-body distinction where one’s mind - subjected to conditioning signals, symbols, and media - has now corroded to time and one’s somatic identity - the physical viscera - is left under the impression of old habits, recalling years spent toiling in the work place, at home, at social gatherings, committed to repetition. The body keeps doing what it always did, “ordering fifty entrées of mapo tofu” as if trained. The imagery of zombies in Severance, traditionally undead, corporeal creatures that only respond to their bodies with a lust to scare, is thus highly interesting. This recalls Han’s idea of burnout, the modern response to the violence of positivity. A life suffused with never-ending habits is condemned to a fate of pernicious cycles. In the scene with the Gowers, a fevered family, Ma describes their cyclical actions, the mother’s routine, how “they bowed their heads and said grace, although they likely did not speak words but animal mumblings following the same rhythm.” Their happiness, with smiles like “child actors in Chef Boyardee commercials” suggests they are content in their blind, lifeless routine.

Lastly, Ma creates unconventional semantic fields and plot points to showcase the effects of globalization. It symbolises the evolution of literary influence, pop culture, and general absurdity in the social sphere. In reading Severance’s narrative, the reader encounters Candance, whose backstory as an orphan with a large inheritance working as a Bible Sales Coordinator in New York City, is glamorous and strange in the way protagonists are often described, but here, it is even stranger. It evokes a sense of absurdity. Candance experiences existentialism through uncertainty about the future, offers a strange admixture of consumerist malaise as she dates the ambivalent Jonathan in their Brooklyn apartment as the world hurtles towards its infection; she works on a Gemstone Bible project. The diction continues to juxtapose with descriptions of zombies, weed, and the constant mention of brands. The text has an element of postcapitalist surrealism - the odd semantic fields and strange plot points; the book actively explores the consequences of globalization; modern day cultural clashes - religion; in its question of what is the Bible but “good business” and “Propaganda” for “Christian Euro-American ideologies”. It is ironic that such an important religious text is now representative of today’s capitalism, being the best selling book that has the same content repackaged a million times over. Both the Bible - in the corporeal sense - and Shen fever originate from China. Perhaps Ma is suggesting that the

Bible is a religious device for virality; religion compared to viruses? Bibles, after all, enforce

routine; daily worship to the selfsame deity; trapped in the monotony of christendom.

Ultimately, Severance reveals that the apocalypse is not a rupture but a continuation. Through repetition in language, structure, and imagery, Ling Ma shows how late-stage capitalism erodes individuality until life becomes habit without consciousness. Shen Fever simply makes visible what was already true: that monotony, productivity, and consumption had long reduced people to routines. The real horror is not the end of the world, but the realization that nothing has changed.

Works Cited

Ma, Ling. Severance. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Han, Byun-Chul. The Burnout Society, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015