Nainani, D.
The spatio-legality of corporate sovereignty in AppleTV+‘s Severance
(2025) Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary. Edited By Alex Green, Mitchell Travis, Kieran Tranter, Routledge, pp. 293-314.
Abstract
In the Apple TV+ drama Severance, both the corporate and the human body are reimagined in terms of its legal personhood and identity. Using a critical legal geography approach, this chapter studies both Lumon Industries (the corporation depicted in the show) and the real-life ‘everything store’ of Amazon to explore how corporate sovereignty is spatio-legally imagined and portrayed in fiction and in reality. It does so by ‘reading’ the show alongside numerous legal challenges initiated by Amazon warehouse workers against Michel Foucault’s work on power and Hans Lindahl’s theory on the legal ordering of space. The chapter therefore traces the spatio-legal aspects of how power is exercised by both fictional (Lumon Industries) and real (Amazon) modern corporate sovereigns in three ways: (1) how they render employee bodies as disposable while tethering them to the corporate bodily assemblage; (2) how they use corporate goods as objects to regulate employee behaviour; and (3) how they use corporate property to govern the spatial practices of employees. It then looks at how the formation of a corporate code that enables these forms of power is made possible through the creation of a corporate legal order, and how Lumon imagines a world where such an order cannot be challenged.
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