As has often been mentioned, on this blog and elsewhere, Hegel's famous section on Lordship and Bondage begins with the assertion that "Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness." This has often been interpreted to mean that self-consciousness needs to find itself in being recognized by another. We know ourselves by being recognized by others. Despite this assertion, thus familiar with the story, and it is a story, of the master and slave, know that the passage suggests that there is another way to know ourselves, we come to know ourselves through our work.
There is a tension between these two different senses of recognition, the one that passes through another and the one that passes through the relation with objects and the material world. As I wrote about this in The Politics of Transindividuality
"The dialectical reversal of this passage, the point where the master is revealed to be a slave, and vice versa, turns as much on the relation to the object as to the relation to the other: the master is a slave, not just because he is recognized by one who he cannot recognize, but because his relation to the object is as a pure object of desire, absolute mediation in its immediacy, while the slave works on object. As Hegel writes, ‘Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.’ This work coupled with the fear of death proves to be another direction for recognition, at least in part: the slave is not recognized, but comes to recognize him or herself through a world that is the product of labour. Labour constitutes another basis for recognition. Whereas the opening of the passage began with a rigid division between appetite and desire, between relations with the world of objects and the world of subjects, desire for things and desire for recognition, the overturning of the relation of master to slave obscures this very distinction. What is more important to Hegel is less the sharp division between the desire for recognition, what we might want to call intersubjectivity, and the relation with things, than the fundamental negation of one’s determinate condition: to be recognized is to be seen as something more than this determinate existence, a point that can be arrived at through the instability of fear and the determination of work as much as it can through recognition."
And
"The first, recognition proper, is through what is traditionally understood as intersubjectivity, I am recognized when another sees me as I see myself, understands my desires as valid. The second suggests that there is also a recognition of sorts in work, a process by which ‘the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.’ This is a fundamentally different sense of recognition, less through the inter-subjective relation of individual to individual than through the way in which one sees oneself, one’s labours and intentions, reflected back to them through objects and institutions."
Moving from Hegel's text to the world, we can say that in all work situations were are always dealing with both, the recognition by others and the recognition of ourselves through our effect on the world. Aside from the isolated crafts person, who can perhaps admire what they made in isolation, most of what we produce or do in the world comes to us through our relation with others. We know that we have made something good because other people tell us. If one wanted to historicize this, one could say that this is increasingly the case, very few jobs involve produce things that can we can admire or assess on our own most of what we do at work is recognized by others. The shift from the production of things to services has made it impossible to maintain the recognition of work as an alternative to the recognition by others. A waiter, a teacher, a lawyer, or a care worker cannot point to some thing, some transformation of the world in order to prove their effects, as opposed to how people judge or asses them; their work is in transforming how people judge or assess them, which does not mean that everyone assesses them correctly. They do not struggle to be recognized through work, but struggle to be recognized at work.
This is definitely the case in Sam Raimi's Send Help. The film opens with Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) struggling to be recognized at her consulting firm. In the opening scene she produces a report for one of her boss to present at a meeting. He assures her that she will receive credit, but we see him remove the little post it with her name on it before going into the meeting. This little slight proves to be only a hint of what is to come. Linda later learns that the new boss, Donovan (Dylan O'Brien), the son of her old boss, has given the promotion that she was promised to her supervisor (the same one who tossed the post-it). Donovan's reasons have everything to do with this split between inter-subjective recognition and recognition of work. He would rather promote his fraternity brother who he can play golf with, than the woman who does his reports. Appearances matter more than reality. Raimi brings all of his years making horror to a scene in which Linda talks to Donovan with a fleck of tuna salad on her face. Everything about her, from her sensible boxed lunches and supportive footwear, horrifies him. He cannot recognize her, even when he is told that her work is fundamental to the office.
Linda confronts Donovan about this lack of recognition, and he offers her one last chance to supposedly prove herself on a trip to Bangkok. The trip is actually one last chance for the boss to appropriate her work, to get her to solve one lingering problem with a merger, before she is transferred far away. Things go wrong on the flight and Donovan find themselves stranded on a deserted island. It is at this point that the film becomes Hegel's Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage: The Movie.
Linda has spent years learning the ins and outs of the skills necessary for survival, her dream was to be on Survivor. She begins to produce food, shelter, water, everything that they need, and unlike the office, there is no middle man to appropriate her products and erase her name from the documents. This does not resolve everything so quickly. Donovan is slow to recognize her work, and more importantly slow to recognize her. He demands that she do more to make it so that they will be rescued, and even suggests that they build a raft and try to find help on the open sea. Linda has no plans to leave, life on the island makes it possible for her to do the things that she excels at and finally be recognized through her labors. Like the bondsman in Hegel's dialectic, she is less recognized by her boss, than by herself, transformed by what she can do, by the actualization of her potential, and the thrill of the hunt.
I am not going to give the whole plot away, mainly because there were a few minutes when I could not tell where the film was going, balanced someplace between horror and comedy. The film has a few shifts in tone and direction that are enjoyable, and since such pleasures are few and far between, I will skip over recounting them. I will conclude by pointing out the film's remake of the dialectic raises two questions to Hegel's original. First, can such a struggle every really end; or, put differently, how can recognition be separated from the drive to denigrate or "misrecognize" the other? Throughout the film Donovan is very reluctant to admit that Linda, an inferior, and a woman, is the reason that he is still alive, insisting to be seen as a boss even though he is entirely dependent on her. He refuses recognition even when such recognition seems warranted. Second, can such a struggle every really take place as a purely intersubjective relation between two individuals separate from the general cultural moment. This last question is particular pressing because we live in an era in which the boss is in some sense recognized more than the worker. The boss is seen as the ultimate worker, the one who not only works the hardest, but also creates jobs, the job creator, while a worker, an employee is seen as something of a failure, a failure to be a true entrepreneur, to become a boss. It is the merit of Send Help that it reveals that a world in which everyone just aspires to be a boss can only be a horror movie.
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