Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor (review)

Bruno Gulli's Earthly Plenitudes is a sophisticated attempt to rethink our understanding of labour in the context of a capitalist modernity that uses notions of sovereignty to undermine the dignity and uniqueness of human life and activity. It is so sophisticated, in fact, that it treads perilously close to being inaccessible to the very people whose lives and labour it seeks to revalue.

To be sure, Gulli is a philosopher and he has written a book for philosophers. Though he builds his arguments most prominently on the work of Karl Liebniz, he skillfully navigates his way through an impressive dossier of theorists from a variety of traditions. While somewhat grounded in a Marxian analysis, Gulli is quite comfortable bending Heidegger, Bataille, Kierkegaard, Rawls, and countless others to his particular aims and rarely appears to be citing popular theorists for the sake of name-dropping.

Nonetheless, he has a penchant for wordiness that makes some chapters — in particular the first few — almost impenetrable. And while, in some cases, the arguments are complicated and the hard work expended to understand them is worthwhile, there are a few too many instances where Gulli is unnecessarily difficult. "Voluntary contingency is contingently contingent; the involuntary type is necessarily so," (110) says Gulli in Chapter Four. Quite a mouthful. Even if I were to assume that I am the most blockheaded of academic theorists, the difficulty I had with Gulli's work still suggests that Earthly Plenitudes will not be accessible to many people outside the academy, especially given the breath of reading one needs in order to follow Gulli through centuries of critical theory.

I open with this admittedly uncreative critique primarily because I think Gulli's work is actually very important and could be a useful tool in building broader class-and labour-based critiques of capitalism. For, while I struggled with the opening chapters that lay out his theoretical framework, I was deeply impressed by the following chapters which applied his framework to concrete historical realities. In particular, Gulli's treatment of the problem of contingent labour in the academic sector (the above quotation notwithstanding) is of tremendous value to anyone caught in the increasingly vicious world of the corporate university.

Indeed, this is my most immediate entry-point to Gulli's work, in part because I spent three months on strike at York University in 2008-09 fighting out the very problems Gulli is describing. In fact, this chapter could act as a formidable piece even as a stand-alone; it is certainly one I will have my students reading. It is effective because it concretizes the theoretical work Gulli labours over in ways that actually make the otherwise obscure theory quite sensical and even urgent.

Central to Gulli's project is the notion that emancipated labour — labour that is not devalued and alienated from human dignity — is a cornerstone of a free society. Using the case study of contingent academic labourers (he is referring most prominently to "adjunct," "sessional" or "contract" faculty — individuals who teach university courses on a piecemeal basis rather than under the tenure structure) Gulli demonstrates the extent to which contemporary capitalist social relations break down and even destroy human potentiality. Indeed, he makes a compelling case that regimes of contingency in universities are destructive to everyone involved — contingent faculty ourselves, but also tenured faculty, students, and society at large. He goes even further, insisting that change must be unequivocally radical. "This mode of domination and exploitation amounts to a violation of basic human rights and this violation cannot be remedied by the same system that creates it" (p. 130.)

Gulli is, in effect, theorizing the lived experiences of contingent labourers in a context where we are often ourselves so alienated from our own labour that we are tempted to buy into the mythologies created to legitimate our own contingency (e.g. the idea that the university functions better if teaching is made "flexible," when in fact this is only true if "functionality'" is defined by profitability...