Greetings from Prickly Paradigm—we’re back in your inbox with another edition of Prickly Dispatches.
As we’ve finalized the print edition of James Chandler’s The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning this month, Bruno Latour and International Archives Week inspired us to reflect on our history, while Pope Leo XIV inspired us to look ahead to the future.
Read on for the latest from Prickly Dispatches.
The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning
The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, PPP’s newest title from film and literary critic James Chandler, is available now to preorder in print and read online. Chandler connects the the Trump administration’s contemporary assault on American universities to the 19th century “Know-Nothing” nativist movement, interweaving Steve Bannon, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the WWE.
Book Forum
We invite colleagues and critics to respond to our pamphlets through our Book Forums. For The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, leading voices from the war on higher education weigh in. What does Chandler get right? What does he miss?
This month we’re highlighting two additional contributors to Chandler’s Book Forum. Richard Bourke, Professor of the History of Political Thought at King’s College, Cambridge, suggests that universities may be in a predicament of their own making. “Given the record of mounting estrangement between universities and the public,” he writes, “it is time to turn our propensity for criticism against ourselves.” Meanwhile playwright Colin Murphy traces Trump’s propensity for theatricality all the way back to Thucydides.
You can read the full suite of commentary on Chandler’s pamphlet at our Book Forum for The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning.
Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking who officiated Trump's first wedding, is a link in a long chain of American prejudice against Catholics.
Chandler has expanded on The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning with three supplementary posts for Prickly Dispatches. Read about kayfabe and the war in Iran, the administration’s selective memory as applied to Harvard, and the history of anti-Catholicism in America Steve Bannon’s great-grandfather to Donald Trump’s wedding officiant.
The Pope, the bots, and us
Shortly after our last newsletter went out, fellow Chicagoan Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, a fierce call to foreground human experience in the age of AI. We asked our authors and contributors to weigh in.
Historian and political scientist Nicolas Guilhot analyzed the political theology as outlined in Magnifica Humanitas. "Unavoidably,” he writes, “AI finds itself in direct competition with the Church over pastoral hegemony.” Read the full piece here.
Paul Kockelman, author Last Words: Large Language Models and the AI Apocalypse (2024), took a more playful look at the papal encyclical, noting Pope Leo XIV’s to quote Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. Looking ahead to our shared future shaped by AI, Kockelman hopes his own book will be “as light and nutritious as lembas” (that’s another Tolkien reference, in case you’re not up on your Elvish).
Speaking of Last Words, linguistic anthropologist Terra Edwards recently looked at Kockelman’s book through the lens of Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. When we engage with LLMs, she argues, we’re dealing with something more dangerous than we’d like to believe. Read her take on Kockelman and “bear semiosis” here.
From the backlist
As negotiations to conclude the war in Iran lurch forward, our publisher Peter Sahlins revisited Bruno Latour’s War of the Worlds: What About Peace? (2002). Latour argued that Western democracies operated under a modernist belief (or illusion) that you don’t have enemies, only untutored pupils who haven’t yet absorbed your lessons. But Sahlins points out that Donald Trump is a “post-modernist” arbiter, one who rejects the universalism of previous administrations. “Here lies the final, bitter irony: because Trump lacks the modernist faith in universalism, he’s actually better positioned for this kind of deal than a more principled democratic leader – except that it would require him in this case to admit defeat…” Sahlins writes. “Trump has lost the war, and he has lost the peace.” Read the full article here on Prickly Dispatches.
War of the Worlds is now available to download for free on our website. You can find it at the link below.
We also celebrated International Archives Week this June by looking back on our 30+ year history.
Back in 1993, Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart founded Prickly Pear Pamphlets, the original PPP, and published an influential run of ten texts, including groundbreaking work from historian of science Simon Schaffer (From Physics to Anthropology — and Back Again, 1994) and anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (The Relation, 1995). Marshall Sahlins took over the press in 2001 and amped up operations, publishing pamphlets by David Graeber (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004), Donna Haraway (The Companion Species Manifesto, 2003), Bruno Latour (War of the Worlds, 2002), and Sahlins himself (Waiting for Foucault, Still, 2002, The Western Illusion of Human Nature, 2008, Confucius Institutes, 2014, and What the Foucault?, 2018). We’re under new management now, but we remain, as ever, a small press of big ideas. Read our short history of Prickly Paradigm Press here.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and see you next time.