Prickly Paradigm Pamphlets Available Online Under Creative Commons License

A while ago on the blog I mentioned Secret Project #1 was in the works, and I am pleased to announce that it is now unveiled: Prickly Paradigm Press is releasing its back catalog under a creative commons license. I’ve been working with both Creative Commons and Prickly Paradigm to make this happen, and I’m very happy to announce that this has finally gone through. You can read Creative Commons’s press release about the event, or check out my schnazzy interview with Marshall Sahlins, the editor of Prickly Paradigm (and the chair of my dissertation committee) who is a featured commoner on Creative Commons at the moment.

Prickly Paradigm publishes delightfully irreverant forays into politics, humour, and philosophy by famous intellectuals and academics who by all right ought to be up to something much more dignified. All of the pamphlets are good, and a few are truly excellent — David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is truly too good to wait for and you really ought to buy the treeware version now. Among the free PDFs that are now available, three stand out for me. Marshall’s Waiting for Foucault (link to PDF) is a now-famous series of after dinner remarks that is a half-standup intellectual polemic which is worth reading if you haven’t latched onto it yet. Michael Silverstein’s (another committee member) pamphlet Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to “W” (link to PDF) is also particularly worth looking at. It’s an analysis of how Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush, despite their incredible differences in the departments of verbal acuity, both rely on the same deep structures of American rhetoric in order to seem trustworthy in the eyes of voters. But more importantly, this pamphlet is the easiest way in to understanding Silverstein’s notoriously baroque (and also incredibly powerful) approach to language and culture. If you’ve always wanted to understand what Silverstein was on about, but couldn’t make it through the first page of ‘Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function,’ then this is the pamphlet for you. As Marshall once quipped, Prickly Paradigm “has the English language rights to Silverstein.” Finally, I am not a fan or Bruno Latour, but if you (like so many people today) are down with Latour you should check out his pamphlet War of the Worlds: How About Peace?, which ventures into the contemporary politics of the post-9/11 world.

I’m firmly convinced that alternative licensing and electronic distribution of texts is the future of academic publishing, and I’m truly gratified to see Prickly Paradigm andCreative Commons are working together to move us into a world where academic ideals of the free flow of information are reflected not just in the practice of research and debate, but in the realities of publishing and distribution.