Geoff Deyer has a lot of fun sending up the conventions of academic writing in his latest NY Times column, but he seems ambivalent as to whether his target, art historian Michael Fried, is simply “faithfully observing the expected conventions” or is unusual in writing some of “the most self-worshiping — or, more accurately, self-serving — prose ever written.” To be fair, Deyer is explicit about how exceptionally bad he finds Fried (I’ve not read Fried, but Amazon reviewers seem to agree); however, the examples he provides are not atypical of most run-of-the-mill academic prose.
What the reader discovers, however, is that Fried will continue to announce what he’s about to do right to the end: “Later on in this book I shall examine . . . ”; “I shall discuss both of these after considering . . . ”; “I shall also be relating. . . . ” Fried’s brilliance, however, is that in spite of all the time spent looking ahead and harking back he also — and it’s this that I want to emphasize here — finds the time to tell you what he’s doing now, as he’s doing it: “But again I ask . . . ” ; “Let me try to clarify matters by noting . . . ”; “What I want to call attention to. . . . ” But that’s not all: the touch of genius is that on top of everything else he somehow manages to tell you what he is not doing (“I am not claiming that . . . ”), what he has not done (“What I have not said . . . ”) and what he is not going to do (“This is not the place for . . . ”).
Fried does seem to be exceptional in his love of these conventions. Deyer says “Fried is at once its high camp apotheosis and its disintegration into mere manner.” But I still am bothered by Deyer’s claim that such writing is “self-worshiping — or, more accurately, self-serving.” I say this because in graduate school I was continually accused of failing to adequately sign-post my work. As such I was socialized into this particular norm of academic writing. Is it “self-worshiping” and “self-serving” to conform to professional norms?
Part of the reason I started blogging was to have a platform where I could write about academic issues in a voice which feels more properly “my own.” I don’t consider myself a great writer or a great stylist, but I do strive for clarity and brevity. What I’ve noticed about some of the anthropologists who are considered great stylists is that they seem to say the same thing over and over in different ways (or using slightly different examples). I can see how this makes it easier for readers to grasp an idea, but conditioned as I am to reading texts very closely, I tend to find it annoying. This is one reason I prefer journal articles to books. But with all the pressure to churn out book after book, I don’t really blame academic authors for adopting whatever strategy works best for them: excessive sign-posting, repeating the same point over and over, going off on tangents, etc. Perhaps Fried deserves such scorn, I don’t know, but I wonder if it is fair to blame “self-worship”?
[Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the Twitter discussion which led to this post.]
As per the old D.A.R.E. psa’s: “I learned from Foucault! Alright? I learned it by reading Foucault!”
Granted there is an element of narcissism present when authors point to themselves rather than the object of their contemplation, but the alternative would seem to be rendering one’s self invisible — an authorial practice roundly critiqued in anthropology and other writerly disciplines as a rhetorical technique for securing undue authroity. When done poorly writers pointing to themselves can seem anywhere from arrogant to overly sensitive. Still its necessary, unless you’re a journalist apparently. Then you can be objective and invisible all you want.
But seriously, Foucault is the master of telling you what he’s not doing.
@Matt
Aren’t you ignoring the middle ground? One useful formula is to lead with something interesting about the topic, then briefly and modestly explain how you plan to address it. It may also be appropriate at this point to say something about your relationship to the topic and the people you are citing. Then you can get down to business. If your argument is affected by the fact that you are basing it on something you observed or were told, mentioning the context in which the observation was made or the telling heard is also good practice. None of this requires the painfully self-conscious and belabored stance for which Deyer criticizes Fried. Neither does it render the author invisible.
This guy just sounds naive. It is possible to overuse explicit signposting — especially when one does not just make claims without self-quotation — but the elaborate psychological diagnosis is absurd. Reported speech (including one’s own) is a regular feature of language that can be used in many ways. “I know pronounce you man and wife” anyone?
Old-fashioned types used to leave getting to “know” the bride until after the priest said “now.”
“Reported speech (including one’s own) is a regular feature of language that can be used in many ways. “I now pronounce you man and wife” anyone?”
I’m no expert in this area, but isn’t the above a very specific and deliberate pointing to the speaker’s authority (in this case, establishing the legitimacy of the declaration by the speaker’s position–“by the power vested in me…”).
As such, it would actually be a much more germane than the Fried quotes Dyer is attempting to pillory.
I agree, the psychologizing is naive and ridiculous — the signposting convention may be overused, but if so, it’s a stylistic defect of the writing, making it more cumbersome. Imputing self-aggrandizing or navel-gazing on the basis of that convention is even more absurd than diagnosing cultural shifts in narcissism from increased uses of “I” in popular music.
To be blunt, and perhaps a little unfair, you could have simply said, ‘no.’ ‘No, I will not “sign-post” my work in this enervating, ridiculous, and space-wasting way.’ Something like that. The only way to change the (frankly silly) conventions of academic writing – that, mark you, serve only to add empty verbiage at best and to obfuscate at worst – is to challenge them by not using them and then asking why you should if challenged for not using them.
‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ is not reported speech (well, it is here, but it is not, shall we say, when used in actuality). It is a performative utterance, to use Austin’s term, or a declarative speech act, and in particular it is a declarative that facilitates an institutional fact, the fact of marriage between the pair. (I believe the idea of declaratives, or other types of act with the logical form of declaratives, creating institutional facts is to be found in Searle’s more recent books, including Making the Social World, as well as one of his earlier ones [1969?], Speech Acts.)
Certainly, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ is not a model for academic writing in any way.
“This guy” is the only important protege of Clement Greenberg, and the author of one of the most important essays on post-war art, one which manages to be both brilliant in observation and misguided in prescription. He’s also a bit of a putz.
The point of academic style is to render the author invisible. That’s nothing but a conceit, like the conceit of objectivity (and I saw both those words written above). Fried is a memorialist to modernism, and turns everything onto objects, even himself. He is forever pointing to things as teachers do. Every-thing is separate and distinct, seen ironically and thus from a supposedly superior position, as if from a distance. It’s a rhetoric with a long history, but our age of the academic baroque it’s become ostentatious humility. And yes its narcissism; like the slacker at the taco stand who insists so much on complimenting the food that you realize he’s asking to be praised for his superior palette. Pointing to ITITIT but ricocheting back to MEMEME.
If you assume [if “one assumes”] that ideas are objects in the world it’s easy to imagine oneself or one’s imagination as something not only separate but external, in the moral and esthetic equivalent of holding a teacup by the tips of thumb and forefinger, pinkie extended! “Look Ma, no hands!” It’s like a certain kind of aristocratic english speaking accent, that makes you think the speaker senses all words as physical and therefore just slight-ly dis-taste-ful.
Modernism has become Mannerism, and idealism has devolved to phobic terror of the un-ideal.
If you imagine ideas as perspectives then there’s no need to hide yourself. Dyer is a novelist. Novels are informal in an age (the same as above) where informality is waxing as scholasticism is waning.
Hallelujah