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

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?

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.

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?

‘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.

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.

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.

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.