US critic Lee Siegel
got into trouble for posting flattering replies to his own blog under a
false name. In The Guardian he explains why he has no regrets:
The web is only about 15 years old, but already the conversation about
it runs along tired old lines. Elites vs the people, amateurs vs
professionals, hierarchy vs democracy - and on and on. For a medium
supposedly defined by its transparency and openness, the critical
discourse is surprisingly restricted.
And never more so when we talk
about the fate of the critic. To my mind, critics speaking on this
subject usually recall the forced confessions of Stalin's Russia: "The
internet is a brave new medium and only a fool would cavil and carp at
the magnificent opportunities it affords hitherto repressed masses of
people. Certain regressive elements might speak of lost aesthetic
standards, of the critic's knowledge and authority, and also of the
unpleasant tendency of some to abuse and malign others from behind the
mask of anonymity. But such is the price of progress, comrades."
I had my own collision with the inexorable march of history at the New
Republic magazine, where I had worked for nearly 10 years, first as a
staff writer, then as TV critic, and finally as a senior editor. By the
time the magazine gave me my own culture blog, in May 2006 - ominously
titled Lee Siegel On Culture - I had had pretty extensive experience as
an online critic. I had published in Newsweek.com, worked as the art critic for Slate.com,
and for three years written a weekly online TV column for the New
Republic. I am not what you would call a nice critic, so I was no
stranger to sometimes apoplectic online responses - mostly anonymous.
(I had received plenty of furious printed responses, too, though these
were published under the correspondent's own name.) But the situation
on my blog at the New Republic was something new. Unlike any other
magazine, newspaper, website or blog that I have ever heard of, the New
Republic decided not to filter or edit the online comments.
...
Tired of being labelled an elitist, weary of being bullied, but most
of all angry at being insulted as a "douchebag", "asshole", "fraud"
and, finally, "paedophile", I implored my editors to edit or delete the
worst attacks. Delighted by the ruckus and all the online traffic, they
refused. So, after attacking what I described as my readers' "thuggish
anonymity" under my own name, on my blog and in print, and after
enraging the entire blogosphere by coining the term "blogofascism" to
describe the quality of the discourse I was experiencing, I decided to
get silly. I decided to give thuggish anonymity a taste of thuggish
anonymity.
I called myself "sprezzatura", a term invented during
the Italian Renaissance that connotes a "deceptive simplicity".
Whenever Lee Siegel was being libelled, I celebrated him. To those who
objected in obscene terms to my views on Jon Stewart, I replied:
"Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be.
Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep." Whenever my attackers
ganged up, I excoriated them. I was back in the schoolyard, so I did
what I had done as a bullied, bookish boy. I fought back with artifice
and words. I drove everyone nuts. Of course, I got a bloody nose.
Crossing
over to the other side, to the anonymous world of the hitherto silenced
and repressed, had a peculiar effect on me. I found that I could not
bear to allow my alias's words to go unacknowledged as mine. My foolish
pride, as the song goes, which gave birth to sprezzatura, also could
not take a back seat to sprezzatura. So I did nothing to hide my style,
even repeating phrases I had used when writing under my own name. It
was through these reckless telltale tics that some enterprising
commenters worked out who I really was.
Though I appeared as
sprezzatura on a mere five occasions - and several times mocked myself,
in one instance enthusing that "Lee Siegel was being burned in effigy
in front of the Pakistani embassy" - I was made out to be a serial
deceiver. I was called a hypocrite, naturally, once my cover was blown,
though the way I see it, an advocate of gun control who shoots an armed
assailant is hardly a hypocrite. To my mind, I had simply been
practising the type of criticism the champions of the web claim to have
unleashed. I was challenging smug, complacent, monolithic opinion, even
if to other people it looked like the "wisdom of crowds". An
understandably terrified New Republic suspended me for a few months
before warily publishing me again. But my punishment hardly came as a
surprise. As the truly dissenting bloggers out there might agree - and
of course they exist - dissent is never in season. I hope those
stubbornly contrary bloggers will persist, and use the internet to
reform its worst aspects. I certainly intend to keep using the web, in
the hope that it will develop into something less herdlike and banal.
It will be quite a scrimmage. Technology may change, but humankind
doesn't, and as a critic once said - before his hegemony was happily
abolished - humankind cannot bear much reality.
