泰勒•斯威夫特的聲譽管理

Ill repute outweighs good in pop and rock. “It gives a strange fascination,” Thin Lizzy admitted in their song “Bad Reputation”. Joan Jett recorded an identically titled song in which the “queen of rock ‘n’ roll” bragged that she didn’t “give a damn about my reputation”, yowling defiance at prudes tut-tutting about young women doing what they want: “You’re living in the past, it’s a new generation.”

流行音樂和搖滾音樂領域的壞名聲超過好名聲。“瘦利茲樂隊”(Thin Lizzy)在他們的歌曲《壞聲譽》(Bad Reputation)中承認，“它賦予了一種奇怪的魅力”。瓊?杰特(Joan Jett)錄製了一首同名歌曲，這位“搖滾女王”在歌中吹噓說，她“根本不在乎我的聲譽”，並對那些非議我行我素的年輕女性的假正經人士嗤之以鼻：“你們生活在過去，現在是新一代”。

That was in 1980. Several generations later, Jett’s fellow Pennsylvanian Taylor Swift is releasing the year’s most anticipated album, Reputation. It follows a downturn in the singer’s own standing. Previously lauded as a paragon of apple-pie goodness who wrote all her own songs, Swift has been traduced by haters as the precise opposite — a publicity-obsessed schemer who is accused of devising fake romantic relationships with other celebrities, who does cryptic things in pursuit of world domination as a supposed member of the Illuminati and is seen to have contracted out her music to the world’s slickest, most soulless pop producers.

那是在1980年。幾代人以後，和杰特一樣來自賓夕法尼亞的泰勒?斯威夫特(Taylor Swift)發佈了年度最受期待的專輯《聲譽》(Reputation)。此前斯威夫特自身的地位遭到削弱。此前她被譽爲像蘋果派那樣良善的典範，所有的歌曲都是自己寫的，但斯威夫特現在被憎恨者詆譭爲完全相反——一個好出風頭的算計者，被指捏造與其他名人有浪漫關係，被猜測是“光明會”(Illuminati)成員，爲了追求世界統治而做着神神祕祕的事情，而且被視爲將自己的音樂外包給世界上最華而不實、最沒有靈魂的流行音樂製作人。

Reputation’s cover shows Swift with one side of her face covered by a black rash of newsprint, a shady counterpart to the unblemished other side of her face. It recalls Abraham Lincoln’s saying: “Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” All reputations are suspect, in other words. They provide a distorted approximation of a person’s true nature.

《聲譽》的封面顯示，斯威夫特的一側臉上疊加着一層報紙，與另一側沒有遮擋的臉相比顯得有些陰暗。它讓人想起了亞伯拉罕?林肯(Abraham Lincoln)的名言：“品行如樹，名聲如影。行實名虛。”換言之，所有的聲譽都是可疑的。它們是對一個人真實品性的失真寫照。

But that cannot be right. Reputation is a vital aspect of our public selves, not just a shadow of our real selves. Unlike status, which is high or low, it has a moral component, spoken about in terms of good and bad. It relates to one’s good name, the loss of which can feel like a death. The sacked army officer Cassio in Othello bewails his drunken disgrace: “Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.”

但是這不可能是正確的。聲譽是我們公衆自我的一個重要方面，而不僅僅是我們真實自我的一個影子。與有高有低的地位不同，它有一個道德要素，可以用好和壞來評論。它與一個人的好名聲有關，失去好名聲的感覺可能像是死了一樣。在《奧賽羅》(Othello)裏，被免職的軍官凱西奧(Cassio)爲自己醉酒後的失態悲嘆道：“哦，我失去了我的名聲！我失去了自己不朽的一部分，剩下的就是獸性。”

We like to imagine ourselves as more liberated than in Shakespeare’s day, less trammelled by conventions about how we should behave. Surely the modern Cassio could do a Thin Lizzy and admit to a strange fascination with his bad reputation. But the opposite turns out to be the case. The public persona that we present to the world grows ever more significant.

我們喜歡認爲自己比莎士比亞(Shakespeare)時代更加自由，在行爲方面受傳統的約束較少。現代的凱西奧肯定可以像“瘦利茲樂隊”那樣，承認壞聲譽有一種奇怪的魅力。但現實恰恰相反。我們向世界呈現的公衆形象越來越重要。

In the digital age reputation is inescapable. Not a day goes by without our judging something or being judged ourselves. We like each other’s tweets, get tracked by credit-rating agencies, give stars to Uber drivers and are given stars in return. The assignation of value unfolds in real time at an unprecedented scale. The Chinese government’s plan, now delayed, to set up a social credit system, awarding points to citizens based on analysis of their behaviour through their data trails, is the logical endpoint of such a process.

在數字時代，聲譽是不可避免的。我們每一天都在評判外界事物，或者受到評判。我們爲彼此的推文點贊，受到信用評級機構的跟蹤，給優步(Uber)司機打分，還會得到他們的評分。價值評定以空前規模實時進行。中國政府計劃建立社會信用體系，通過公民的數據軌跡來分析他們的行爲，並據此授予他們分數（現在這一計劃被推遲了）。這類計劃是此類過程合乎邏輯的終點。

This is reputation as brand, a system of identification that treats behaviour as a transactional product, goods to be exchanged rather than goodness in the deeper sense. But the moral dimension cannot be erased. The sexual crimes and scandals that have emerged in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s disgrace have ruined a succession of reputations, bringing low powerful men previously uncensured by laws and institutions. Tax avoiders find their good names on the line following the Paradise Papers leak, hauled up before the court of public opinion in the absence of other forms of sanction.

這是把聲譽當作品牌，一種將行爲看作可交易產品的身份識別系統，是可以交換的商品，而不是更深層意義上的美德。但道德維度不能被抹殺。在哈維?韋恩斯坦(Harvey Weinstein)身敗名裂後浮出水面的性犯罪和醜聞破壞了一連串的聲譽，讓那些以前不受法律和制度懲罰的大人物們身敗名裂。在《天堂文件》(Paradise Papers)泄露後，避稅者發現自己的好名聲面臨危險，在沒有其他形式處罰的情況下，他們受到輿論法庭的審判。

With her background in country music, a repository of traditional Christian values, Swift understands that reputation is more than skin deep and not just a branding exercise. Her new songs are full of the language of morality (“I Did Something Bad”, “Don’t Blame Me”). Reputation is an instrument of moral justice, sharpened by mass communication — a dangerously double-edged one, open to misuse and misappropriation, as the attacks on her own reputation attest. Unlike Jett, she gives a damn about it. She is right.

憑藉在鄉村音樂領域的背景，以及傳統的基督教價值觀底蘊，斯威夫特明白，聲譽並不膚淺，也不只是品牌推廣活動。她的新歌充滿了道德語言（“我做了壞事”和“不要責怪我”）。聲譽是道德正義的工具，藉助大衆傳播變得更加鋒利——這是一柄危險的雙刃劍，容易被誤用和濫用，她本人的聲譽受到攻擊證明了這一點。與杰特不同，她在乎聲譽。她是對的。