Brandits! - or – A Use of Pejorative Language in Informational Texts as a Means of Persuasive Discourse

I needs must acknowledge my love of Wikipedia. They may well be tarnished by with a lack of credible accredited accreditors of “truth” but I have found these remarkable things called “footnotes” which show a link to a source for most any claims made in articles. Others attack Wikipedia on it's lack of direction and focus since, after all, the amount of attention given to the “plot” intricacies of Lost is greater than that of public intellectual and activist Naomi Klein. Such attacks are, in essence, the sad sorrowful (and sibilant!) lament of those who worship aura and ritual. Wikipedia is thus made to suffer from their sundry authors and their collective decision that Transformers the Movie is more worthy of their time and research than Barry Goldwater. However my instinct on doing a Google® search was not to click on the official Naomi Klein web page (whose imprimatur cannot be questioned, it's “official”!) but instead to click the return listing Wikipedia's name. Haters gonna hate, but I love me some Wikipedia.

I assure the reader that this is all relevant. My love for Wikipedia is not for any concrete thing. I do not love their corporate board, their foundation, their racks of servers in air conditioned rooms. When I inform you that I love Wikipedia what I am saying is that I love the image of Wikipedia I hold. Wikipedia's brand, if you will. Her Wikipedia page makes no mention of her love or hate of the online encyclopedia but her article in the leftist rag The Guardian makes it abundantly clear how she feels about the process and idea of branding itself. She does not care for it. It's also clear that she wants us to share this view, which brings us to our first irony and paradox. If sharing is caring and Klein wants us to share her view of not caring than what is the result? Wait, that's not it.

The actual paradox we are faced with is how a seemingly informative text can act to persuade. The key distinction between informational and persuasive is the existence of a thesis. From this difference all else flows. Newspaper articles, unless they are editorials, are not meant to persuade but to inform. This is true even in the all but commie trash tabloids that masquerade as newspapers in Europe and Klein is publishing excerpts of her book within that format and those constraints. Nowhere in the selection is the author's point of view expressed in a literal fashion; that the production of goods is superior to the production of brands.

Supposedly this is being made clear to the reader simply through the informational context. Naomi Klein reports the facts on brands vs products and we, the reader, decide. This is clearly not true and can be demonstrated with a simple thought experiment. If it was the information itself doing the convincing than there would exist splits in interpretation based on the readers viewpoint. Simplistically all republican's could read it and see it as supporting their views and all democrat's could do the same for their views. But when a piece has an argumentative tint it is clear to all reader regardless of perspective which way the evidence of information leads (whether they agree with it or not). This discrepancy is the result of confirmation bias in which a recipient of information is drastically more inclined to notice and remember information that agrees with their own views. This is the default state of human dialectic, and so rhetorical methods must be employed to break through it.

Enter the pejorative. Klein's first description of brands is that they are a “seemingly innocuous” idea. Let's see. . . the antonym for innocuous is harmful. So right away we are given that, in Klein's view, brands are not good things. Words do not have to be directly insulting to be a pejorative and most of Klein's pejorative is in tone rather than actual words. For instance when she says “The price difference, apparently, was the cost of the word 'Kraft'” she is belittling the notion of a brand being worth real dollars. Throughout her piece figurative language, such as irony and metaphor (quoting an ad man calling the consumer cockroaches and using the term herself) serves to create a thesis and argue persuasively for it. For instance I have nowhere in the body of this precis made literally known my opinion on those stalinist fishwraps that European's fondly imagine to be newspapers, but it should be abundantly clear to all but the most illiterate what I think of them. Sadly you have all been misinformed, I actually like and admire much of European journalism and the Guardian in particular. Readers, you just got punk'd!

While a firm believer that word count matters less than how much each word counts I am afraid that I might be reaching a point where I've used to much to say too little. So let us end where we began (if one accepts that all of us engaged in this text form a community of dialectic, or commune than it can be said we had a nice little communist revolution!) with my looking up information on Naomi Klein. Well, she's Canadian which might explain her dislike of logos and brands by way of jealousy of our obviously vastly superior culture and marketing power. . . Wait, what's this? Not only is she the grand-daughter of communists and the child of new leftists (read: socialists) she reacted to having an active and public feminist mother by embracing full on consumerism. Hmm. . . Then her mother suffers a stroke. . . Interesting. Wonder what Freud would say? Probably something about libido and homosexual tendencies. And last is. . . kind of horrible really. A crazy person took a gun and started shooting women in an attempt to fight feminism. Out of all this Klein is reborn a feminist and she proceeds to do a Henry V and take an ax to her old vices. Context is everything and Wikipedia provided me with context and so my love for Wikipedia (the brand) is affirmed.

Your humble and obedient servant,

- Birney