Making Light: Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers

We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers,

Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t. A house built with bricks from one or two brickyards will be just fine. A bookstore that only carries stock from a few publishers will have a thin, poor selection to offer its customers.

Multiple suppliers—that is, a broad range of publishers and books to choose from—is a good thing, if a bookstore chain knows what it’s doing.

This is an excerpt from a commentator criticizing a letter sent to a book publisher by a bookselling chain asking for money for carrying their books. The first indent is a quote from the letter and the rest the commentator’s reaction. (I’m using this excerpt for my own purposes. The entire post deserves a read in its own right.)

Both the initial sentence and the commentator’s interpretation are examples of metaphorical inferencing (Lakoff 1993). The original one is unconscious and reveals a high level of inferencing that may have happened implicitly or explicitly in the background. The commentator’s note elaborates this and describes the “misapplication” of language and conceptualizations from one area of commerce to another.

This sort of exchange is extremely common in the market metaphor (and in others, I just have lots of examples in this area). On the one hand, we have an application of metaphor and its associated inferencing, e.g. ‘school vouchers are moral because they offer the freedom of choice to individual consumers and the benefit of the market forces to the whole society’ and the subsequent unpicking of the metaphor by critics, e.g. ‘the market metaphor relies on failure often accompanied by a personal tragedy of unsuccessful interacting entities and success is based purely on contemporaneous preferences of consumers rather than external benefit’. (Henig, 1994). Similar thing is happening in the negotiation of the “Iraq is Vietnam” metaphor brilliantly summarized by Stephen Colbert in is oft-repeated “Vietnam dry - Iraq wet”. This is particularly typical of “high-stakes” discourse where metaphor is often used strategically to provide an interpretative framework. Lakoff and Johnson claim (probably rightly) that this sort of inferencing is essential to all metaphorical reasoning (which - in one way or another - is almost all reasoning). However, lower-stakes usage of metaphor tends to be more local and perhaps not as essential to the interpretation of larger stretches of discourse. For instance, multiple metaphors can be used to interpret same instance (e.g. love is like food, love is like a journey, love is like a war). This, of course, is happening in ‘high-stakes’ discourse as well but there the privileged interpretive nature of certain metaphors is more likely to be negotiated and although a single metaphor is rarely cognitively dominant enough to displace all other, it is more likely to be used more centrally.