To management, all internal and client-facing behavior, and all decision-making, was completely dictated by how these things would make the company appear to the financial markets. Every day, we would receive an email with the stock price, and we would be praised or blamed depending on how the price had risen or fallen that day. “CNCX up to 24! Good job!” “CNCX down to 19. We all have to work harder.” The messages we got from management were not about the company’s direction or plans, but accounts of the heroic conference calls the president and VPs had had with the Wall Street analysts. And every manager lived in terror of the EBITDA, the quarterly profit figure that was in actuality completely fudged by management colluding with the accountants.

It should be obvious that this was ludicrous. Blaming employees for a day’s shift in stock prices, when these prices are determined by investors, is insane. But the frantic currying of favor with the analysts, the jiggering of the balance sheet, the mapping out of a business strategy not designed to solve real problems or help real people, but instead to get the maximum price for one’s own stock options – these are all just aspects of corporate life, as ordinary as a ream of copy paper, and as firmly in place now as a decade ago.

Yu Zhang, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been doing the necessary and important work of taking these phenomena from the anecdotal realm, systematizing them, and using hard data to show how they operate within given industries. In his co-written article, “Earnings Pressure and Competitive Behavior: Evidence From The U.S. Electricity Industry,” he goes right to the heart of the problem: the expectations which securities analysts have for the performance of a company often directly affect how that company is run, causing its management to plan the company’s entire strategy around managing and influencing these expectations. Management’s planning and goals often stretch no longer than to the next financial quarter, when the company’s short-term results are made public and the analysts’ performance targets are to be met. Every aspect of the company’s operations is affected. A survey cited in the article says that 80 percent of CFOs have decreased spending on crucial business functions such as research and development, advertising, and maintenance in order to meet short-term profit targets. They will attempt to “game” the analysts by underestimating their own goals in the face of analysts’ own “optimism bias,” by scheduling or deferring major capital projects based on timing the quarterly results, and by making earnings figures conform to predictions via accounting trickery, which is charmingly called “earnings management.” And, as I might have guessed, a crucial predictor of whether a company will react to earnings pressure with these kinds of manipulations is whether its management is compensated in the company’s own stock.

The need for analysts and their predictions is self-evident, given the deluge of financial information and the practical difficulties attendant on an investor doing his or her own in-depth research across all of his or her holdings. Investing without some clue as to a company’s future performance is pointless. Nonetheless, the tyranny of expectations can cripple the core of a company. My company downsized and then went bankrupt over the course of a few months, rudderless and unable to deliver on the concrete commitments it had made. What is more, the same tyranny can be harmful on a much larger scale. For markets and policymakers, expectations seem to be more important than the results they predict or characterize. No matter if more people have jobs than three months ago; if the numbers do not meet the mythical expectations, we are doing terribly and the country is in a tailspin. In turn, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the markets react to the “news” and slump.

I have no solutions to this problem. For some reason, there is only one Warren Buffett, focusing on the long-term, and those who imitate him seem inevitably to return to market timing of one type or another. I would like to have believed that if my company had been wholeheartedly committed to providing the services we were in business to provide, from the top down, we might have done better. But as Zhang points out, the market punishes, quite severely, those who do not meet expectations. Missing earnings forecasts by even a single percentage point can lead to an immediate dip in share price of from 5 to 15 percent; managers who have their wealth in stock options are not inclined to disobey, and CEOs’ jobs hang in the balance as well. Resistance seems futile. So if you wonder why, for example, your cell phone company does not seem to have a core mission to provide you with cell phone services, perhaps an answer may be found in this direction.

Thanks to Yu Zhang and David Filippi.

It bothered me, first, that they hadn't asked the anthologist about his table of contents (in fact he is a person of wide-ranging curiosity and he has included plenty of Chinese texts, more, perhaps, by weight or page count than most other anthologies), and second, that they didn't care what Chinese literature was to be included; it just had to be Chinese.

As I often do in these situations, I asked myself silently, “What would I have said if I had been in their place?”

Well, first, I can't imagine pushing for more American texts in a world anthology. I'm a relatively grateful and loyal citizen, all told, but do I need to be a booster of American products all the time? I would find it embarrassing to be a salesman in a purportedly academic context. And after all, shouldn't an anthology of literature be judged on its goodness, not on its Americanness, these two things being not necessarily related?

Second, the editor must have some rationale for what to include, and without knowing that rationale, I can't be sure that an American line of goods is what is needed.

I thought a little further, and this thought bubble began to condense over my head: “Thanks for asking me for advice about what to include in your Chinese anthology of world literature. If I were you, I would go easy on the Jack London and John Steinbeck. For many people back home, they don't really belong in the category 'literature.' And if you read Jack London's fantasy about exterminating the Chinese with a super-bomb, you might be less eager to embrace his leftist credentials. Similarly, Arthur Miller, whom you like so much over there, has served his purpose, and for long-term storage, I don't think he will drink as well as the Melville 1851, the Dickinson 1890 or the Pynchon 1966. Why not Zukofsky? Wallace Stevens? Elizabeth Bishop? Donald Barthelme? Nabokov-- if he counts? Give them some Flannery O'Connor and see what they say.”

That bubble dissolved and was replaced by this, better, one: “Include in your anthology the American texts that you are ready for, the writings for which there is a need, an audience, and a language (not everything is ripe for translation everywhere and at just any time). If your readers still need to get over the collective hysteria of 1966-1976, maybe Miller's The Crucible is what's called for, and Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover will say nothing to you. It's not for me to say what you and your audience should need. Literary texts succeed where they fulfill a need or at least a want. I can't flatter myself that Americanness per se is a widely-felt need among Chinese readers. Take a broad view of what we can offer, don't forget the other 150 countries of the globe, and be adventurous: put before your readership at least a few things that in the short run they will think are nonsensical, irrelevant, self-indulgent, immoral or trivial.”

That bubble in its turn faded, and I was still in a room with sixty folding chairs, some of them occupied by people who could see the purpose of making statements such as, “Chinese literature is good.”

I'm sure my Chinese colleagues thought they were doing something good for China and for the anthologist by urging him to “include more Chinese literature.” But that advice would be useful only in a very simple world. If I had a postage-stamp album, I would want to collect stamps from China, as I would want to collect stamps from Bermuda, Vanuatu, San Marino and elsewhere-- the collection wouldn't be complete without them. But stamps are issued by governments (at least, the kind of stamps that most collectors collect are). Poems and novels are not. Some of these are even issued despite government disapproval.

My discomfort with their well-intended suggestion boils down, I think, to a difference of perspective on what comparative literature is all about, a difference that leads to rival definitions of cosmopolitanism. (I know, the subject has long been kicked around between the goalposts of Universality and Particularity to the point of platitude; but an anthologist of world literature has to have a grasp on it.) For me, I guess, comparative literature is something like an NGO, an organization staffed by people from various nationalities that is trying to accomplish a purpose regardless of national affiliation. For the Chinese colleagues at that meeting, comparative literature seems to be an IGO, an inter-governmental organization, the members of which are appointed by their national governments and are expected to negotiate for national interests.

NGOs and IGOs necessarily diverge on the issue of sponsorship. Let's imagine that we are working for a little NGO whose goal is to broaden literacy. We would perhaps welcome assistance from different governments, from corporations, or possibly even from the devil himself, but our capital of legitimacy, like our program, would suffer if it became known that we had signed an exclusive agreement with, say, Disney to distribute their storybooks as our primary literacy tool, or if we had allowed the CIA to design our pedagogical materials. An NGO ought to do the best it can to further its specific aims, holding at arm's length (or at a greater distance) the powers that desire to instrumentalize it, to turn it into a channel of influence or distribution.

So, then, comparative literature ought to be an international conversation among people who are interested in language, imagination, ideas, ethics, style, and whatever other features of literature make it worth the time and energy people around the world give it. It is a vast effort to find and share the good stuff, wherever it may be. State prestige is equally served by the bad stuff and the good stuff, as long as recognition gives the state something to brag about; Ba Jin is as good as Du Fu, if Ba Jin is what the anthologies are printing as “Chinese literature.” And forty pages of Ba Jin are better than twenty pages of Du Fu... — you get the idea. For this reason, Comp Lit has no business behaving like an IGO. — Unless you think that the rewards for accepting instrumentalization are sufficient, or unless you have already endorsed the issuer of your citizenship documents as the necessary and exclusive horizon of your political imagination. Even as a relatively docile member of my own national community, I can't go that far, and I don't really believe anyone else can either.

Well, let's see. Do you remember the Geneva Conventions?

These were the result of some hard lobbying work by a Swiss businessman, Henri Dunant, a colonial promoter who had made a bundle (and wanted to make a bigger bundle) in Tunisia. Hoping to collar Napoleon III for a little business chat, he found himself on the battlefield of Solferino and was sufficiently shocked by what he saw to set in motion what would later become the International Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions.

Now I suppose that a radical pacifist might hold that had it not been for these international organizations and agreements which mitigated the brutality of war-- by creating an obligation for armies to treat wounded or captured enemies humanely once out of combat, and to limit civilian casualties-- the very practice of war would have come to an end sooner. Maybe after 1870? Or 1918? 1945, anyone?

Then again, a pacifist who preferred to see prisoners of war summarily shot and wounded soldiers abandoned on the battlefield, as was the pre-Geneva custom, would be a pretty bloody-minded kind of pacifist, ready to heave a lot of people into their graves in order to make a point. And only a pacifist with an unreasonable belief in the rationality of our species could expect the horror of war all by itself to convince people to stop making war.

Zizek, speaking as the public intellectual of consumer culture, in his RSA lecture objects to the idea of “virtuous consumption”-- the habit, promoted by some coffee houses among other businesses, of dedicating some percentage of their profits to charitable work or the promise to obtain raw materials from impoverished people on terms favorable to the latter (“fair trade”). Zizek finds this hypocritical. Well, maybe it is, if you are considering the use of “fair trade” and the associated warm fuzzies as a selling point, a marketing technique, a little lifestyle ornament, a reason for lucky people to feel better about themselves when they consume. In other words, as a consumer Zizek is within his rights to say that he thinks he doesn't get fair value for his penny when he pays extra for “fair trade,” literacy programs, vaccinations, etc. He's free to go elsewhere. And if he's hounded on the sidewalk by pre-adolescents raising money for Multiple Sclerosis or victims of domestic violence, he has only to walk a little faster.

The fallacy is in assuming that the consequences of one's purchases are a kind of mustard, an additional condiment slapped on top of the merchandised substance, and that one can just say, “Hold the mustard.” When I bought stuff for my baby at Target, I wasn't aware that a percentage of the sales price was going to go toward the anti-marriage-equality movement. If you order pizza from Domino's (and I don't, here's why) you might like to know how much the company's foundation contributes to various evangelico-conservative causes. I would have appreciated a notice board at the entrance to both establishments thanking me for supporting the very things I don't care to support.

The “hold the mustard” fallacy is the fallacy that we semiology fans might call the Failure to See the Zero Degree. To claim to be apolitical is, of course, a politics; it's just the politics of going along and getting along, in other words the politics of whatever passes for normal in the society around you. The zero degree of a sign (or other parameter) is still a degree. The fact that Target doesn't tell you what their profits go to doesn't mean that they, unlike the do-gooder coffee shop, are engaged in pure, honest capitalism and have forsworn the image-mongering of the visibly socially-conscious. They just have other priorities and they lack the motive to tell you about them. No mustard will be held for you, Professor Zizek; there is always mustard. Some of it is made of ingredients I can't mention here.

And in social theory we might invent a label for the Silver Bullet Fallacy, the idea that a perfect solution to all ills is conceivable, is in fact two steps away from reality, and that if we just held onto our “optimism of the will” for long enough we wouldn't have to settle for anything second-best. If that glorious prediction had any chance of being true, perhaps some diehards could be praised for their refusal to compromise. But repudiating charity on the grounds that it delays perfect justice rings a bit like the “the worse things get, the better for us” epigram attributed to Lenin. Lenin's “us” was not, alas, universal humanity, but a particular gang of bandits. If this is dialectics, it doesn't have much to brag about.

Meanwhile, supposing the consumers of the rich world took heed and dropped charity from their list of things to do, certain people would die of tuberculosis, AIDS, malaria, starvation, etc., who wouldn't otherwise. Certain kids would go without schooling. Some houses wouldn't be built, some springs wouldn't be capped, some villages would have fewer resources with which to say No to a band of guys with rifles. Do you suppose that a single African with AIDS living in poverty will hear Zizek's talk and chime in, “Yes, I would rather die untreated so that the ugliness of capitalism can be revealed in its fullness”?

(A Geneva Convention for capitalism. That's what I'm reduced to calling for today.)

I don't know how many people have been directly benefited by your publications and lecturing, Professor Zizek. Yourself, your publishers, your agent, your immediate relatives, the people you took to lunch, forty or fifty junior professors who got a dissertation or tenure from deploying your ideas-- there's my best guess. It's not bad; that's a decent measure of success. But I don't think it gives you much reason to look down on people who are deriving from possibly impure sources (e.g., a billionaire's guilt, a politican's desire to leave a legacy, the self-regard of a bottle-recycling, stroller-pushing suburban dad) the means to heal, feed, house and protect others. A little humility looks good on a public intellectual. Or to put it the other way, it would have prevented embarrassment for the rest of us who read witty books about Lacan, Hegel, and Marx, and like a counter-intuitive argument.

It has had particular success with genetically engineering plants resistant to pesticides. The farmer can blanket his fields with pesticide, secure in the knowledge that the weeds will die but the plants will flourish. However, a problem with this seemingly ideal arrangement has developed. The pesticide-resistant genes have jumped from the crops to the weeds, creating “superweeds” impervious to anything a farmer can throw at them. Monsanto has desperately been supplying farmers with a pesticide from a previous generation in the hopes of quelling the superweeds before the enormous cash crops are decimated, food prices soar, and the world is beset with yet another food disaster.

Monsanto made one crucial mistake in its quest to turn life into intellectual property. It should not have genetically modified plants to make them pesticide resistant. Instead, it should have genetically modified people.

Breeding pesticide resistance into people would have numerous advantages. First of all, much higher concentrations of pesticides could be used. The first generation into whom the gene would be placed would be agricultural workers, whom farmers could douse with defoliants without seriously impacting their productivity or longevity. Second, genes could be developed for pesticides that are currently banned for their toxicity, but which otherwise would be inexpensive and commodious to use. Third, in new generations of pesticide-resistant humans, a gene could be introduced which would enable them to metabolize pesticides as though they were food. People would spurn organic produce in favor of the conventionally farmed variety, because an apple coated with Alar would actually be more nutritious than one without. And in the final generation, people could eat pesticides without having to eat actual food, useful during periods of crop failure.

Can we begin research into this promising new area, achieving measurable results before the superweeds take their toll on commodity agriculture? There is probably no Institutional Research Board or Human Subjects Committee in the nation that would allow such research to even be contemplated. But, faced with imminent mass starvation, they will change their tune.