From “you should” to “I can”: The positive power and academic pressure

The pressure to publish – and the exponential growth in submission and publication rates – is often attributed to the managerialism that has swept across academia globally. Alongside managerialism, universities and other related institutions have introduced different performance metrics, e.g., impact factors, h-indexes, ranking, funding formula, publication points. These metrics are used to measure, compare, and govern academic work.

While blaming the metrics on the pressure captures an important aspect of this story, it fails short of explaining why, for instance, tenured faculty continue to feel a strong urge to publish and produce more (at least in quantitative terms) – sometimes incessantly – even in countries with relatively stable employment systems. If they were the (sole) cause, resistance – especially among tenured academics – should be relatively easy: one could choose to not partake in the game or comply only minimally. Yet, this rarely happens in practice. What if the pressure to publish does not arise only from the evaluation system, and the metrics they embody, but also from how researchers experience themselves as subjects?

Metrics within academia provide a way of quantifying productivity. While the quantification is problematic in itself (for instance, through such measurement things that everyone tends to agree are valuable but are hard to measure become viewed as less valuable), they promise comparability. They claim to offer objective and comparative yardsticks for evaluating scientific performance across individuals and institutions. In doing so, they have contributed significantly to the “publish (constantly) or perish” ideology and to the almost chronic publishing pressure and ill-being by many researchers.

Metrics belong conceptually to what Michel Foucault described as disciplinary societies. They embed the imperative “you should”: you should produce a certain number of publications, you should accumulate citations, you should secure a given amount of external funding, and so on. The pressure here is external; it is imposed. However, as Korean–German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues, a more powerful logic characterizes contemporary societies: the imperative “I can”¹.

Unlike “you should,” the “I can” operates from within oneself. It does not primarily respond to external coercion or prohibition but gains its power from the positivity of freedom, motivation, and self-optimization. But this positivity is neither a mere reflection of individual traits or preferences. Rather, it is an outcome of systemic and structural processes that produce achievement-subjects. Under this form of power, the subject is no longer primarily oppressed by institutions but exhausted by him/herself. Despite the perceived freedom and autonomy, this subject remains as disciplined and docile as the one governed by the imperatives of disciplinary society.

The logic of “I can” is particularly strong within academia – not as an exception but rather as an ideal case. Academic work is open-ended, largely internally motivated, and never truly finished. There is no natural point at which one can say, “I have done enough,” let alone “I’ve finished my work.” Instead, academics work in the space of openness where there is always the possibility of producing still one more paper (one more than last year?), collecting one more dataset, revising one more manuscript, accepting one more editorial role. New “opportunities” always and inexhaustibly present themselves for an active researcher. The only obstacle between higher levels of performance and achievement is the “I” – the academic subject is interpellated not as a worker who must obey the institutional imperatives but as a project that can always be improved.

Under the positive power of “I can” the academic becomes a constant and ongoing self-development project – a subject that is both entrepreneur and laborer. In this self-centred project, improving one’s CV, engaging in strategic co-authorship, managing a publication pipeline, and experimenting with productivity hacks increasingly take precedence over meaningful or risky research. Even resistance risks becoming subsumed by this very same logic and appearing as yet another form of optimization and self-improvement: “publishing better,” “publishing smarter,” “publishing more efficiently.”

In this world, metrics function less as a whip and more as a mirror. As a mirror, it does not reflect a neutral or objective image of the self. Rather, it reflects an image saturated with expectations, norms, and ideals. What looks back is a perpetual sense of insufficiency – a self that is understood as a project incomplete and improvable. Metrics translate the insecurity into numbers, defining what counts as beautiful, valuable, and expected. Metrics do not command productivity; they seduce it.

The tyrant producing pressure, exhaustion, and even burnout is non-existent, invisible, and yet omnipresent as an internalized part of the self. As Han elaborates, the achievement-subject “works for pleasure and does not act at the behest of the Other. Instead, it harkens mainly to itself.” Yet, this does not amount to emancipation or liberation. The dialectic of freedom produces new constraints. The negative outcomes are neither failures of the individual nor their weaknesses or mismanagement of self-development. They are the structural outcomes of unlimited positivity – that is the power of the positive power “I can”.

There is no clear external enemy to oppose, no clear injustice to resist. One cannot resist a system that represents itself as one’s own freedom. Perhaps the problem is not that we are forced to publish too much, but that we have learned to desire a form of productivity that can never satisfy us. The voice of “I can” grows ever more louder, stronger, and controlling than that of “you should.” In a society that produces achievement-subjects, we need to find a way to “protect me from what I want,” as Han—quoting the artist Jenny Holzer—eloquently puts it.

Author