Rethinking "Impact": Between the Attention Economy and The Readerless Republic of Letters

Time is in short supply, so my argument will be condensed, and therefore apparently dogmatic. I will sketch seven reasons why we should distance ourselves both from the promotion of "impact" as an appropriate measure of a scholar's output and from its knee-jerk rejection as a scandalous, oppressive and humiliating form of control of scholarly work.¹ My main points will be that we all crave impact (understandably), that the current definition of "impact" tends to hide what it claims to reveal (and should therefore be rejected), but, more importantly, that the very framing of "impact" rests on an obsolete conception of how and why we do research. To put it bluntly: we still hang on to the traditional idea that articles and books are made to be read (by a maximum of people), whereas we should accept the fact that they are mostly made to be written—independently of who does or does not end up reading them.

1. It's the economy, stupid!

"'Impact' is the buzzword of the day," Martha Nussbaum recently wrote in a much celebrated essay, "and by 'impact' the government means above all economic impact" (128). Over the last twenty years, a number of procedures have been set in place throughout the academic world, from Harvard to London, then from Shanghai to Paris, attempting always more precisely (and more byzantinely) to measure researchers' output. From the emergence of the Publish or Perish rule of survival in the US academic jungle to the rigid ranking of French periodicals into three classes of "excellence," and all the way to the precise calculation of each individual researcher's "H-factor," our age seems obsessed by a contradictory urge to produce as much scholarly writings as possible, and simultaneously to expect all these writings to "excel."

As the "buzzword of the day," "impact" translates into two categorical imperatives: Write (as much as you can) and Be read (by as many influential readers as you can reach). These two imperatives are over-determined by conventional economics on at least three levels. First, as Martha Nussbaum writes, a number of evaluations of scholarly production come from governmental agencies, which tend to reduce research to the "Research and Development" model of technological innovation: universities are conceived as incubators of "new ideas" ready to be appropriated by investors eager to provide jobs and profits to fuel (or jump start) economic growth. While this expectation of macroeconomic impact might make some sense for certain fields of research (nanotechnology, solar energy, etc.), many other fields of academic inquiry feel trapped in a model that threatens and denies their very existence—hence the success of Nussbaum's claim that the Humanities are Not for Profit.

At a second deeper level, "impact" is framed by economic reasoning insofar as it comes down to a matter of accounting. Whether in nanotechnology or in 18th-century French literature, doing research costs money (if not in labs and fancy machines, at least in salaries). Universities have to measure their input (paying for buildings, libraries, heating, cleaning, staff, etc.), so it is not totally unreasonable to attempt to measure their output (degrees granted, patents obtained, papers and books published, etc.). At this accounting level, "impact" attempts to measure the effective output generated by academic institutions, in a "cognitive" phase of capitalism where universities have taken over the role previously played by factories in the age of "industrial capitalism."²

At a third more fundamental level, the buzzword of "impact" expresses the total colonization of our mind by the logics of economic productivity. Social beings do not exist by virtue of who they are, but in proportion to the stuff they produce (within an ontological imperative according to which production is bound endlessly to "grow"). More to the point, their production can only be accounted for through market value. The evaluation of a researcher's output will therefore consist in putting a number on his or her contribution to our economic growth. Certain civilizations valued the sheer existence of "masters," secluded in out-of-the-way temples, absorbed in self-sufficient...