Affects as the rhythm of governance – An autoethnography of being controlled

This paper explores how frustration emerges, accumulates, and lingers in everyday work under contemporary regimes of control. I show how contradictory approaches to governing intersect and clash in subtle and often unnoticed ways. Drawing on reflexive autoethnographic vignettes from a Swedish university, I approach the frustrations of being controlled as an affective condition produced by the layered and paradoxical structure of control. This frustration is not spectacular or rebellious; it is mundane, embodied, and continuous, showing that affects such as frustration are central to understanding what it means to be governed. The paper also shows how frustration is bound up with the impossibility of meeting three simultaneous pressures: professional ambition, performance expectations, and procedural requirements. The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it conceptualizes governance as a socio-technical and affective practice. Multiple and contradictory ambitions embedded in control systems create a recurring rhythm through which governance is felt, with frustration forming its affective pulse. Second, it shows how frustration builds through the structural incompatibility of ambition, performance, and procedure, generating a steady, low-intensity sense of falling short even when work is carried out with care and commitment. Third, the paper reframes frustration as inwardly directed work rather than a precursor to resistance. Instead of mobilizing opposition, frustration produces self-adjustment, workaround practices, and affective depletion, becoming an internal mode through which governance operates. Frustration is not a reaction to failed control but a recurring rhythm of governance – a repeated pulse through which governance endures.