Current calls for the social relevance of research in the humanities increasingly shift attention to the question of normative forms of guidance, such as those set by funding institutions, and to their relation to disciplinary autonomy. Using debates in literary studies as an example, it becomes clear how political objectives, sometimes described as 'activism from above', reshape the tension between knowledge-driven research and administratively supported transformation agendas. Two kinds of unpredictability meet here: the structural openness of literary research processes and the difficult-to-predict effects of activist interventions. Both resist common methods of forecasting and evaluation, which raises doubts about whether administrative models of control can be applied to the practices of the humanities at all. The article first clarifies its main terms: internal and external refer to the origin of impulses, while top and bottom describe their hierarchical mode of implementation. Based on this, a heuristic framework is proposed that combines both dimensions and adds the difference between affirmative and repressive modes. This framework helps to distinguish between disciplinary self-mobilisation, gatekeeping, agenda setting in research policy, and intervention through sanctions, and to define more precisely in what limited sense the term activism can be applied. The paper argues that external, hierarchical and repressive interventions are not forms of activism in the narrow sense but rather mechanisms of control and direction that come into tension with the autonomy of epistemic practices. This distinction underlines the need to define the criteria of scholarly relevance more clearly. The relevance of research in the humanities does not lie in supposed direct causal effects but in forms of public resonance and traces of internal disciplinary transformation. The paper aims to encourage a more differentiated view of the relations between activism, governance and academic practice.