Foucault’s End of History: The Temporality of Governmentality and its End in the Anthropocene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality is widely used throughout the social sciences to analyse the state, liberalism, and individual subjectivity. Surprisingly, what remains ignored are the repeated claims made by Foucault throughout his seminal Security, Territory, Population lectures (2007) that governmentality depends more fundamentally on a specific form of time, than on the state or the subject. By paying closer attention to Foucault’s comments on political temporality, this article reveals that governmentality emerged from, and depends upon, a very specific cosmological order that experiences time as indefinite: what Foucault calls our modern ‘indefinite governmentality’. This is elaborated here in three ways. First, by reviewing the transformation from a linear Christian cosmology to our modern indefinite governmentality through what Foucault calls the ‘de-governmentalization of the cosmos’. Second, by arguing that our experience of indefinite temporality was concretised by the geological discovery of ‘deep time’. Third, by engaging a contemporary geological concept that returns humanity to its lost cosmological centrality, thereby re-governing the cosmos: the Anthropocene, or the ‘human epoch’. Analysed using indefinite governmentality, Foucault’s forewarning of an ‘end of history’ is implicit in the new concept of the Anthropocene’s origins and ends. If it is the paradigm shift its proponents claim, then it threatens to end the temporality of the state, the subject, and governmentality itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".