Foucault’s End of History: The Temporality of Governmentality and its End in the Anthropocene

Introduction

Despite being recognised as one of the greatest and most cited thinkers of the 20th century, French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault is usually omitted from discussions of time. As Walters notes, his work is assumed to theorise how techniques of control and strategies of power shape subjects: ‘when it comes to his major works – the monographs on madness, punishment, illness and sexuality, and the lectures on government – it is the schemes, tactics and dreams of experts and authorities that take centre stage in his explorations’. ³ Throughout the social sciences, therefore, it is now commonplace to see Foucault’s scholarship embraced in precisely these ways, analysing how technologies and relations of power shape regimes of truth, the self, society, and rationalities of politics. So, although we read that ‘Foucault’s whole oeuvre is oriented to breaking down the domination of a fully self-reflexive, unified and rational subject at the centre of thought’, ⁴ a philosophy of political temporality is never included as one of his many specialties. Time seems to be missing from Foucault’s oeuvre.

This absence has not dissuaded the discipline of International Relations (IR) from turning extensively towards Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’. ⁵ Governmentality is generally considered as a tool to analyse how power operates within and beyond the state, from the micro-scale of individual subjectivity to the macro-scale of the global polity. ⁶ By diagnosing and revealing the implicit functions, strategies, rationalities, and power relations underpinning everyday practices sustaining liberalism and society, it exposes the underlying constitutive principles of modern political order that allow the state to exist. ⁷ Indeed, ‘We live in the era of a governmentality discovered in the eighteenth century’, Foucault exclaimed, and this ‘governmentalization of the state has nonetheless been what has allowed the state to survive’. ⁸ The use of governmentality is now so widespread in IR that it has been likened to a catch-all term or buzzword ⁹ that risks succumbing to applicationism: ‘that is, treating governmentality as a fixed set of concepts and tools that one simply applies to empirical projects, whatever the topic’. ¹⁰ Hence, with such well-trodden ground covered so intensively, the impression is again given in IR that Foucault and governmentality have nothing to say about time. Genealogies of governmentality mention nothing about temporality, ¹¹ acclaimed books do not include it, whilst brilliant philosophical works on time and IR contain only scant passing mentions of Foucault. ¹²

What if, however, we have missed some crucial component of Foucault’s thought in which he clearly describes the political temporality of the state? What if we have overlooked Foucault’s own assertions that governmentality itself depends more fundamentally on time, than on society or liberalism? Might this realisation transform the ways in which we engage some concepts in IR and the social sciences today? Might it change the way we look at governmentality, and the oeuvre of Foucault?

With these questions in mind, the purpose of this article is to problematise and highlight the hitherto neglected bond between governmentality and political temporality in Foucault’s work. Contrary to decades of scholarship asserting that governmentality is grounded fundamentally upon the state, society, or liberalism, ¹³ this article argues that a primary conceptual pillar of governmentality has been ignored up to this point: its emergence through, and continued dependence upon, a specific rendering of time. When considered as a whole, Foucault’s seminal 1977–78 Security, Territory, Population (STP) lecture series actually traces how governmentality emerged from a transformation in Western cosmology and temporality. By paying close attention to each of its 13 lectures rather than focusing solely on the 1 February 1978 lecture describing ‘the governmentalization of the state’, it becomes evident that a cosmological shift created what Foucault repeatedly describes throughout STP as the bedrock of the modern state and political subjectivity today: ‘indefinite governmentality’. Foucault frequently describes indefinite governmentality as a form of political temporality that is seemingly repetitive and endless, within which states have no predefined or predetermined endpoint in time. ‘[W]e now find ourselves in a perspective in which historical time is indefinite, in a perspective of indefinite governmentality with no foreseeable term or final aim’, he argued. ‘We are in open historicity due to the indefinite character of the political art’. ¹⁴ Importantly, this ‘indefinite’ sense of time could only take hold in the West by replacing the previous Christian cosmological and temporal sense of time, which had fused temporality and sovereignty together into a linear and definite path, moving steadily towards eschatological salvation upon Christ’s return on Judgment Day. ¹⁵ This explains why the lectures of STP after 1 February speak more about what Foucault calls Christian pastoral power, than the state: Foucault was working through the cosmological transition from a definite Christian time to an indefinite statist time, which fostered the move of pastoral power away from the Church’s shepherding of souls, to the government of a state existing in an indefinite historicity. ‘The Empire, the last Empire, the universal Empire, whether or the Caesars or of the Church, was something that haunted the medieval perspective’, Foucault claimed, ‘and to that extent there was no indefinite government. There was no state or kingdom destined to indefinite repetition in time’. ¹⁶

Once we recognise the importance of indefinite governmentality to the state, we may reconsider modern concepts altering this temporality in a new way: as cosmological or temporal threats to the state’s survival. As this article will argue, there is indeed a popular concept used today that is antithetical to the open historicity of governmentality. It asserts a cosmology that ‘ends’ the world as we know it, by moving far beyond our everyday human experience of minutes, hours, years, and even decades, reaching into timescales of millions and even billions of years, known as deep or geologic time. ¹⁷ As Harrington has eloquently described it, ‘At a fundamental level, it troubles the intellectual and psychological conceptions of who we are as humans and how we relate to the world around us’. ¹⁸ This concept is a human-made geological epoch of planetary instability and transformation, a ‘terra incognita’, that is known widely as the age of anthropos, the human: the Anthropocene. ¹⁹ Viewed through the lens of Foucault’s indefinite governmentality, therefore, the Anthropocene resembles what Foucault labels in STP as a ‘revolutionary eschatology’, or a new form of ‘counter-conduct’, in which ‘time, the time if not of history then at least of politics, of the state, will come to an end as a result’. ²⁰ In other words, by positing new cosmological and temporal origins and endpoints, the narratives of the Anthropocene run counter to the open historicity of the state. As such, if we are governed today through the limits described by Foucault’s indefinite governmentality, then cosmological concepts such as the Anthropocene not only impact and transform political temporality, but the state and our own subjectivity as well. Since time and governmentality are entwined, a change to one will necessarily change the other.

This article proceeds in five steps. First, it reviews literature on cosmology, highlighting its importance to perceptions of time and government in IR. Second, it engages in an in-depth examination of Foucault’s STP. It specifies how governmentality emerged in the 18th century from a cosmological transformation Foucault describes as the ‘de-governmentalization of the cosmos’. ²¹ It was this de-governmentalization that allowed a type of government by ‘pastoral power’ to then shift away from the Church, so as to ‘governmentalize’ the state. Third, this article explores why, in the 18th century, the ongoing process of de-governmentalizing the cosmos suddenly ended. It is not coincidental that the 18th century also witnessed what has been described as the greatest conceptual revolution in the history of human time perception: the discovery of geological time. Contrary to established scriptural narratives of the New Testament’s Genesis 1 Creation story, geological time revealed how the earth is comprised of indefinite natural processes working far prior to, and far beyond, humanity’s existence. Fourth, it links this connection between geological time and changes in cosmology and political temporality, to similar trends visible in the concept of the Anthropocene today. With its human-made origins and its prophecy of an imminent end, it mimics the linear Divine temporality of Christian cosmology, fostering its own modern form of ‘Anthropocene eschatology’. ²² Finally, this article concludes by arguing that the Anthropocene’s eschatology re-governmentalises the cosmos, by fusing sovereignty and history back on to a singular pathway leading to the world’s end in planetary catastrophe. This ‘end of our world’ encloses time back into a definite linear historicity – a looming end that all must share – which implies the end of modern indefinite governmentality, the state, and even history itself.

Some caveats are in order, however. First, this article examines temporality, the state, and the Anthropocene, using solely the ‘indefinite governmentality’ outlined by Foucault in his STP lectures. It does not sample snippets or integrate concepts from across Foucault’s decade-spanning and extremely wide oeuvre, such as his earlier ‘archaeological’ work engaging histories of science ²³ and knowledge. ²⁴ Foucault’s work shifted so quickly and drastically in its orientation, that comparing ‘early’ to ‘late’ Foucault is tantamount to comparing two entirely different thinkers, thereby obfuscating and confusing the content and meaning of the works compared, whilst also treating Foucault’s thought unfairly. This article critically reassesses how governmentality was discovered, and therefore what forgotten or ignored elements of STP still comprise and shape governmentality today without our explicit awareness. And indeed, STP ultimately returns time and time again to what IR has routinely ignored: the cosmology of Christian pastoral power and its transition from God’s government of the cosmos, into the state’s government of subjects through an indefinite governmentality.

Second, with STP as its aim and focus, this article is admittedly Eurocentric in that it focuses on and examines Foucault’s account of the Christian West and the emergence of statist governmental rationality. There exists a multitude of competing cosmologies and temporalities from other times, places, and cultures, that cannot all be considered in the space of this article. It does not celebrate nor discredit the validity or inaccuracy of Foucault’s historical (and Eurocentric) claims, but instead, explores how they progressed through his STP lectures to craft the temporal foundation of governmentality. Although critiques of Foucault’s eurocentrism are indeed available, ²⁵ the important task of critiquing and exploring the Eurocentrism of indefinite governmentality will be left to future scholars.

Time, Cosmology and Governmentality Today

Prior to arguing that governmentality emerged from a transformation in cosmology and time perception, it is important to specify what a cosmology is and how it shapes thought. After defining this concept, this section provides a brief review of how it intersects with the discipline of IR. It then concludes by highlighting a subtle but important distinction that Foucault made early in his STP lectures, prior to the invention of governmentality: the difference between centripetal and centrifugal forms of time.

The word ‘cosmos’ originates from the Greek term κόσμος, meaning ‘order, orderly arrangement, ornaments’, and refers generally in the social sciences ‘to the basic world views of various human groups’. ²⁶ A ‘cosmology’ thus refers to the expansive but implicit scientific and/or metaphysical understanding a community possesses about its world and universe. It ‘denotes the knowledge of a given society about the composition of the universe and the place of humankind within it’. ²⁷ Each specific cosmological order is thus an unconscious blueprint for how every scientific and social form of knowledge relates the human being to the universe, Being, space, and time.

Through a mix of scientific discovery and social dialogue, cosmologies become contextually ‘situated’ and made intelligible and intersubjective for human beings in their everyday lives. ²⁸ Although there are always a variety of differing and competing ways that the workings of the universe can be understood and debated within a cosmology, cosmologies differing between each other historically and culturally imply a paradigmatic discontinuity and intractability. Each can possess different renderings of space, time, and human experience, that are incommensurable with the basic forms of knowledge comprising others.

Today, we assume that ‘now, as in the Past and as it will be in the Future, cosmology is a provisional interpretation of scientific facts’. ²⁹ Cosmology has become a scientific, not mystical or religious, practice. Astronomy and theoretical physics, for example, are now taken to be integral for grasping cosmological order through what is typically described as a classical ‘Newtonian framework’ of the cosmos. This framework understands the universe as a systemic totality, amenable to measurement, quantification and calculation. Subjects and objects are material and discrete atomistic entities, and hence they can be measured and quantified in relation to one another. This fosters a deterministic and linear causality that allows for a data-driven prediction of future events to be derived from measured patterns of past occurrences. Indeed, IR has recently made new advances in directly addressing how this Newtonian cosmology intersects with politics, addressing topics as varied as globality, climate change, and the Anthropocene. ³⁰

Within the Newtonian cosmology in which it is presently situated, IR has embraced its penchant for theoretical eclecticism by framing its discussions of (political) temporality around notions of chronotic and kairotic time. ³¹ For instance, Hutchings carefully details how our everyday ‘clock time’ of chronos, or chronotic time, relies upon Newtonian cycles that proceed indefinitely, linearly, and infinitely: ‘time as a neutral, constant, measurable and measuring medium opens up a variety of possibilities for thinking about the relation of present to past and present to future …it becomes possible to divide the past into specific periods, to make direct comparison between events at the same time or at different times’. ³² In contrast to chronotic time, kairotic time (kairos) is sudden, inconsistent, and radically de-centring because it diffuses our Newtonian background into a flux of uncertainty and unpredictability. It consists of the ‘“exceptional” to a qualitative event that creates, arrests or changes time, rather than endures it’. ³³

It is thus no surprise that it is through these two warring forms of time that governmentality is generally considered by scholars. As noted above, temporality is not considered to be part of Foucault’s main works, so when the issue of ‘time’ is raised, Foucault is usually grafted-on to other sociological theories or philosophical concepts. On the one hand, Foucault’s thought is used to diagnose the chronos of a disciplinary power that isolates and individualises bodies through regimes of future-oriented examination and domination, so they may be regulated and coordinated. ³⁴ On the other hand, it is used to move beyond disciplinary power, by detailing how chronos is harnessed through technologies aiming to contain the unpredictability of kairos. Governmentality is here conceived as a calculative statistical power capable of reaching into the future, predicting the self-governance of risk, ³⁵ forms of anticipatory governance, ³⁶ and diagnosing an emerging ‘big data governmentality’ in complex practices such as predictive policing. ³⁷

Yet, is grafting Foucault on to other theories the only way to frame the temporality of governmentality? Very early in STP, Foucault himself is indeed grappling with this same chronos/kairos distinction. In his opening lecture of 11 January, he is intrigued by how the regulative stasis of disciplinary power eventually transforms within the state into something strange; a new type of power that, at this early stage in STP, he sees as capturing the state’s ‘security, territory, and population’ through the temporal ‘series’ and the circulations visible in the social ‘milieu’. Rather than a discipline that regulates everything, these new apparatuses of security are more laisser-faire, letting things happen, as a natural process that ‘works on the future, …a future that is not exactly controllable, not planned or measurable, …the temporal and the uncertain, which have to be inserted within a given space’. ³⁸ In his first two lectures, Foucault thus makes an important distinction between a form of centripetal power that isolates and encloses a segmented space (discipline), and an emerging centrifugal form of power that flows outwards beyond it, through endless ever-widening processes and circulations, becoming visible at the level of the population – an early precursor to what would soon develop into governmentality.

Although he would soon abandon discussion of these concepts, the notion of perpetual ‘centrifugal’ processes should be kept in mind going forth. As Foucault makes clear, STP was a work in constant progress, transforming its concepts and narratives between every lecture as many new paths and directions were explored, and many were abandoned. This is why in his seminal 1 February 1978 lecture in which ‘governmentality’ is first outlined, he states: ‘Basically, if I had wanted to give the lectures I am giving this year a more exact title, I certainly would not have chosen “security, territory, population”. What I would really like to undertake is something that I would call a history of “governmentality”’. ³⁹ His thinking at this point had changed from earlier lectures, and this becomes evident as he largely discards security, the series, and the milieu, to focus on something new that would occupy the remainder of STP: uncovering that which underpins the ‘governmentalization of the state’, the precursor to the ‘art of “governing men” …the origin, the point of formation, of crystallization, the embryonic point of governmentality’ that is found in only one location in all of Western history, ‘no doubt unique in the history of societies and civilizations’: the Christian pastorate. ⁴⁰ ‘The pastorate seems to me to sketch out, or is the prelude to what I have called governmentality’. ⁴¹ Why? Foucault spends the remainder of STP arguing that it was a cosmological transformation in time perception that allowed the governing power of the pastorate to shift away from the Church, crystallizing the type of governmentality that underlies the modern state. This was a shift from a definite eschatological finitude, to an indefinite time of the state: an indefinite governmentality.

Our Indefinite Governmentality

It is typical to read that governmentality is a cluster of concepts and meanings, as ‘Foucault does not settle on a single definition of governmentality but uses the word to mean several things’. ⁴² Indeed, although three different meanings of governmentality are outlined in STP, ⁴³ Foucault aims his lectures at unpacking one: the ‘governmentalization of the state’, a process slowly unfurling since the 16th century but ultimately crystalizing ‘in the era of a governmentality discovered in the eighteenth century’. ⁴⁴ It is no surprise, therefore, that scholars in the social sciences have enthusiastically followed this lead, embracing the 1 February 1978 lecture on the state as the quintessence of the concept. From the history of the physiocrats to neoliberalism, from the self to society, and from the state to the global polity, it seems that every usage and meaning of governmentality now generally shares at least one core notion derived from this lecture: governmentality as ‘“the conduct of conduct”: that is to say, a form of activity aiming to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of some person or persons’. ⁴⁵ Privileging this 1 February lecture, however, the majority of the other lectures comprising STP are usually ignored, considered redundant, or conflated with it. So, what happens when this 1 February lecture is bracketed, and STP’s other lectures are given equal consideration?

Discussions of ‘the conduct of conduct’, the state, liberalism, and the population do not occupy the majority of STP. As noted above, lectures preceding 1 February 1978 illustrate Foucault’s early inquisition into security and how the ‘centripetal’ disciplinary power of the sovereign became a ‘centrifugal’ power engaging the new element of population, expanding ever outwards to calculate its series, circulations, and processes. ⁴⁶ In stark contrast to 1 February, the subsequent lectures of 8 February, 15 February, 22 February, 1 March, 8 March, 15 March, and the final summative lecture of 5 April, analyse the historical ‘constitution of the modern Western subject’ through a rather different topic: Western Christianity, ⁴⁷ eschatology, and a new form of power: ‘omnes et singulatim’, or what Foucault called an individualising and totalising pastoral power.

Pastoral power demands that a good shepherd govern their flock by ‘keep[ing] his eye on all and on each, …which will be the great problem both of the techniques of power in Christian pastorship, and of the, let’s say, modern techniques of power deployed in the technologies of population I have spoken about’. ⁴⁸ Indeed, pastoral power shapes not only the state, but the ‘entire history of procedures of human individualization in the West’, ⁴⁹ as God’s subjects became individualised as state citizens, and totalised as members of the nation-state. Hence, a specific ‘subjectified …modern Western subject makes the pastorate one of the decisive moments in the history of power in Western societies’. ⁵⁰ The question Foucault asks, therefore, is how exactly this pastoral power shifted from the Church to the state, whilst having previously ‘remain[ed] absolutely specific and different from political power, at least until the eighteenth century’ ⁵¹ at ‘the end of the pastoral age’. ⁵²

Foucault repeatedly notes that pastoral power began to intersect with state practices as early as 1650, but that Christianity’s cosmological worldview had not completely given way to our modern Newtonian understanding until the 18th century, when governmentality finally crystallised and took hold in the state. Prior to this time, pastoral power was relegated to the Church. Contrary to the cyclical cosmologies and temporalities of the ancient Mayans or Greeks, ⁵³ Christianity posited a cosmos governed by God and a temporality that was linear and unidirectional, leading from the origin of humanity in the New Testament’s Genesis 1 narrative to its inevitable end in the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic Last Judgement. According to biblical scripture, writes Burtt, ‘the whole world of nature was believed to be teleologically subordinate to him [man] and his eternal destiny’ in an eschatological end. ⁵⁴ ‘More precisely’, claimed Foucault, this made the world a transitory stopgap for ‘man’ to earn his salvation: ‘man was not made to live in this world, at any rate not definitively, but only in order to pass into another world…. Final causes and anthropocentrism was one of the forms, one of the manifestations, one of the signs of God’s pastoral government of the world’. ⁵⁵ It was this Christian cosmology that made the sovereign disciplinary power Foucault examined earlier, so closed and centripetal: ‘the public good is essentially obedience to the law, either to the earthly sovereign’s law, or to the law of the absolute sovereign, God…. which means the end of sovereignty is circular; it refers back to the exercise of sovereignty’. ⁵⁶ God’s authoritative government thus made Divine sovereignty and law top-down; from the Deity, to the sovereignty of the Divine King, to his subjects, rather than allowing any free circulation of bottom-up processes derived from society or the population. The Divine King was a fusion of the transcendental and the worldly, thereby providing a focal sense of continuity and community for subjects living under the dictates of harsh sovereign law. ⁵⁷ Humans were God’s obedient subjects awaiting their final Judgement, not free citizens living out a plurality of their own individually chosen ends. ⁵⁸

As STP advances past 1 February, Foucault realises that catalysing the governmentalisation of the state and its harnessing of pastoral power was a dramatic shift in cosmology and perceptions of time. The transition from God’s pastoral government of the world to that of the state occurred as a ‘de-governmentalization of the cosmos’, contingent upon the spread of a specific new form of political temporality. ⁵⁹ In ‘raison d’État, we see the emergence of a historical and political temporality with specific characteristics in comparison with the temporality that dominated the thought of the Middle Ages, and even of the Renaissance’, Foucault states, ‘because it is an indefinite temporality, the temporality of a government that is both never-ending and conservative’. ⁶⁰ The previous ‘Renaissance’ temporality was that of Christianity’s cosmos, which placed the world linearly between a definitive Divine origin and an eschatological end. The de-governed cosmos transformed this temporality by making time a neutral medium, with no beginning or end to challenge the state. First, ‘The art of government and raison d’État no longer pose a problem of origin: we are always already in a world of government, raison d’État, and the state’. ⁶¹ Second, ‘The end of raison d’État is the state itself, …There is no last day. There is no ultimate point. There is nothing like a uniform and final temporal organization’. ⁶² Since the state is not finite, but indefinite, it thereby demands a new model or art of government that moves beyond antiquated sovereign law, God’s government of nature, and the shepherd’s relation to his sheep. ⁶³ ‘The new historicity of raison d’État excluded the Empire of the last days’, noted Foucault, because ‘it excluded the kingdom of eschatology’. ⁶⁴ Yet, what is also important is what remained included in this new historicity: pastoral power.

As the Church’s influence dissipated, the pastoral power underlying it remained and actually intensified ‘its extension and temporal efficiency’ in the state, albeit now with no final end of time towards which God and a Divine sovereign could shepherd the human flock. ⁶⁵ Unlike the Church’s disciplinary and centripetal sovereign law, therefore, Foucault notes how this moment elicits a political sea change in the ends that both individuals and the state could seek: ‘the state – raison d’État and the government commanded by raison d’État —–will not have to concern itself with individual salvation. It will not even have to pursue something like the end of history, either as a fulfillment or as the point at which historical time and eternity join together’. ⁶⁶ Hence why engaging ‘a plurality of specific ends’ and ‘a series of specific finalities’ in a laissez faire manner becomes the new objective of state government, as it looked to harness the centrifugal processes now unbound by, and uncontrollable through, outdated sovereign law. ⁶⁷ In other words, the new temporality of the state did not need to prescribe any universal origin or end for humanity and the world to pursue. Cosmology had split from scripture, and so the state’s temporality could now be – hypothetically – open and indefinite.

With no fixed origin or eschatological end, perpetuity merges with political temporality. Indefinite time is what brings the governmentality of the state into being. This transformation explains why, when summarising the entirety of STP in the waning moments of his final 5 April lecture, Foucault exclaims: ‘More schematically, and to summarize all that I have wanted to say, maybe we could say that raison d’État basically posited as the primary, implacable law of both modern governmentality and historical science that man henceforth has to live in an indefinite time’. ⁶⁸ The state’s art of government was an indefinite governmentality, turning pastoral power to a plurality of worldly ends rather than the restricting singularity of Christ’s return. God’s government of the cosmos shifts into the sovereign’s art of the state. Hence, why ‘the state is only an episode in government, and it is not government that is an instrument of the state’. ⁶⁹ It is ultimately temporality that determines the form that government can take.

A brief word must be said here on the ‘individual’ subject that emerges from this de-governed cosmos, into the state. Foucault has much to say on how this cosmological moment releases subjects from Divine time and government, leaving them free to govern themselves as autonomous, responsible, enterprising beings now subject to endless clock time. ⁷⁰ Individuality comes at a steep existential cost, however. Whilst the sovereign King’s subjects were previously united under the Grace of God, ‘The God who is revealed in Christ [and] brings all nations under His judgment’, ⁷¹ the loss of the security of Divine salvation fostered an extreme crisis of human continuity. STP is clear that well into the 17th century, sovereign princes and kings remained subject to ‘those two great poles of the Empire and the Church that represented a sort of great spiritual and temporal pastorate’ in a ‘historical-religious sovereignty that dominated the West and promised salvation, unity, and the fulfillment of time’. ⁷² Yet, the indefinite state was anathema to this Divine sovereignty and its eschatological finality. Perpetuity threw humanity into a cold and empty reality of worldly finitude, a human mortality that could no longer be saved through God’s eternal grace. Since time was no longer coextensive with Christian scripture, marking the Bible’s unfolding of providence up to Christ’s return, time became an empty mathematical variable that could be plotted and calculated indifferently and endlessly upon Newtonian grids of classical space-time. Indeed, although Foucault noted how ‘The modern state is born, I think, when governmentality became a calculated practice’, ⁷³ this practice was not simply derived from the application of population arithmetic (statistics) to the population. It required a prior intersection with a pastoral power that no longer used scripture as a technology of government to shepherd the souls of the flock, but rather, could now use physics and mathematics to reveal the centrifugal nature of processes and patterns created by individuals and the population of the state.

As scholars from Anderson to Niebuhr note, nothing was more important for the emergence of nationalism and the nation-state than the decline of this sacral monarchy and its promise of eternal salvation. Without it, as Anderson notes, there formed an abyss of meaning and a radical discontinuity for the human being. ‘Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary’. ⁷⁴ As argued above, STP details how the lost continuity of Christianity’s pastoral of souls was repackaged as an episode of government in an indefinite state. Indeed, even today, ‘the individual man is fooled by the greater majesty and the seeming immortality of collective man’s achievements’, Niebuhr writes. ‘Therefore he worships his nation as god’. ⁷⁵

The Deep Time of a De-Governed Cosmos

The cosmological shift away from the Church took centuries. Throughout STP, Foucault spreads this process from ‘the foundation of the classical episteme’ between 1580 and 1660, ⁷⁶ to the assimilation of pastoral power into the state in the 18th to 19th centuries (see above). So, what event finally completed the de-governmentalisation of the cosmos? Foucault is frustratingly inconsistent on this point. Aside from crises of war, economics, and politics, ‘the art of government formulated in the sixteenth century was also blocked in the seventeenth century for other reasons, which could be called …institutional and mental structures’ still attached to sovereign law and power. ⁷⁷ This raises the question of what new ‘institutional and mental structures’ might have emerged around this time that could have ended the dominance of Christian temporality and cosmology. In other words, what event made ‘man’ definitively of this world and earth, governmentalising the state through a new sense of indefinite time?

Despite being considered as one of the most important scientific achievements in human history, it is a testament to both its everyday ubiquity and its grip upon our contemporary subjectivity and understanding of the world, that we typically overlook or forget the discovery of a new form of temporality in the 18th century: geologic time. ⁷⁸ This form of time posited the age of the earth not in the Bible’s scale of thousands of years, but in a magnitude of millions and even billions of years; an expanse of time so vast, that it was (and remains) literally incomprehensible for the mind to grasp. Yet, it launched ‘a milestone in humanity’s understanding of our place in the cosmos’ by catalysing a revolution in Western thought that surpassed even the impact of Copernicus. ⁷⁹

Prior to the 18th century, a linear Christian chronology had fused human history into Earth history, so that worldly events were regarded as the manifestation of what was preordained in the Bible’s totalising scripture. The Bible contained the whole story of time, from Creation to the last Judgement. ⁸⁰ Although previous developments in astronomy and physics had de-centred the heliocentric earth from the Bible’s geocentric cosmos, Copernicus, Galileo, and even Newton had all failed to ‘challenge humanity’s central place in Earth’s history’, because all remained staunch believers in the first Hebrew creation story told in Genesis 1. ⁸¹ It was axiomatic for Enlightenment scientists at this time to declare biblical chronology as a fundamental scientific truth, asserting well into the 18th century that the Earth and the universe were clearly a mere 6,000 years in age. ⁸² Astronomy and Newtonian physics were new and powerful tools, but they were used to illustrate the wonder and complexity of God’s design in nature. ‘To study nature is to search into his workmanship’, wrote Maclaurin, as late as 1748 in a review of Newton’s physics. Indeed, Newton’s work showed how ‘there is nothing we meet with more frequently and constantly in nature, than the traces of an All-governing Deity’. ⁸³ Similarly, Foucault notes that in this God-governed cosmos, ‘Insofar as he governs, the sovereign does nothing other than reproduce a model [that] is quite simply that of God’s government on Earth’. Even through Newtonian classical physics, therefore, God governed nature and the cosmos just as the King governed his subjects. Well into the 18th century, all shared the same origin and eschatological destiny.

Despite not fully displacing its cosmology, the physics of Newton and the earth’s new found heliocentrism succeeded in transforming Christianity’s understanding of mathematical space and the orientation of the universe. This change forced the supporters of biblical scripture to become even more reliant upon defending the biblical age of the earth against encroaching geological sciences. In 1650, for example, Irish Bishop James Ussher famously made a ‘scientific’ attempt to determine the earth’s age from calculations derived from scripture, identifying the darkness preceding the light of Creation as Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C. ⁸⁴ This age was then embraced by dominant groups of early geologists known as ‘Neptunists’, who claimed that the earth’s rock strata had indeed formed from deposits in global oceans after the Deluge of Noah, as documented in Genesis 1.

Whilst Newtonian physics applied the concept of infinity to calculable space, James Hutton’s geological theories were the first to apply infinity to earthly time. Contrary to Ussher’s biblical chronology, Hutton’s research on soil erosion and rock strata in Scotland revealed the earth to have ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’. ⁸⁵ He thus set forth a new geological theory known as ‘uniformitarianism’. Rock strata, and the fossils of strange sea creatures found on mountaintops, resulted not from any biblical flood but from endless earthly cycles of erosion, deposition, compression, and movement in which ‘the cumulative effects of minute forces and infinitesimal changes can produce results equal to those of any sudden cataclysm …superseding the necessity for any divine intervention’. ⁸⁶ Although seemingly normal or axiomatic today, this geological evidence for a seemingly infinite earthly time shattered the Christian establishment’s scientific and social conventions, paving the temporal foundation for Lyell’s geology, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and even for our modern natural and social sciences. Many historians now agree that this discovery was the death knell for the Christian chronology that ‘from the second century of the Christian era had mapped human intergenerational history onto Earth history with only slight variations in calendric enumeration for more than 1,500 years before Hutton’. ⁸⁷ The definite chronology of biblical (earth) history was here dissolved into an endless geological process, working far beyond the scope of human comprehension.

The effect of indefinite geological time upon human subjectivity was staggering. Writing in 1890 on the emergence of rationalism in Europe, Lecky attributed geology as fusing the ‘indefinite’ with humans and the earth. ‘To those who regard the indefinite as the highest conception of the infinite, the revelation of eternity is written on the rocks as the revelation of eternity upon the stars’. He also notes that geology’s existential impact ‘has not been that it throws back to an incalculable distance the horizon of creation, nor yet that it has renovated and transformed all the early interpretations of the Mosaic cosmogony; but that it has conclusively disproved what was once the universal belief concerning the origin of death’. ⁸⁸ Geology had thus eroded the last justifications for belief in biblical chronology and its providential salvation. Now, ‘Era after era followed each other for billions of years before human births and deaths, human intents or purposes’, ever achieved importance. ⁸⁹ As noted in STP, this shift meant that human continuity could be found in the state, and that earth and nature could be engaged in ways no longer restricted to biblical scripture. Nature ‘can only be understood if we relieve it of pastoral government’, in a cosmos that was effectively de-governed, left subject only to fundamental scientific principles. What emerged in this geological temporality, therefore, was a split between ‘the a-governmentality of nature and the governmentality of the state’. ⁹⁰

The Anthropocene: Re-Governmentalising the Cosmos

If the modern state relies upon a temporality of indefinite governmentality, then what happens if powerful new geological and cosmological claims emerge that prophesise an origin and end to the world of the state? This section will argue that we encounter this return to genesis and eschatology in the new concept of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene was first set forth by Paul J. Crutzen in 2000, referring to a new geologic epoch that the earth is entering due to humanity’s wanton destruction of planetary boundaries and earth systems. ⁹¹ It has since become a multifaceted and highly debated concept used widely across the social and natural sciences, garnering massive amounts of research and literature. ⁹² It has recently been defined by C. Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemenne, in three ways:

Although there exists a great deal of debate between scholars and scientists situated within and between each of these three camps, ⁹⁴ what remains common to all is the basic assertion that the Anthropocene is an imminent reality that will change the basic nature of humanity’s relation to the earth, and to itself. Like it or not, for good or for ill, by ‘transforming the world into our world’, we will need to adjust to a new and unpredictable future world and human condition. ⁹⁵ The Anthropocene thus ‘captures the step-change in the quality of the relationship of the human species to the natural world represented by the “impossible” fact that humans have become a “force of nature”’, entangling humanity and the earth’s systems together. ⁹⁶ In many accounts, social sciences such as IR are instructed to become sub-disciplines of the geophysical sciences. Humanity is not merely outpacing geology here as a driver of planetary change, but rather, ‘it is that they are the geological record’. ⁹⁷ Anthropos is literally ‘making’ the planet and determining its future.

If we step back to consider the cosmological and temporal foundations of the Anthropocene, we find that it relies fundamentally on the establishing of fixed origins and future catastrophic ends. On the one hand, a basic requirement of the Anthropocene is to identify some type of beginning boundary, marker, point, or transition at which anthropos catalyses its new epoch. Without this human-made origin, the entire point of the Anthropocene is lost. ⁹⁸ A Global Standard Stratotype-Section and Point (GSSP), or what is commonly called a golden spike, is here typically used to mark this new division in the Geological Time Scale. ⁹⁹ Although debate rages over when and where to place the golden spike – proposals range from deposits of nuclear fallout and the ‘Great acceleration’ of industrial processes that occurred after World War II, ¹⁰⁰ to European colonial imperialism into the Americas that caused such mass death and biota exchange that a drop in global CO₂ levels occurred by 1610 ¹⁰¹ – the general practice of locating this global marker remains essential. ¹⁰² The golden spike ultimately reinforces the point that the Anthropocene is new, human-made, global, and totalising.

Yet the golden spike actually runs counter to the temporal marker commonly used today as ‘a turning point from which to count time both backward and forward’ using ‘the modern computation of historical dates, introduced only at the end of the eighteenth century’: the birth of Christ, now secularised as BC/AD. ¹⁰³ Despite Christ’s birth being used to mark chronological time reckoning for centuries, after the discovery of indefinite time it no longer marked scripture’s path to salvation, but plotted the new ‘earthly immortality of mankind’ that ‘reaches back into an infinite past to which we can add at will and into which we can inquire further as it stretches ahead into an infinite future’. ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, as Arendt notes (nearly echoing Hutton verbatim), today Christ’s birth represents a ‘twopoint infinity’ of ‘a process which knows no beginning and no end and which does not permit us to entertain eschatological expectations’. ¹⁰⁵ In the concept of the Anthropocene, however, if the golden spike signals a definite origin for our anthropos intervening into nature, it necessarily replaces Christ’s twopoint infinity by starting a fixed new beginning of Anthropocene time. Thus, ‘In Christian theological terms, the much quoted line from Genesis about humanity as having dominion over nature can now simply be read as a statement of fact’, notes Dalby. Indeed, ‘this is the point of the Anthropocene’. ¹⁰⁶ In the beginning, rather than God making Heaven and the Earth, anthropos re-makes the processes of the earth into its own. Foucault’s ‘a-governmentality of nature’ appears to be governed here anew.

On the other hand, integral to the concept of the Anthropocene is its presaging of the ‘end of the world’ as we currently know it. ¹⁰⁷ Action must be taken today, because looming global ecological collapse and unprecedented catastrophe await us. ‘We can see the melting glaciers and surging tides, the dying corals and acidifying oceans, and predict the disasters they will bring: devastated ecosystems, drowned cities, failed crops, strange new wars, vast streams of human homeless’. ¹⁰⁸ Do these unidirectional prophecies of an inevitable end to our world, mimic that of Christian eschatology? The divine King’s subjects were also always living in the end times, certain that their world would end but uncertain of precisely when the Last Judgement would actually occur. Like the Anthropocene, the New Testament also ‘derives this sense of [eschatological] urgency from the feeling that the ultimate judgement and the ultimate issues of life impinge upon each moment of time’. ¹⁰⁹ In both cases, the feeling is created that there is no escape from the approaching end to the everyday world.

In a detailed comparison, Northcott has convincingly likened the Anthropocene’s apocalyptic future(s) to the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic eschatology; ¹¹⁰ Grove has argued how the Anthropocene’s apocalyptic crisis forces humanity to be creative, finding a new form of immortality in the world’s end; ¹¹¹ whilst Fagan details how these discourses of ecological apocalypse serve to project our present anxieties on to the future’s vast canvas. ¹¹² Each account, however, describes how nature and the state are no longer the discrete entities that emerged from the 18th century de-governmentalisation of the cosmos, as described in STP. Now, the Anthropocene ‘brings with it the end of the world by rupturing the primary binaries upon which international relations has largely depended’. ¹¹³ Unlike the state’s plurality of ends, therefore, there is here no avoiding the approaching singular ‘end’ of our Holocene world in what is to come. ¹¹⁴ C. Hamilton even labels this as the destiny of humanity, now uniting all peoples of the world together as a ‘newborn anthropos’ or planetary super-agent. ¹¹⁵ All of humanity, therefore, is asserted to share the new cosmological origin and ending story in the Anthropocene.

Just as ‘government’ once shifted from Christianity’s God-governed cosmos to its recent episode in the state, today, we may therefore detect subtle and nascent hints that the Anthropocene re-governs the cosmos once more. As Lewis and Maslin proudly proclaim, the self-declared power of anthropos to ‘make’ nature and its world now ‘reverses 500 years of scientific discoveries, which have continually moved humans to ever-increasing insignificance’ in the universe. ¹¹⁶ Supplanting God and the state, humanity places itself in the position of pastor and steward of the earth. As Yusoff argues, the Anthropocene does not simply insert humanity into the earth’s systems, but makes it responsible for the history of earthly processes comprising pasts and futures of geologic time. ‘This quieting of the cosmos by way of an originary supplement of epochal planetary claim’, Yusoff writes, ‘institutes a form of anthropogenesis into geologic history [sic]’. ¹¹⁷ In other words, it is a re-unification of humanity with a lost earth history of Divine origins and eschatological ends. ‘Homo sapiens are now central because the future of the only place where life is known to exist is being determined by the actions of humans’, write Lewis and Maslin. ‘In fact, we would argue that humanity has become a geological superpower’. ¹¹⁸ The rift between the a-governmentality of nature and the governmentality of the state, is thereby closed in the portent of this ‘Anthropocene eschatology’: both nature and the state are sublimated under the new geopolitical supervision of the planetary pastor and steward, the ‘newborn anthropos’.

In the concept of the Anthropocene, therefore, there exists a new cosmological origin and ending story for humanity that aims to alter today’s basic presuppositions of what the earth and the ‘human condition’ are. It is ‘a genesis that names man as the originator of a new geologic nature’, as its own governor, pastor, and steward of the earth and itself. ¹¹⁹ It is, in other words, a re-governmentalisation of the cosmos, that closely resembles what Foucault described in the final summative lecture of STP as the end of history.

Foucault’s End of History

‘The end of history’ has become a trope or hackneyed cliché since 1989, when Francis Fukuyama (mis)appropriated it from Kojève’s reading of Hegel. ¹²⁰ It has now become synonymous with the failed claim that post-World War II American (neo)liberal ideology reached the crescendo of human freedom and political possibility, ending the trials and tribulations of history by establishing a timeless reign over the globe. ¹²¹ However, long before Fukuyama, Foucault himself summarised his thoughts on governmentality by describing the end of history at the conclusion of his final STP lecture on 5 April 1978. He asserted that, ever since it emerged, indefinite governmentality has been haunted by the spectre of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’. This was a form of counter-conduct, that will

… make it a principle to assert the coming of a time when time will end, and to posit the possibility of an eschatology, of a final time, of a suspension or completion of historical and political time when, if you like, the indefinite governmentality of the state will be brought to an end and halted. By what? Well, by the emergence of something that will be society itself. The day when civil society can free itself of the constraints and controls of the state, when the power of the state can finally be reabsorbed into this civil society…time, the time if not of history then at least of politics, of the state, will come to an end as a result. ¹²²

Is the ‘Anthropocene eschatology’ the end of history as described here in STP? Foucault notes earlier that another ‘end of history’ was previously set forth by the Christian Empire’s belief in individual salvation in the Last Judgement, ‘the point at which historical time and eternity join together’. ¹²³ As outlined above, it is precisely this fusion of humanity and earth history that is now found in the concept of the Anthropocene, and today, is promoted by scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty. ¹²⁴

Chakrabarty correctly notes how our everyday human perception of clock time is simply incommensurable with the scale of geological temporality, where the lifespan of each individual human ‘I’ dissolves into nothingness in the incomprehensible magnitude of epochs lasting millions of years. Perhaps borrowing from Heidegger, Chakrabarty argues that instead of a subject conceiving of itself as an individual ‘I’, in the Anthropocene, humanity may only achieve a geological continuity of existence if re-conceived somehow. Yet, the only experiential or thinkable human agent that is possible and visible over millions of years, is not the state citizen as an ‘I’ nor the nation as a state. Rather, it is the collective ‘We’ of the species, ‘an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience’ from within the indefinite temporality of modern state time. Under this account, the re-governed cosmos of the Anthropocene would thereby transform human self-understanding through a new geological – rather than statist – temporality. ‘We may not experience ourselves as a geological agent’, notes Chakrabarty, ‘but we appear to have become one at the level of species’. ¹²⁵

Although Chakrabarty does not delve into the cosmological implications of his temporal claims, they match Foucault’s description of the end of history in two ways: through the emergence of a new form of society, and through the promotion of a singular temporal end of politics. On the one hand, STP’s discovery of governmentality on 1 February is preceded on 25 January by the assertion that the emergence of ‘mankind’ as a collective biological species – homo sapiens – occurs only after the Christian ‘juridical notion of the subject of right’ is displaced by a new field of realities, or ways of conceiving the population. To consider ‘mankind’ as the human species and the state’s public, required a de-governed cosmos. ¹²⁶ The point here is that a new temporality thus allows for new forms of government and human self-representation. It should therefore come as no surprise that the new temporality of the Anthropocene – or, what we might now call ‘Anthropotemporality’ – may likewise redefine how humanity conceives of itself in a re-governed cosmos, over which it even claims pastoral control. Whether it is C. Hamilton’s ‘newborn anthropos’ or Chakrabarty’s ‘We’ of the species, the danger of the Anthropocene’s re-governed cosmos is that it risks transforming the autonomous enterprising individual of the modern state, into an historical relic without specifying what will replace it – just as the pious Christian souls of the Middle Ages were displaced by the self-governing ‘I’ as their own cosmology was de-governed. The emergent ‘society’ of the Anthropocene, therefore, is humankind as a planetary entity of the We or the species. It is a counter-conduct of Anthropotemporality that is irreconcilable with the indefinite state.

Second, although it is often overlooked, one of Foucault’s most interesting points in STP is that governmentality engenders political plurality. Positing an eschatological end time normalises experience in a centripetal and disciplinary way. It quells diversity by compressing all beings towards their shared universal end state; a fusion of particularities into One as the linear path to the end is tread. Hence, ‘not only is there no point of origin’ for the indefinite state, Foucault emphasised, ‘but the problem of the endpoint must not be posed, and this is undoubtedly more important’. ¹²⁷ Contrary to the homogenizing effect of eschatology, therefore, an open historicity demands no uniform cosmological nor political consolidation. Indefinite time creates the potential, and even the need, to recognise and accept diversity, uniqueness, and a plurality of ends, because there is no linear path to any final singularity. The example of Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’ is thus given in STP as ‘a link between states that remain states’, ‘not [as] the consequence of unification in a temporal or spiritual empire, but, if things actually work out, it will be the way in which different states are able to co-exist with each other according to a balance that prevents one from dominating the others’. ¹²⁸ Political plurality, therefore, demands temporal perpetuity. Plurality has no singular end. Contrary to literature that conceives of governmentality only as a repressive manipulation of conduct and control, recognising its temporal grounding in open historicity reveals it to be essential for dreams of perpetual and universal peace. ‘In fact, the plurality of states is the very necessity of a history that is now completely open and not temporally oriented towards a final unity’, Foucault said. The ‘indefinite historicity’ of raison d’État ‘entails an open time and a multiple spatiality’, where there ‘will forever be a plurality of states that have their law and end in themselves’. ¹²⁹

To be clear, I am wary and concerned by the troubling existential and ethical implications that emerge here when analysing the Anthropocene through indefinite governmentality. If its re-governed cosmos posits the end of the world, and the rise of the planetary ‘We’ of the species as a counter-conduct to the state, then the dream of a universal peace to be achieved through a political equilibrium of balanced polities, likewise ends. Although it does seem like Foucault’s end of history, there is little indication of how the new cosmos begins, or what forms of government and subjectivity it entails. Hence why some enthusiastic calls in IR and the social sciences to move into the Anthropocene epoch raise very troubling questions that have not been sufficiently explored. We should not therefore assume that any post-human (or other) forms of possibility or emancipation are inherent or automatic in any post-governmentality futures such as the Anthropocene. Questions about what the future ‘end of governmentality’ will mean, and how a planetary form of pastoral power might shift to anthropos as a new cosmological governor, are predictions far beyond the scope of governmentality analytics and this article. However, we should remember the importance of maintaining accountability and responsibility for assisting plural groups and individuals suffering in the present moment, as well as holding those actors responsible for ecological catastrophe to account. Importantly, STP shows here how sustaining and promoting a plurality of worlds and heterotemporalities are inexorably temporal goals, tied into our cosmological limits just as much as our ethical aspirations. ¹³⁰

Conclusion

This article has argued that political temporality is an essential component of Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Strangely, IR and the social sciences have overlooked Foucault’s many discussions of time in the STP lectures, gravitating instead towards topics such as society, liberalism, and the population. This article has attempted to remedy this omission by providing a close inspection of STP, thereby revealing how the governmentalisation of the state occurred through a fundamental cosmological and temporal transformation – a ‘de-governmentalization of the cosmos’ – that moved pastoral power from the closed linear temporality of Christian eschatology, into an open historicity without end, facilitating what Foucault repeatedly describes as the ‘indefinite governmentality’ of the state. Replacing the lost path to salvation in Christ, there is continuity found anew in the autonomous individual being governed through this indefinite time: ‘There will always be governments, the state will always be there, and there is no hope of having done with it’. ¹³¹ In sum, STP provides a fascinating description of the temporal and cosmological foundations of the modern state and governmentality. Although overlooked, time is very much a part of Foucault’s oeuvre.

By applying Foucault’s indefinite governmentality to debates in IR, this article was also able to take a new perspective on the implications of the Anthropocene epoch. It argued that today’s discussions about the Anthropocene imply cosmological and temporal assertions concerning a human-made origin and an imminent end of the world as we know it. As such, just as the discovery of ‘deep’ geological time had the effect of ‘de-governmentalizing’ the cosmos and giving rise to state governmentality, so the Anthropocene hints at a re-governmentalisation of the cosmos once again. As Foucault forewarned in his final STP lecture, however, this revolutionary eschatology effectively ends history, governmentality, and the state, as we know them today.

This prospect raises important questions about how the state and its forms of government will change in a re-governed cosmos stewarded by anthropos. The questions concerning new forms of global governmentality, for instance, are immense. It is therefore hoped that this article will catalyse new conversations regarding governmentality, cosmology, and political temporality, going forth. Are governmentality studies that have omitted cosmology or temporality strengthened or weakened by including indefinite time in their analysis? What other practices, rationalities, and events, may have helped to facilitate the final de-governmentalisation of the cosmos in the 18th century? What is the logic that links changes in time perception to forms of (pastoral) power and government? ¹³² What does Foucault’s end of history and a post-governmentality world spell for the social sciences?

To conclude, it is important to reinforce the point that governmentality is not a static tool or analytic for disinterested research into the state, but is a fluid concept that can reflect our most basic cosmological orientation and subjective constitution. With this in mind, the STP lectures are thus far more than an inquiry into the history of the state. Instead, they highlight how time is entangled with political possibility, shaping the historical forms that both government and subjectivity can take. Today, whether our everyday reality of open historicity will be cosmologically re-governed by placing humanity as anthropos back into the fold of earth history, certainly remains to be seen. From the plural perspectives of unique states and individuals in an indefinite governmentality, or from the singular collective grouping of a species stretched across a future Anthropocene epoch, what is at stake is the political temporality of an episode of government that will shepherd each and all of us, through a specific historical experience of time.