Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN
Continuing Foucault’s work on governmentality and discipline and directly reflecting on
the question of the lesser evil, the philosopher Adi Ophir has shown how the panopticon,
beyond being a mechanism of discipline, control and subjectivization, could also be interpreted
as a closed system for the management and reduction of evils. 23 Here it is necessary
to mention that Bentham no longer saw good and evil as metaphysical categories,
but rather as the sum total of good and bad things. He defined the task of government as
minimising the bad things and maximising the good ones. This economy is at the centre
of “the principle of utility”. The general aspect of the lesser evil argument is thus one of
the forms by which the ‘greater good’ expresses itself.
The panopticon, a closed system that regulates everything that flows in and out of it,
is according to Ophir a mechanism whose purpose is to make the calculation (a kind of
proto-computer?) and reduction of evils possible. 24 The panopticon is designed to bring
to perfection the consequences of every action undertaken within it. The observation
and control of individual actions that the panopticon produces is the very condition
that makes the calculus possible. The system is constructed in such a way that however
much evil is put in, ‘less evil’ is guaranteed to come out. Although the machine produces
collateral evil – and Bentham is clear that both punishment itself and the friction the
machine produces are evil – it guarantees, so Bentham tried to convince his contemporary
politicians, the reduction of these evils and of the pain of the treatment to the
necessary minimum. Ophir thus interprets Bentham’s panopticon as a Perpetuum Mobile
of utility, a precursor to a panoptical society that has in itself now become a machine for
the calculation and reduction of evils; the very diagram of biomorality (the necessary
counterpart to biopolitics) which is focused on the increase of happiness and the reduction
of suffering. 25
The Road to Utopia is Paved with Lesser Evils
“Lesser evil” arguments are not only articulated from the point of view of Power but
also in relation to attempts to subvert and replace it. An interesting example is provided
in the discussion about the shortening of the working day in Marx’s Capital. Unlike the
revolutionary and militant communists who protested the drift towards a timid, reformist
politics of choosing the lesser evil, of making the kind of compromises with capital
that may divert the struggle from the absolute ideal of communism, Marx thought that
the winning of the ten-hour day was a huge victory for the English proletariat. The tenhour
working day reduces the duration of evil, but ‘normalizes’ and regularizes exploitation.
According to Marx, on the other hand, a ten-hour day allowed fourteen hours of
non-work, in which “the laborer can satisfy his intellectual and social wants” and which
would allow the proletarians to organize and continue fighting. Marx’s argument was
that this lesser evil gives the proletarians the space to build an organizational platform,
the consciousness and experience needed to take over the means of production. It created
the productive forces capable of generating a sufficient surplus to enable socialism
and the proletariat to continue fighting and build something better. 26 His ultimate aim
was still of course to abolish the state. But advanced capitalism was not only seen as a
lesser evil compared to ‘primitive manufacture’, it was also a transformation that made