Cesare de Seta: Sos Albergo dei Poveri: ospiti la Biblioteca Nazionale @ Corriere della Sera 13 febbraio 2015

Sos Albergo dei Poveri: ospiti la Biblioteca Nazionale

di Cesare de Seta @ Corriere della Sera 13 febbraio 2015

Read more @ Corriere della Sera website

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NAPOLI - L’Albergo dei Poveri è una delle testimonianze più alte del despotismo illuminato di re Carlo di Borbone; destinato a ospitare i poveri e i diseredati del Regno, ma anche adolescenti e giovani perché imparassero un mestiere. La sua progettazione fu affidata a un insigne architetto fiorentino come Ferdinando Fuga che aveva già lavorato a Roma al Palazzo del Quirinale con la “manica lunga” e al Palazzo della Consulta. A Napoli nel 1751 iniziarono i lavori: il cantiere rimase aperto per decenni e mai concluso. Il progetto originario, così come lo si vede nella mappa del Duca di Noja, prevedeva cinque corti e la fabbrica era lunga oltre 600 metri; fu realizzata, nel tempo, a tre corti e la facciata attuale è lunga ben 385 metri.

Fu infatti progettato per ospitare, separandoli per sesso ed età, ottomila ospiti. Il progetto originario di Fuga rimase incompiuto alla sua morte nel 1781 e successive modifiche furono apportate da Mario Gioffredo, Carlo Vanvitelli e Francesco Maresca. Non è questa l’occasione per far la storia aggrovigliata della fabbrica: Paolo Giordano nel sontuoso volume L’Albergo dei poveri a Napoli ( La scuola di Pitagora editrice, foto di Mimmo Jodice, 400 pagine), con il suo pluriennale lavoro di rilievo e d’indagini sul campo ci offre una rassegna esemplare di splendidi disegni, che mettono in evidenza il registro compositivo adottato da Fuga. Questi era un figlio della cultura illuminista, ma capace anche di soluzioni innovative quale è quella di collocare nella corte centrale (in miserevole disfacimento) una grande chiesa a pianta centrale con quattro navate a croce di Sant’Andrea dove raccogliere, ancora separatamente, gli uomini e le donne, i bambini e le bambine.

Un vero Panopticon che sarebbe piaciuto a Michel Foucault, il quale — posso testimoniarlo — mai l’aveva visto. Meccanismi di separazione tipologica; analisi dei flussi di percorso degli ospiti all’interno dell’edificio; individuazione delle diverse strutture di collegamento verticale destinate agli ospiti o ai ministri dell’edificio: sono questi i punti salienti chiariti dalla più recente ricerca sull’Albergo dei Poveri, su cui spicca una storica come Elizabeth Kieven. Paolo Giordano con le sue ricerche e i suoi rilievi, ha posto basi solide per ogni futuro intervento, consentendo alla Soprintendenza ai Beni Ambientali e Architettonici di Napoli e al Comune di Napoli di predisporre, nel 2002, un progetto di restauro e riconfigurazione dell’Albergo dei Poveri. Purtroppo i recenti lavori di restauro che si sono allontanati dall’ipotesi predisposta da Giordano, non fanno ben sperare.

La monocromia bianca attribuita recentemente all’edificio settecentesco rappresenta una contradictio con le reali caratteristiche d’identità della fabbrica. Al di là dello scandaloso abbandono, la morfologia e la tipologia dell’edificio nella sua secchezza è tale che molte ipotesi d’uso sono possibili. Non certo quello prospettato in una ricerca commissionata dal sindaco Bassolino e dall’assessore De Lucia che prevedeva un fantomatico Museo del Mediterraneo e persino un hotel di lusso (sic!). Né è credibile l’ipotesi pure avanzata di farne una «Città per i bambini», quasi un’inclinazione sadiana per i poveri malcapitati. Il problema essenziale è che il restauro della fabbrica non può condursi pezzo per pezzo, ma deve essere chiara la visione dell’insieme e la destinazione d’uso che avrà. Una così immensa fabbrica dovrà avere di necessità un uso polifunzionale. Chiunque può leggere quanto scrissi sul tema in Bella Italia. Patrimonio e paesaggio tra mali e rimedi ( Electa, 2007). Il progetto di fattibilità va condotto in concerto con l’ipotesi di restauro. Qualunque studioso di questi argomenti sa benissimo che queste ipotesi debbono procedere su binari paralleli: conoscenza del manufatto analitica (finalmente c’è!), valutazione degli interventi da compiere, ipotesi di riuso, dunque analisi dei costi e dei benefici che si traggono dall’una o dall’altra ipotesi. Una delle storture concettuali più perversamente diffuse nel nostro tempo è che l’economia sia la scienza delle scienze, una scienza (esatta?) dominante a cui piegare i monumenti e talvolta la vita degli uomini.

L’Albergo dei Poveri è una fabbrica ben più delicata del Lingotto di Torino (un modulo in cemento armato) e qualunque ipotesi d’uso deve — in primis — misurarsi con la qualità architettonica del manufatto e con la sua storia. La soluzione che avanzai fu quella di un mallo di funzioni, a cui aggregare molteplici attività congrue: pensai che questo mallo potesse essere la Biblioteca Nazionale, oggi a Palazzo Reale in spazi del tutto inadeguati alla crescita dei due milioni di volumi e alle funzione di una moderna biblioteca. A sostegno di questa ipotesi c’è il vantaggio di liberare larghi spazi in Palazzo Reale e ricondurli alla sua naturale destinazione museale. Lasciando in Palazzo Reale solo i nuclei bibliotecari più antichi e preziosi. Come è accaduto a Parigi con la Biblioteca Nazionale di Francia che conserva, in centro, solo il nucleo storico della Biblioteca Doucet e ha trasferito a Bercy la BN. Gli spazi di Fuga sono per la loro razionalità illuminata del tutto idonei a ospitare una biblioteca senza che si debba intaccare o ledere i caratteri tipologici dell’Albergo. Ma è insensato procedere a mozzichi e bocconi. Un complesso analogo all’Albergo dei Poveri, pressoché contemporaneo, nel centro di Madrid è divenuto una sorta di Beaubourg spagnolo: il Centro de Arte Reina Sofia ospita mostre e spettacoli, attività scientifiche e didattiche, centri commerciali e per il tempo libero.

Nei vastissimi spazi dell’Albero dei Poveri potrebbero essere ospitate attività idonee e indispensabili a una grande biblioteca: studi, istituzioni di formazione pubbliche e private, scuole e laboratori per il restauro dei libri e della rilegatura, laboratori artigiani per restauri d’opere d’arte e di mobilia, gallerie d’arte: attività a cui potrebbero concorrere istituzioni pubbliche e private, auspicando che queste ultime battano un colpo. Lo stato penible è tale da non meritare commenti. La questione è da anni nelle deboli mani del sindaco, ma investe direttamente il ministro Franceschini perché l’Albergo dei Poveri non è un relitto da rottamare: è una delle fabbriche più insigni e possenti dell’Europa dei Lumi ridotta a rovina piranesiana.

Raise the Crime Rate by Christopher Glazek @ n+1, issue 13, Winter 2012,

Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift, a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by corporations and the government, Hacker noted, like unplanned health costs, are now the responsibility of Mom and Pop. Transferring risk from the collective to the individual, though, ends badly for everyone. Family affliction, like banker “contagion,” is tricky to sequester: if Larry and Terry get bankrupted by bad luck, their misfortune cascades, dragging down creditors, neighbors, and especially their children. The reason liberals like insurance is that it helps diffuse risk throughout society. Pooling risk, one might say, is the essence of the progressive social contract.

Hacker focuses on hazards like cancer and credit exposure, but these are not the only perils we face. Every time we leave the house—and more often, actually, if we remain within it—we run the risk of getting stabbed, shot, raped, or robbed. But while financial risks have crested in recent decades, the risk of suffering personal violence has receded. According to government statistics, Americans are safer today than at any time in the last forty years. In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides in New York City. In 2010, there were 536, only 123 of which involved people who didn’t already know each other. The fear, once common, that walking around city parks late at night could get you mugged or murdered has been relegated to grandmothers; random murders, with few exceptions, simply don’t happen anymore.

When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005, the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent. Scholars attribute this stunning collapse to various factors, including advances in gender equality, the abortion of unwanted children, and the spread of internet pornography.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the country was more dangerous in 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic, than in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble. What’s strange is that crime has continued to fall during the recession. On May 23, in what has become an annual ritual, the New York Times celebrated the latest such finding: in 2010, as America’s army of unemployed grew to 14 million, violent crime fell for the fourth year in a row, sinking to a level not seen since the early ’70s. This seemed odd. Crime and unemployment were supposed to rise in tandem—progressives have been harping on this point for centuries. Where had all the criminals gone?

Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are controlled, and defiled, by the state.

Before last year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons. Its data relied on official complaints filed by prisoners, which in recent years have averaged around 800. One such complaint was filed in 1995 by Rodney Hulin, a boy from Amarillo, Texas, who had been arrested as a 15-year-old after throwing a Molotov cocktail into a pile of garbage. The trash burned, causing about $500 worth of damage to the exterior of an adjacent house. Hulin’s prank was unimpressive, but Texas in the mid-’90s had little tolerance for teenage ruffianism; in 1994, George W. Bush had become governor, defeating Ann Richards, a popular incumbent, by depicting her as soft on crime. Hulin was charged with two counts of second-degree arson. He was a small guy—just five feet tall and 125 pounds—but he got a big sentence: eight years in adult prison.

Within a month of arriving at Clemens Unit, a temporary holding facility outside Houston for juveniles on their way to adult prison, Hulin was raped by another inmate. He asked to be moved out of harm’s way, but his request was denied, and the rapes continued. In a letter to prison authorities, he wrote, “I might die at any minute. Please sir, help me.” Help was not forthcoming: getting raped was not deemed urgent enough to meet the requirements of the prison’s emergency grievance criteria. When Hulin got his mother to complain to the prison’s warden, she was told that Hulin needed to “grow up” and “learn to deal with it.”

Hulin’s method for dealing with it was to kill himself. Ten weeks after his arrival, he was discovered dangling from the ceiling of his cell.

Hulin’s case was unusual: most prisoners who get raped do not write letters to the warden. It isn’t hard to see why: resisting an inmate who claims your body as his own, or, worse, acquiring a reputation as a “snitch,” can turn an isolated incident into months of serial gang rape. Just ask Roderick Johnson, a petty thief who was attacked by his roommate shortly after arriving at a Texas prison. Johnson asked to be transferred to a different section of the facility, and got his wish. But news of Johnson’s physical availability had spread throughout the complex—after you’re raped once, you’re marked—and he was soon enslaved by a gang. In addition to passing Johnson around among themselves, Johnson’s new overseers sold his ass and mouth to a variety of clients for $3 to $7, a competitive enough price that it resulted in multiple rapes every day for the eighteen months that Johnson spent in prison. When he went to the authorities, they laughed and told him to “fight or fuck.”

Bringing criminal charges against prison officials for failing to protect inmates is virtually impossible in the United States, but civil actions can be filed. After Johnson got out, he lodged a civil suit against six guards who he said refused to help him. In 2005, a Wichita Falls jury found in favor of the guards. In 2007, after passing a note to a clerk at a gas station that read, “I have 9 mm. Put the money in the bag,” Johnson was arrested again. This time, since Johnson was a repeat offender, he got nineteen years.

Victims in juvenile facilities, or facilities for women, have an even tougher time: usually it’s the guards, rather than the inmates, who coerce them into sex. The guards tell their victims that no one will believe them, and that complaining will only make things worse. This is sound advice: even on the rare occasions when juvenile complaints are taken seriously and allegations are substantiated, only half of confirmed abusers are referred for prosecution, only a quarter are arrested, and only 3 percent end up getting charged with a crime.

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women. (...)
Read the whole Glazek's article on n+1

Anne Brunon-Ernst, Beyond Foucault: New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon, Ashgate, Uk, March 2012

Anne Brunon-Ernst, Beyond Foucault: New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon, London: Ashgate, March 2012

In his hugely influential book Discipline and Punish, Foucault used the example of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison as a means of representing the transition from the early modern monarchy to the late modern capitalist state. In the former, power is visibly exerted, for instance by the destruction of the body of the criminal, while in the latter power becomes invisible and focuses on the mind of the subject, in order to identify, marginalize, and ‘treat’ those who are regarded as incapable of participating in, or unwilling to submit to, the disciplines of production. The Panopticon links the worlds of Bentham and Foucault scholars yet they are often at cross-purposes; with Bentham scholars lamenting the ways in which Foucault is perceived to have misunderstood panopticon, and Foucauldians apparently unaware of the complexities of Bentham’s thought. This book combines an appreciation of Bentham’s broader project with an engagement of Foucault’s insights on economic government to go beyond the received reading of panopticism as a dark disciplinary technology of power.

Scholars here offer new ways of understanding the Panopticon projects through a wide variety of topics including Bentham’s plural Panopticons and their elaboration of schemes of ‘panoptic Utopia’, the ‘inverted Panopticon’, ‘panoptic governance’, ‘political panopticism’ and ‘legal panopticism’. French studies on the Panopticon are groundbreaking and this book brings this research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It is essential reading, not only for those studying Bentham and Foucault, but also those with an interest in intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those studying contemporary surveillance and society.

Contents:
Foreword, Clare O’Farrell;
Introduction, Anne Brunon-Ernst;
Part I Historiography Reconsidered: from Discipline to Governmentality: Deconstructing Panopticism into the plural Panopticons, Anne Brunon-Ernst;
From Discipline and Punish to The Birth of Biopolitics, Christian Laval.
Part II Status of the Panopticon in Prison, Penal and Constitutional Reform: From ‘utopia’ to ‘programme’: building a Panopticon in Geneva, Emmanuelle de Champs;
Penal theory without the Panopticon, Jean-Pierre Cléro;
From the penitentiary to the political Panoptic paradigm, Guillaume Tusseau.
Part III Is There a Panoptic Society? Social Control in Bentham and Foucault: Transparency and politics: the reversed Panopticon as a response to abuse of power, Marie-Laure Leroy;
Social control and the legal Panoptic paradigm, Malik Bozzo-Rey;
Epilogue: the Panopticon as a contemporary icon?, Anne Brunon-Ernst and Guillaume Tusseau;
Bibliography; Index.

About the Editor:
Anne Brunon-Ernst is Senior Lecturer in Legal English at the University of Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas) and a member of the Centre Bentham, Paris.

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