Just recently I finished "Chaos" by James Gleick. It's a very accessible history of the science of chaos and chaos theory, with much in terms of the biographies of the major scientists. Chaos is fascinating, and yet trivially obvious in a way. Why shouldn't simple rules create incredibly complex behavior? Actually if you know nothing about it, I'd start with one that caught my imagination even more, it's called "Ubiquity: the science of history - or why the world is simpler than we think" by Mark Buchanan. Terrific account of the applications of power laws and chaos theory in everyday life.
The other I'm about 15 pages away from finishing is Foucault's "Discipline and punish" (surveiller et punir in the original French title). He's one of those authors who seems to have more of a following in the US and UK than in France. You honestly can't miss him here, everyone from political scientists to economits, sociologists, anthropologists and lawyers quote him and his "panopticon" (more on that in a sec). The book is really an account of the evolution of punishment, while at the same time being a brilliant analysis of power relations in society. Whether you're interested in class structures, education, torture, the evolution of hospitals or prisons, the difference between gender power relations, Foucault is relevant. What he's most famous for, probably, is the explanation of the panoptic society: a society which is constantly monitoring and examining and keeping files on everyone. And even when it's not, the citizens think it might be, which means that citizens internalize a strong sense of being watched, and self impose discipline upon themselves.
"to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automicati functioning of power. so to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action." "a power that objectifies those on whom it is applied. discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a 'political' force of the least cost and maximised as a useful force. the extreme point of penality today would be an infinite discipline: an interrogation without end, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm.
Servan: A true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; this link is all the stronger inthat we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work.
Just as a side note, the "Panopticon" is an architectural design introduced by a man named Bentham, originally for prisons, where all prisoners look onto a courtyard with a tower. They cannot see whether someone is in the tower or not, but if someone is, that person can surveil (?) everyone at the same time. The tower acts as the reminder (just like a camera would) that you are or might be under surveillance.
Do you think reality TV is our version of the panopticon, i.e. our way of playing voyeurs onto everyone else's life without being seen?
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