From narrative to database

Abstract

Information technology is a cultural environment that requires its users to communicate within certain parameters. This article explores how contemporary penal knowledge has changed in order to be accepted as knowledge in the information society. Computers enable penal governance that is based on formatted communication, and relies on databases rather than on the expertise of individual decision-makers. The rules governing the database thus become central for the nature of knowledge and identity constitution. The database, as a cultural form, differs from the narrative. It is a collection of items without an internal development. The database classifies its objects and in the process gives them additional social identities. The vertical and horizontal fields that constitute the database tend to construct individual identities in highly caricatured yet immediately available form (Poster, 1990). The database identity is dispersed, highly abstract and de-contextualized. As such it is opposed to narrative identity as well as Foucault’s ‘descending individualization’. It will be suggested that the database can be seen as an example of power without narrative (Simon, 1995) and government-at-a-distance.