Introduction

The articles in this collection were presented at the third conference in a series of conferences under the broad rubric “knowledge/value.” This conference, held at the University of Chicago’s Beijing Center, was on the topic “Information, Databases, and Archives.”¹ The articles collected here, all reporting on research in Asia, focus on the forms through which collective and public knowledge is rendered as information of a systematic, comparable, and collectively useful kind. Information models and metaphors that have become hegemonic in molecular biology are accompanied in the contemporary era by the botanical and zoological databases of the environmental sciences, by digital humanities analyses of writing, and by artificial intelligence systems that help users manage an excess of knowledge and put .it to partial use. By virtue of new information-management technologies, multiple archives accumulated in diverse histories are ever more accessible to some users, while at the same time the very structure of our retrieval tools buries some elements of these archives ever more deeply in obscurity. The ways in which tools such as databases generate new knowledge within the constraints of market and government agendas is an important aspect of a global “informationalization” process that is far advanced, perhaps especially in India and China. The articles in this issue explore some of the new terrains of knowledge revealed in these processes.

A broader theme, “knowledge/value,” is being explored in this series of conferences. We have considered how technoscientific emergence over the past few decades, especially in the information sciences and life sciences, has put questions of both knowledge and value at stake and in need of fresh conceptualization. Further, and particularly, what comes to be at stake is the “/”—the nature of the articulation between knowledge and value. The form of the problem is not dissimilar to that which Michel Foucault was exploring in considering what he referred to as “power/ knowledge” (Foucault 1978, 1980). Through an analysis of epistemology (including especially its discursive and institutional forms and manifestations), Foucault was able to open up different ways of conceptualizing power, ways that we now take as foundational in social theory but that were often invisible or impervious to analysis before he made them seem so obvious. Questions of value present similar kinds of analytic challenges. This is especially so when values are seen in the context of the mutations, overdeterminations, and crises of contemporary capital, and in the context of new forms of technoscientific governance.

At this point, we do not have a formula for thinking about knowledge/value, nor do we wish to have one. In the first conference, the critical emphasis to emerge was around the theorization of value. Because we were concerned with the fact/value distinction, “knowledge” tended to get equated with “fact”—it did not really emerge as a critical site for discussion. But value did. Questions were asked about the double-jointed nature of the term value, referring as it does to market value but also to the ethical and the normative in particular collectives. Much discussion centered on the relationship between value and neoliberalism; and some interesting conversations emerged on the relationship of value to promise and crisis.

In the second conference, however, the emphasis shifted considerably, to ask what “knowledge” even is in the context of contemporary experimental biologies, and the institutional frameworks within which they are performed. A critical term that emerged in our conversations was translation. We wondered what knowledge might mean if the endgame, as it were, was not truth as much as it was translation, or even translatability; what it might mean, for example, in the context of contemporary biologies in which what is at stake is not simply establishing facts objectively but was rather in getting things to move across domains—between laboratory and clinic, academy and industry, genetics and environment, across national boundaries. What does knowledge mean, we ended up asking, when biology becomes what Donna Haraway, Sarah Franklin, and Gail Davies have all, at different times, thought of as trans-biology (Haraway 1991; Franklin 2006; Davies 2010)?

In this collection, gathered from the third conference on knowledge/value, we...