10
Virtual Fish Stink, Too
James Maguire is enrolled at the IT University of Copenhagen as a PhD Fellow. He did his fieldwork among fisheries scientists and fishermen in an Icelandic village, documenting the effects of turning fish into a scientific, legal and economic abstraction. In this chapter he describes how ITQs affected rural Iceland. He introduces the term “virtual fish,” echoed by a later contributor as “paper fish,” or those that are not made of flesh but are still quite real. He describes how a process billed as one that would create abundance instead caused scarcity, just one contradiction among many he illustrates here.
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We activated capital that was dead before. . . . The fish stocks did not have a price tag, they were non-transferable and could not be used as collateral—non-tradable. Then the quotas were allocated, which creates capital. . . . Here in Iceland, capital was handed over to private owners, and then it became alive.
Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson, Ísland í dag
Historically, fish have been both an economic fundament and a source of sociopolitical tension in Iceland, and the recent crisis has only exacerbated these tendencies. Fish have played a central role in the development of regional communities over the last one hundred years as coastal towns have come and gone relative to the presence or absence of such marine resources. This traditional relationship has seen a subtle transformation over the last two decades. Instead of following fleshy fish swimming in nearby seas, people have increasingly been following virtual fish; ones that have been taken out of the sea and brought to life in exchanges and electronic marketplaces and upon which extraordinary sums of money can be and have been made. Thus during the pre-crisis period in Iceland, the fishing industry became bound up within a constellation of neoliberal policies and practices in which the rush to privatization became the dominant motif.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the West Fjords of Iceland in 2010, this chapter shows how the virtual fish emerged at a particular conjuncture in the life of the Icelandic nation, one in which the processes and practices of a new “financial economy” were under way. While the emergence of such fish cannot be pinned down to a specific causal trajectory, I assert that the practices of fisheries science, fisheries legislation, and finance capital intersected with, or were enfolded into, one another in such a way as to enable the virtual fish to sustain themselves. In leaving the seas, the virtual fish entered the lives of Icelanders on a spatiotemporal scale very different from that of the ordinary fleshy fish. Although neither type of fish (virtual or fleshy) makes a greater ontological claim, they both have different “modes of existence.” I further suggest that the financial crisis opened up a “generative moment” in which more fundamental questions about fish were posed. I argue that the paradox at the heart of fisheries legislation, in which fish are considered both common and individual property, can be constructively reconfigured. Rather than postulating that such a contradiction is the work of political machinations, I will instead argue that it is in fact the multiplicity of fish that enables such a paradox to continue in abeyance.
The New (Virtual) Fish in Town
“Fish bring life to towns,” Palli commented to me late one evening as we sailed back to the harbor after a satisfying day’s catch. This remark is far from an overstatement; the relationship between people and fish has been the driving force behind the development of coastal towns all around Iceland since the mid-1500s. Fishing towns did not, however, begin to flourish fully until after the abolition of the Danish trade monopoly in 1782 (Pálsson 1991). The nascent Icelandic independence movement saw fishing as a way to assert economic independence from the crown. By the time the restrictive land tenure laws were removed in the mid-1800s, technological developments and an increased labor supply had established fishing as a viable way of life.
In this regard, people here have always been following fish; small remote villages have nestled themselves in the winding arms of the West Fjords, their raison d’être being proximity to rich fishing grounds. Historically, such areas have had their share of turbulent times. One notable example is the collapse of the herring stock in the fifties, which resulted in the near decimation of Djúpavík, a small town in the West Fjords. However, the situation today is subtly different; despite the presence of fleshy fish in nearby waters,1 the very existence of these fishing towns is still being threatened because the new virtual fish have moved away.
At this juncture, it is important to unpack my use of the term “virtual,” which is usually employed to refer to virtual reality; computer-simulated environments that have taken on the connotation of the not-real. This is not the understanding I wish to convey. As Slavoj Zizek quips, “What is important is not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual.”2 Gilles Deleuze, drawing on Marcel Proust, sets out a more philosophical approach to the term, defining it as “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” (Shields 2003, 2). In essence, the virtual is something that is real even though not concrete or actual and is mainly known through its effects. For example, dreams or memories, though not actual because they do not have a tangible or concretized form, are still nonetheless real and are felt through their effects.
Recent strains of political economy also use the term virtual to address the ever-increasing tendency toward the nonmaterial in the global economy (complex financial instruments such as derivatives, being but one example). Such theorizing of the drive toward the nonmaterial in economic processes is premised on Karl Polanyi’s notion of a disembedded economy in which economic activities become removed from their social relationships and, ever increasingly, their productive material bases (Polyani [1944] 1968). Authors such as J. G. Carrier and D. Miller have characterized this as a somewhat inexorable process whereby the empirical world has begun to conform to the structures of the conceptual, mainly via abstract economic models and concepts; something they term “virtualism” (Carrier and Miller 1998, 3). However, this approach problematically collates the virtual with the abstract,3 and not unlike other political economy accounts, it leaves the employment of the term “nonmaterial” underdetermined, whereby it usually becomes shorthand for everything that is not a traditional tangible commercial product. So in these accounts we are left with material products on the one hand and abstract-conceptual models on the other, with the latter increasingly inflecting the former, while the ontological complexity of the new economy is given short shrift.
My use of the term “virtual fish” is not entirely abstract. While it takes on ideal dimensions, it is not entirely nonmaterial since it is traded in electronic markets, and although such markets may be called “de-territorialized” it is difficult to call them dematerialized. As the epigraph at the opening of the chapter tantalizingly suggests, “capital was handed over and then it became alive.” Such virtual fish do come alive, but differently from fleshy fish. Emerging at a distinct spatiotemporal scale at the intersection of scientific, financial, and legal practices is what allows these fish to reenter the lives of Icelanders in a fashion that has serious effects and consequences, and it is this impact on human lives that makes the reality of the virtual all the more palpable.
Scientific Practices and the Emergence of Virtual Fish
A portion of my fieldwork in 2010 took place among fisheries scientists, in particular those working at the Marine Research Institute (MRI). Fish do not reside in the world or in the scientific imagination. Rather, fisheries scientists create them as scientific objects through their practices in which fish ultimately emerge as virtual. Scientists are particularly keen to distinguish themselves from fishermen, who hunt, while scientists transform fish from samples to indexes for populations to stocks to virtual entities.
During the biannual trawler rally that occurs in and around the Icelandic continental shelf, a selected sample of fish is taken from the catch and separated out by species.4 Each fish is weighed and measured, the stomach gutted, and the contents examined and noted. The liver is also weighed, the scales are measured, and the otoliths are counted. Fish are numbers, statistics; they are done very carefully, and through consistent measurements and techniques they are transformed into being. These fish are not representations, however; they are indexes, indexes that point to a fish stock. The individual fish that is caught at a specific time and place becomes in practice an index that points to a generalized stock.5 So what is this stock? Defining what a stock is, and distinguishing one from another, is a complex practice-based activity. Mostly, the definition of a stock is interchangeable with a species. As Roepstorff puts it with a nice hint of sarcasm: “One simply has to determine the species, or subsets of it, that move around within more or less spatial-temporal borders, ideally without mixing with neighbouring subsets, and voilà, one has identified a stock” (Roepstorff 2000, 171).
Things are of course not so simple in practice. Genetic mixing tends to take place in fisheries more so than in other biological habitats because of a high degree of larval drift due to constant current flows and temperature changes. So not only is there not one distinctive biological marker by which an individual fish can genetically be said to belong to one stock,6 but different scientists define stocks very differently. Given the tremendous degree of complexity and variation in all of this, determining a stock is a very definitive type of practice. Complicating things further is the fact that scientific data are not the only or even primary consideration in ascertaining what a stock is. For management purposes a stock is not only its genetics or migration pattern, it is usually a semi-discrete group of fish with some definable attributes of interest to administrators. A stock is the conjunction of the biological, the ecological, the historical, the political, and the administrative (Secor 1999, Law and Lien 2013). It is an active doing of genetics, fish reproductive and feeding behavior (biology), and environment (ecological), along with considerations of management requirements (the political) and its catchability and accessibility (historical). Rather than a representation of a given biological entity “out there,” or purely a product of scientific and administrative discourse, the stock is, in the idiom of Karen Barad (2007), meaningful matter, both concept and thing. Finally, a last switch from stock to biomass is the practice through which the stock is transformed into tons and kilos. Biomass, fish in tons and kilos, is what allows differing regimes of practice to align and provides the link between scientific, juridical, and financial practices in which fleshy fish move out of the sea and enter into the everyday lives of Icelanders as virtual.
Legal and Financial Practices
As recounted earlier, Iceland went through a series of neoliberal reforms during the 1980s and 1990s that radically altered the economic landscape in a relatively short time. The fishing industry was swept up in a rush to privatization that started with the introduction of the quota management system in 1984. This system was the first step in a series of measures that enfolded biomass—fish in tons and kilos—within a complex set of legal and financial practices and relations, ultimately giving rise to the age of virtual fish.
Established in the early 1980s as a temporary measure to avoid what at that time was considered to be the impending collapse of the cod stock,7 the quota system originally garnered a wide degree of support among the various stakeholder groups in Iceland (Eythorsson 2003). Such consensus, however, quickly evaporated after a series of legislative adjustments in the 1990s that resulted in supplanting the primary tenet of ecological sustainability with economic efficiency. In 1991 an ITQ system was adopted, effectively allowing virtual fish to be bought, sold, and rented on the market. In 1996 the introduction of a collateral law (the details of which I will examine later) paved the way for fish to be used as a type of mortgage in the raising of capital.8
It is hard to overstate the degree of change that the ITQ system imposed on the lives of the fishermen and inhabitants of small coastal towns. From this point forward, access to fishing grounds was predicated not on the availability of fleshy fish in local waters and all that implied,9 but on the accessibility of virtual fish. The basic premise of the ITQ system is therefore a mixture of both scientific and economic goals: to manage the stocks by adopting a fishing effort to the point where maximum economic yield occurs or where maximum sustainable yield results. In essence, this means that the quota system has always held out the promise of not only preserving the fish stocks but also increasing them over the long term. In fact, one of the reasons why the original adoption of the quota system generated such cross stakeholder support was this very promise of increased future stocks and hence more profits for quota holders over time. Therefore, it would appear to be a primary logic of the system that more fish will lead to more money, and while this may still be true for ordinary fleshy fish, the reverse is the case for virtual fish: curiously, fewer fish have come to mean more money.
Despite intensive management of the stocks over the last thirty years, the cod quota has continued to decline, from a peak of close to 500,000 tons in the early eighties (Íslandsbanki Seafood Team 2010) to 160,000 tons for the fishing year 2010–2011 (Hafrannsóknastofnun 2010). The MRI rationalizes this by arguing that, despite the technical management of the stocks over the last three decades, it is only since the mid-nineties that the fishing industry has been following their scientific advice to the letter. Interestingly, criticism of the apparent failure of the MRI’s program generally comes from renegade scientists and small communities rather than from the large boat owners association, Landssamband íslenskra útvegsmanna (LÍU),10 as one would expect. In what can be described as a classic Foucauldian knowledge-power axis, LÍU supports the MRI’s metrics, arguing that long-term preservation of the stocks is in the entire industry’s interest, even if it results in smaller catches for its members in the short term. While it is hard to argue against the ecological logic of this position, it is more than a little ironic that the lower the quota goes—and technically the less fish these companies can catch—the more money they earn. Since the virtual fish can be rented out on a yearly basis, sold for life, or mortgaged to raise finance, lower stock levels equate to higher quota demand and hence increased rental, sale, and mortgage values. The effects of virtualization on the fishing industry in general and on smaller communities and small-scale fishermen in particular have been extensive.
The escalating price of virtual fish becomes both a barrier to entry into the fishing industry for new fishermen who cannot afford the sums required to buy into the system as well as a seductive point of exit for current small-scale holders who can sell out for vast sums of money. This is still a highly contentious issue within small communities, as those who sell the quota are often considered to be “betraying the town,” given the reduction in baiting, fishing, fish processing, and hence employment that ensues from any such sale. The risk to these small locations, where families or tightly networked groups tend to hold the quota, can and has been devastating. In 2007 the primary quota holder in Flateyri, a small town in the Ísafjarðarbær municipality of the West Fjords, sold his entire holdings at the highest recorded price ever of 4,000 kronur per kilo. Since then, the town has been in a state of terminal decline. The overall trend in Iceland has therefore been for quotas to accumulate in the hands of an ever-decreasing number of large fishing companies whose power to control the industry has been greatly enhanced. In 2010, 73 percent of all quotas were held by fewer than twenty large companies (Íslandsbanki Seafood Team 2010, 14), and it was these companies that tended to rent out a high proportion of their quotas to others, creating social unease and in many cases outright resentment.11
The general macro-level effects of this combined ability to sell and collateralize virtual fish were well illustrated in a paper by a prominent fisheries economist written just several months before the crisis. Ragnar Arnason argues that the ability to use virtual fish (my term) to raise financial—or what many would call speculative—capital created up to $5 billion in wealth “where none existed before” (Arnason 2008, 37; emphasis added) Moreover, he contends that there is a direct correlation between the creation of this wealth, or “living capital” (ibid., 36; emphasis added), as he refers to it, and the growth of the Icelandic economy during the economic boom years.12 Using the indebtedness of the fishing industry, which doubled from 1997 to 2007, as a metric for how much money flowed from fishing to other industry sectors, his clear inference is that the quota significantly contributed to the takeoff of the economy as a whole. More interestingly, what Arnason’s paper hints at, and what I have been pointing toward, is the alternate spatiotemporal scale at which the virtual fish emerges, coming “alive as capital ” in Iceland in ways that fleshy fish never could.
Emerging from specific scientific practices at a time when a broader neoliberal surge was underway in Iceland, in which leveraging, or the raising of debt capital, was the dominant motif, the virtual fish became enfolded in a broader set of juridical-financial relations in which it became subject to the dominant logics of capital mobility. At the zenith of quota prices in Iceland, the virtual fish could be leveraged at 4,000 kronur per kilo and could, therefore, actualize many multiples of its future self in one transaction. In comparison to fleshy fish, which must be caught through normal fishing practices and therefore incur all of the typical costs of fishing (boat, fuel, labor, etc.), there are no such associated costs with virtual fish. Given their exorbitant market price, the profit to be made from their sale amounted to roughly eighty years’ average fishing revenues. My fishing friends always talked about this in terms of taking the profits today of fish that would not hatch until many years hence.
As such, the virtual fish emerges from a future temporal location that has its effects in the present by being actualizable in vast monetary multiplications of itself. Such a temporal form, while blurring causal trajectories, became standard business practice and always sat uncomfortably with my friends who pondered how the benefits and value of future fish could be taken from the seas in the present. It not only violated the basic “catch law” but also “stole” the rights of future generations of fishermen and communities. The virtual fish also emerges at a spatial scale which gives it a unique type of mobility, moving around as it does not in local waters but in a de-territorialized market exchange. The irony of the virtual fish’s spatiality (which facilitates an ease of exchange not previously seen) is not lost on locals who become immobilized by its mobility.
Post-Crisis Effects and Property Concerns
The response of the fishing industry to the financial crisis was at first somewhat ambivalent, given that the currency’s depreciation led not just to an increase in debts but also in a sharp increase in fishing revenues.13 However, as the extent of the industry’s insolvency began to unfold, opinions became less muted. It is estimated that the fishing industry owes somewhere in the region of ISK 465 billion or up to twelve times the industry’s annual profits (Íslandsbanki Seafood Team 2010).14 What Arnason was praising as the natural ability of “living capital” to stimulate the economy is now looked upon in many quarters as speculative gambling that has mortgaged the entire industry and future generations of fishermen without any significant improvement in boats, processing facilities, or fishing technology. Despite or maybe because of these issues, fishing, and particularly the conflict over quotas, has once again taken on renewed significance both nationally and in small coastal towns around the country.
The economic crisis that inevitably followed the financial one turned the focus to nonfinancial industries that a small island population can sustain, and fishing was seen as a central component of this plan. The new government set up a parliamentary working committee on fisheries consisting of twenty members from political parties, industry groups, and academia. The commission was tasked with nothing less than “defining the main conflicting areas within the fisheries and to come up with sustainable solutions that would win the broadest support of the nation.”15 The dealings of the commission crystallized around two pertinent issues. First, a debate ensued as to whether the first article of the fisheries law, which designates fish as the common property of the nation, should be enshrined in the constitution as a way of unambiguously clarifying its property status. Second, and more contentious, was the proposal to revoke the quota, a move that would allow currently excluded fisherman to regain access to the sea.16 Although many groups have given voice to this suggestion in the past, it was the post-crisis reconfiguration of fishing that created an environment, or a “generative moment,” as Bruce Kapferer (2005) puts it, in which the tensions around fish began to fully play out, and it was a series of antecedent legislative measures on the status of fishing rights as property around which such tensions coalesced.
The typical anthropological understanding of property ranges from a relationship between persons and things, a person-to-person relationship mediated through things, or a relationship between persons in relation to a thing. Of course these definitions all raise the question, what is a person, thing, or even, for that matter, a relation? I would like to temporarily park these more vexing issues and focus right now on how legal and economic concepts are based on a similar type of understanding. The standard legal register of property is one of rights; rather than property being an actual thing, it is seen as a relationship that a person has toward a thing, wherein a critical mass of rights—or a bundle of rights—accrues to someone in relation to it. So if a person can possess, enjoy, and change a thing, then they have certain types of rights over it to the exclusion of others.
Property is also said to enjoy certain characteristics, so, for example, the more secure, exclusive, permanent, and transferable one’s rights are, the more perfect the property right is said to be. This bundle-of-rights approach is common in fisheries management, where the tendency has been toward ever-increasing propertization, mainly as a response to Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” scenario (Feeny et al. 1990).17 The 1991 Fisheries Management Act in Iceland—amended and updated in 2006—classifies the fish stock within Iceland’s 200-mile exclusion zone as being the common property of the nation. While allocating harvesting rights to quota holders,18 it clearly states that these rights do not constitute permanent property rights (see Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture 2006). So, somewhat paradoxically, the ITQ system allows individuals to buy, sell, and rent these rights even though they are not classified as individual property.
Additional legislative measures have been passed that further this property-based conundrum. In 1997 the government passed a collateral law whose first line states that quotas, as the common property of the nation, cannot be used as collateral to raise capital. However, the very next sentence of the article provides a mechanism to do just that. It stipulates that if a quota holder has mortgaged a property that has use rights attached to it, then the holder is prohibited from separating these rights from the property without recorded approval from the mortgage giver.19 So, in effect, although you cannot technically mortgage the quota, the quota becomes an irremovable part of the mortgage.20 In addition, the courts have ruled on two other issues that also have a bearing: in 1993 they ruled that the profits from the sale of quotas are subject to taxation, and later in the same decade they allowed a woman to successfully lay claim to quotas as part of a divorce settlement (Eythórsson 2000, 17). So, in practice, harvesting rights can be bought, sold, rented, leveraged, taxed, and inherited; in effect expressing all the characteristics of individual property to a strong degree while legislatively remaining common property.
My fishermen friends in the West Fjords constantly puzzled over this question of fish being both the common property of the nation, which they talked about in terms of fleshy fish swimming in the seas that any Icelander has the right to fish, and individual property, which they saw as being the provenance of only a select few who had saleable and mortgageable rights over fish. The common rationale for the conflicting, almost paradoxical status of the simultaneous existence of two mutually exclusive property forms tended to remain political. Fishermen saw contradictory legislative measures to be the result of interest-based affiliations and ethically suspect, albeit savvy, political maneuverings among closely interlocked networks of political parties, bankers, and fisheries lobbying groups.
However, these fishermen regularly expressed their bewilderment at how fish, which were as of yet unhatched, could make claims on the world in the present. “How can one make so much money from something that does not yet exist? If you go out and fish real fish in the sea, you cannot get a fraction of the same value that you can from selling quota.” Yet they acknowledged that despite the sheer incomprehensibility of this setup, it was still possible to gain the benefits of fish in the present that would not exist for eighty years in the future.
Although the enormous quantity of present money raised from future entities was a real issue for people in the West Fjords, it was not only this temporal dislocation that created consternation among my friends. It was also the virtual fish’s spatial scale and its ability to “move away” through de-territorialized exchanges, or those no longer reliant upon geography, that aggrieved them. While fleshy fish still remained “out there in the sea,” the mobility of the virtual fish has left coastal communities abandoned in its wake. The small town of Flateyri is a good case in point. When the virtual fish was sold away in 2007, not only did the local processing plant collapse, but almost all of the town’s ancillary industries suffered as a result. The fall in employment and the ensuing collapse of the property market left people with no jobs and no obvious way to relocate. They became “stuck,” as they put it. In early 2009 a group of locals got together and bought the processing factory without quotas, but this operation went bankrupt in April 2011. It wasn’t sustainable to rent quotas from the market and sell them to foreign customers.
Although the spatiotemporal scale of the virtual fish is unlike that of the ordinary fleshy fish, both types have a unique “mode of existence” (Latour 2011). In an interesting take on the philosopher Etienne Souriau, Bruno Latour argues that entities, from microbes to horses, can undergo transformations and alterations through certain practices and as such can enter into new pathways in which they circulate along different “chains of experience” (Latour 2008, 90). For Latour, enquiries into modes of being are ultimately enquiries into different ways of altering, suggesting that each mode contains a specific ontological pattern. Similarly, the virtual fish emerged at its own spatiotemporal scale. The entity was altered, and ultimately transformed, leaving the seas and becoming enfolded into new chains of legal and financial experience via particular scale-switching practices—from index to stock to biomass to virtual.
Fish, rather than being a singular phenomenon, can in fact be multiple, existing in different modes and circulating along different chains of experience. As such the coexistence of two “versions” (Mol 1999) of fish, each with its own spatiotemporal scale, creates certain tensions that have played themselves out both in the everyday considerations of fishermen and, strikingly, in a legal property-based idiom. Karen Sykes argued in a recent Manchester debate that “culture is a creative process by which members of a society inventively answer ontological questions”(Carrithers et al. 2010, 169). Using as an example the malanggan, a carved sculpture from the New Ireland province of Papua New Guinea, she suggests that the act of carving answers the ontological question “What is a life?” I am suggesting, therefore, that the reconfigured post-crisis setting in Iceland was one in which people’s concerns with fish were realigned and more fundamental questions were raised. It is in this regard that we can consider the legislative amendments around the quota as a creative cultural response to the ontological question “What is a fish?”
If this is the case, then the simultaneous existence of alternate property forms (common and individual), while appearing mutually exclusive, could be seen as a response to the multiplicity of fish. Rather than contradictions leading to mixtures or multiplicities, as standard dialectical approaches would have it, it is in fact the multiplicity of the world that enables paradoxes to proliferate and be sustained (Webmoor and Witmore 2008, 60). The puzzling paradox that straddles several pieces of fisheries legislation, in which fish are de facto individual property while remaining de jure common property (Pálsson 1996), is not therefore a formal contradiction attributed to sleight-of-hand political maneuverings or unethical lawmakers but rather is more productively construed as an ontological tension that enables the seeming contradiction to be reformulated. Rather than the irreconcilability of the existence of simultaneous property forms, it is the multiplicity of fish that holds the contradiction in a type of unresolved tension or dissonance. The existence of fish as simultaneously virtual and fleshy allows people to conceive of them as either common or individual property. Thus their status as property is indeterminate.
Conclusion
In recent times many countries have found themselves entangled within the logics of the new “financial economy,” the complexities and consequences of which are still being felt around the globe. While Iceland only recently subscribed to such processes and practices, it embraced these logics with a speed and fervor that indebted and unsettled the entire population in equal measure.
Virtual fish were transformed into being through various scientific scale-switching practices and entered into the lives of ordinary Icelanders through various legal and financial practices and relations. The collective concerns of the scientific, financial, and legal communities, or what Latour calls “communities of affirmation” (cited in Bell 2012, 114), throughout the 1990s and 2000s enabled the virtual fish to sustain their mode of existence, which while not actual was nonetheless real. As Alfred North Whitehead succinctly puts it, “through the relations or concerns between the emergent entity and its environment, the entity achieves its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment and stands out for itself alone” (Whitehead 1933, 177).
The Icelandic financial crisis, while having many alternate trajectories and consequences, opened up a generative moment in which a fundamental ontological question was posed about fish. The creative cultural response to such musings was framed in a legal idiom in which the multiplicity of fish was brought to the foreground and as such allowed for an alternate reading of the property paradox at the heart of fisheries legislation. Instead of the simultaneous existence of two mutually exclusive property forms (common and individual) being the result of political machinations, I have argued that it is the multiplicity of fish that allows the paradox to continue in abeyance.
There is no doubt that Iceland has been going through a process of reformulating its own collective self-identity in the wake of its rapid engagement with transnational capitalism, and as such the concerns of the country have been altering. The pre-crisis discourse in which the media “forged ideological links with Iceland’s first settlers and their presumed independence spirit” (Loftsdóttir 2010, 11) constantly referred to the prowess and risk-seeking mentality of the útrásarvíkingur (Business Vikings). The post-crisis sentiment has opened up a space of national reflection in which the characteristics of the financial economy are now being thoroughly reevaluated. It is in this context that the virtual fish and its simultaneous individual property form has become a mode of existence that may be difficult to sustain in the future.21
Thanks go to the group of anthropologists at the Waterworlds project in Copenhagen, Denmark, for providing essential feedback on an earlier draft. In particular, I thank Kirsten Hastrup for encouraging me to write the paper and Frida Hastrup for her generous and close reading of the second draft. Finally, I thank Brit Ross Winthereik for a valuable and constructive discussion of the text’s key ideas.
Notes
1. Despite the fact that there is still a lot of dispute as to the quantity of fish in Icelandic waters, there is almost no dispute that coastal waters could support a healthy local fishing industry and, by extension, maintain a solid municipal infrastructure. Return to text.
2. Zizek explains his ideas in the filmed lecture Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual (Olive Films, 2004). For part 1 of the documentary, see http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=KdpudWL5i68. Return to text.
3. Pálsson and Helgason (1998) utilize “virtualism” in similar terms in relation to Icelandic fish stocks, as do Minnegal and Dwyer (2011) in their discussion of fishing in Australia, but again my difficulty lies in the conflation of “virtual” with “abstract,” set in contradistinction to the real. Return to text.
4. In the annual assessment of codfish stocks, the MRI used two independent data sets: an analysis of actual landing statistics and a set of fish samples taken from an annual trawl survey. This latter measure was introduced in 1985 as a response to the perceived lack of reliability of the landing statistics as a stand-alone technique. Every March five trawlers are used to trawl 600 stations located around Iceland. The same stations are used every year in order to provide for sampling consistency and were chosen partly by the MRI and partly by an original group of trawler captains based on their knowledge of good fishing spots. The boats trawl for an hour at each station, and the ensuing catch is analyzed by onboard MRI scientists. Return to text.
5. Generating a yearly fish index is an important component in assessing the overall fish stock levels. Such data are necessary to create a historical correlation coefficient between population size and index, which can then be applied to the current year’s survey index to arrive at an estimate of the stock in the sea. Return to text.
6. Genetic methods include assessing protein variation, chromosomes, mitochondrial DNA, and nuclear DNA. Return to text.
7. The quota system has expanded to include many fish species and is not just limited to cod. Return to text.
8. Over the coming pages I will use the terms collateral, mortgage, and leverage relatively interchangeably. Return to text.
9. By local waters I mean the distance that small-scale fishing boats travel on an average daily trip (anywhere up to twelve miles from shore). In order to be eligible to go to sea, a seaman must have a captain’s license and a seaworthy boat and must maintain different sets of economic and social relationships necessary for baiting, processing, and selling capacities. Return to text.
10. LÍU is one of the central players and lobbyists in the fishing industry. There is also a small boat owners association, Landssamband smábátaeigenda, which lobbies on behalf of small boats under 15 tons. Return to text.
11. Several authors (Eythorsson, Pálsson, Helgason) have commented on a range of narratives that have developed in response to such renting, in particular noting the development of a feudal fishing system consisting of “lords of the sea” who reap the benefits of using the quota as a purely financial tool and “tenants” who have to “fish for others” at reduced incomes. Return to text.
12. Arnason does acknowledge that there were other contributing factors, such as the growth of the aluminum industry. Return to text.
13. Although accurate figures are unavailable given the confidential nature of the transactions, a significant percentage of the money raised by the mortgaging of quotas is believed to have been secured via non-Icelandic banks, denominated in foreign currency. The devaluation of the krona, therefore, led to a sharp increase in the indebtedness of many fishing companies. At the same time, however, fish prices (mostly traded in sterling, euros, and dollars) delivered higher krona revenues. Return to text.
14. The report was prepared by a division of Íslandsbanki (formerly Glitnir). While I do not doubt the integrity of the numbers presented in the report, there are some issues regarding the selectivity of the data. Many commentators put the debt figure at up to ISK 1 trillion. Return to text.
15. This is a quote from a conversation with a parliamentary committee member. The final report was delivered in September 2010 (Sjávarútvegs- og landbúnaðarráðuneytið 2010). Return to text.
16. My fieldwork entailed attendance at several meetings where the possible consequences of a quota repeal were debated. As is almost always the case at such meetings, positions were strained and tensions ran high. As quota was being treated “as if” it were individual property, any attempt to reappropriate it was considered by many legal experts to be in violation of the primary property clause within the constitution, and as such any breach would necessitate redress by compensation. There were of course many counter opinions. For an excellent summary of the human rights and equality implications, see Einarsson 2011. Return to text.
17. Hardin (1968) suggested that all resources held in common, such as oceans, rivers, air, and parklands, are subject to ever-continuing degradation due to people’s proclivity to take any extra profit available from such resources, but their unwillingness to bear more than a fraction of the cost. In essence, freedom in the commons would “bring ruin to all.” Private property rights are seen as the antidote to such a scenario, whereby resources become more economically efficient the greater the degree of property rights attached to them. Return to text.
18. The original allocation was made to boat owners—itself a contentious issue—in 1984 based on the average of their previous three years of fishing experience. In addition, the term “harvesting rights” is interchangeable with “fishing rights.” Return to text.
19. See http://www.althingi.is/lagas/nuna/1997075.html, paragraph 3, article 3. Return to text.
20. In practice this means that a quota holder can borrow money from a bank equivalent to the value of the boat plus the market value of the quota, using only the boat as collateral. However, the quota holder is not allowed to sell the quota without the prior approval of the bank, hence locking the quota to the boat without technically using it as collateral. Return to text.
21. Leaving Iceland in late 2010, I had the distinct impression that the days of the virtual fish were numbered. However, following the media reports on the turbulent passage of the new fisheries law, which was being pushed through Parliament at the time of finalizing this chapter, it could well be that my response was slightly optimistic. Return to text.