Fish and Fishing Knowledge(s) as Vibrant Matter

Robert Winstanley-Chesters

doi:10.1007/978-981-15-0042-8_3

Abstract

Having outlined the theoretical background behind the notion of matter and matters as vibrant or lively in the introduction, this next chapter uses the theoretical framework provided by Jane Bennett, Sarah Whatmore and others to more deeply explore what its deployment within the realm of fishing would mean. Contrasting recent work on the intersection between human form and matter and the bacterial and viral realm, an intersection which is inescapable for humans and has begun to suggest a meshing and merging of humanity’s apparently independent nature with other, unexpected forms of nature, the chapter considers the importance of knowledge and statistics about fish and their geographies in wider histories of fishing. The changing form and shape of available and known fishing resource, as well as the individual and collective behaviours focused on the extraction of fish and their importance to geopolitics is considered Fish and other creatures of the sea and of the seabed themselves, therefore, are held to be vibrant matters in the web of political and developmental life. Knowledge, therefore, as ephemeral matters with real impact on both fish and human communities and political groupings focused on fishing. Given the previous chapter on histories and geographies of fishing, those histories and terrains will be further considered in this chapter, the embedded vibrant and lively statistical and living materials active at different levels of temporality and materiality, providing a sense in which fishing interactions from the past and future impact on the geographies and communities of the present, especially those in forthcoming chapters of the book.

Highlights

Maximum Sustainble Yield policies from the Rome conference asserted, as is common with much free-market or laissez faire thinking, that through the process of its own functioning, global fishing would produce an equilibrium in stocks, an equilibrium which was to produce the maximum possible profit for global fishing enterprise
When fishing communities and corporations invested in their fleets and committed greated effort to the exercise of fishing, this would necessarily result in larger catches and increased profit. This increased effort would eventually impact on fish populations, which would mean less catch and less profit
Fishing effort would be reduced through a self-regulating principle and the fish population would naturally recover, at which point extra effort could be exerted again by fishers

Summary

Introduction

Becoming an academic or becoming a writer deeply focused on a subject in a way means becoming an expert on that thing or the academic field in which that thing is situated. By this point fish had really become abstracted to vibrant matters seemingly disconnected from their bodies, to become lamp oil and baleen material Such technologies have completely transformed fishing and the capabilities and capacities of fishers and work in tandem with technologies of vision and observation alongside statistical analysis and inference to build the industry we know today. All of these elements are themselves vibrant, energetic matters, all deeply embedded in the wider story of this book and key to this chapter

Numbers as a Lively Matter

Conclusion