Writing Wednesday: A Placeholder Conclusion

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been slowly putting words on the page for a new book project focused on oil, mobility, and modernity. I have a vague (and fleeting) hope that it might be done by the end of the calendar year (it won’t be). 

Last week, between many other obligations, I managed to write a provisional conclusion. This is mostly just an effort to create a placeholder and will undoubtedly have to rewrite it before the book is done, but it’s a good place to leave the project for a bit while I take care of some other obligations. 

Chapter 5: Conclusion

The book is suffused with oil. Oil drew workers to the Bakken, powered their vehicles, and structured their lives. It likewise carries myself and my colleagues to the Bakken. It produced the energy that moved our cars, charged our laptops, and processed our photographs (and continues makes it possible for me to write this in a heated house while listening to music). This contemporary situation, however, is not new. In fact, as this book has shown, it is inherent in the development of archaeology, photography, tourism, and the complex interplay between permanence and mobility characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century society. In short, oil provides a unifying conceptual and practical framework for understanding both modernity and our contemporary world.

In this sense, archaeology of the contemporary world is always the archaeology of oil because oil makes the modern world possible. Our project’s approach to this centered on industrial archaeology. Industrial archaeology stresses the connection between oil and modernity by making visible not only the machines and landscapes that are foundational industrial and extractive activities, but also the role of labor. This framework encouraged us to understand the Bakken as an industrial landscape where workforce housing, the particular emphasis of our research, existed within a petroleumscape informed both by longstanding patterns of movement and the short term needs of extractive industries. As workers moved into the region lured by the promise of lucrative employment in Bakken oil patch, they demonstrated how the very oil they came to extract lubricated the mobility of human capital necessary from its production. The aerodynamic character of the RVs and mobile housing units that populated temporary workforce housing sites in the Bakken made their mobility visible.

At the same time, the viscous mobility characteristic of these workers’ arrival in the Bakken did not lead them to abandon more fixed and permanent ideals of domestic life. In Type 2 camps, hastily built mudrooms often interrupted the aerodynamic shape of the RVs and mobile homes. The location of the RVs along the edge of their lots created room for outside seating areas, gardens, dog runs, and parking. These features evoked the manicured countryside of suburban landscapes with their illusory promise of permanence. The fixity of these interventions amid a landscape characterized by almost frenetic mobility finds easy parallel in the photography of the New Topographics and their successors. The work of these artists to capture the roads, trailer parks, industrial installations, pipelines, and other abrupt interventions against the backdrop of the Western landscape offered another perspective to critique the enduring character of the landscape against the ephemerality of human interventions. While the perspectives offered by the New Topographics contrast the Western landscape with ephemeral human interventions, they nevertheless embody the same tension between permanence and mobility visible in workforce housing sites in the Bakken.

The photograph emerged as a suitable way to document the viscosity, ephemerality, and mobility of everyday life in the late 19th and early 20th century when inexpensive, portable cameras became available. These cameras allowed the tourist and the archaeologist to capture their fleeting experiences. The permanence and portability of these photographs captured the abrupt disjunctures that their encounters produced and sought to stabilize a reality wracked by accelerating change and instability. The tension between permanence and fragmentation made possible new arrangements and novel encounters. This paralleled the work of imagist poets whose embrace of precise, descriptive language and fragmentary form paralleled the publication of archaeological fragments. Benjamin’s disjointed description of the city of Naples wracked by emergent capitalism and the abrupt and fragmentary style of his aphorisms demonstrated the discontinuous nature of modern life. The archaeological and the literary mise-en-page promoted readings that recognized the discontinuities present in Paris’s decaying arcades or in the architectural and sculptural disiecta membra common to an archaeological site. The photograph, imagist poem, papyrus fragment, and archaeological produced new ways to subvert “mythical” narratives that culminated in an inevitable present.

Archaeologists have come to recognize the power of the photograph, the fragment, and the mise-en-page. The work of Shannon Lee Dawdy, Laurent Olivier, Michael Shanks, Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal and others have demonstrated how the constant experience of abrupt disjuncture between the past and the present marks the supermodernity of the contemporary. In this context, the photograph becomes a critical tool in the hands of the archaeologist for producing embodied knowledge that enforces the contemporaneity of the archaeologist and the image. The photographs in the following pages make manifest the relationship between the photograph and the image in the Bakken oil patch. They are fragments of our experiences documenting “Man Camp 11” from 2012 to 2016. While the images are organized chronologically, and in some cases spatially, they do not constitute a narrative. The mise-en-scène in the photographs capture fragments of everyday life among oil workers. The mise-en-page makes manifest the differences, abrupt juxtapositions, and plurality of experiences present in a camp.

The goal of this book is to make the plurality of experiences visible. This project started with an effort to reconcile the variety of objects and situations visible in the photographs to a larger analytical narrative concerning life in a man camp in the Bakken. Over the course of those efforts, we managed to produce a typology of camps and some modest conclusion about the character of workforce housing during the boom. At the same time, these understandings of the Bakken boom and subsequent bust did not capture the fragmented diversity of experience made manifest in the photographs. Indeed, our own scholarship on the Bakken dissolved in the face of this complexity leading us to model a later publication on the work of Laura Berlant and Kathleen Stewart. Only by embracing our own fragmented experiences of life could we appropriately manifest the diverse, disjointed, and abrupt character of these contemporary images. Oil, mobility, and fragmentation live in fragile tension with the sense of the fixed and the permanent in the photograph. In these images whatever continuity we might expect in the contemporary dissolves into fragments of experience. Any hope of narrative resolution dissolves into the reality of the world.