Writing Wednesday: Fragments and Narratives

This week, I focused on the penultimate section of my book manuscript. While the optimist in me sees the book as almost done, the realist in me recognizes that there is a still a good bit to do before I can submit this manuscript for review.

For those of you with a score card, this is the third section in the third chapter of my book focused on oil, mobility, and modernity. This final substantive chapter focuses on photography, permanence, and fragmentation. This section is where I am most out of my depth (or trodding on new ground) and both excited and terrified to put my own thoughts on paper.

I posted the first part of the final chapter two weeks ago and the second part last week (you can check out the outline for my book here).

Here’s is this week’s writing work:

4.3. Fragments and Narratives

The use of photography by archaeologists of the contemporary world produces an experience that emphasizes the discontinuities present in the modern world. As the previous section shows, the emergence of tourism, photography, archaeology, and modernist literature relied on the persistent fragments of both the present and past to create new interpretative spaces. The mise-en -scène of the photograph anticipates and imitates the mise-en-page produced through the arrangement of archaeological or literary fragments. As Nora Goldschmidt notes the goal of modernist writers was not to produce a narrative from the fragments, but to present the fragments as authentic, but also open ended ways of critiquing modern narratives of progress and technology. For Benjamin, the juxtaposition of fragments offers a way to subvert totalizing narratives that culminate in the present. For Benjamin, fragments offer a way to disruptive rise of modern myths which culminated in the tragedy of fascism.

The view of a fragmented world punctuated by discontinuities and disruptions is not limited to the early 20th century world of imagist poets and Benjamin’s flâneurs. While modernist writers have found in the fragments of antiquity a parallel to their own experiences, archaeologists and historians worked to reconcile these fragments into cohesive narratives. This not only sought to resolve the irreconcilable tensions present in the fragmentary past, but also to reify or critique preexisting narratives of the past. Archaeologists have become increasingly conscious of the challenges associated with totalizing “master narratives,” which bolster arguments for the inevitability of the present (Lucas 2004; Gonzalez-Ruibal 2008). At the same time, the viability of counter narratives relies upon their capacity not only to subvert the inevitability of the present but also to create spaces of radical disjuncture between suppressed narratives of the past and present experiences. In the archaeology of the contemporary world, making visible the plurality of narratives that exist in the present also creates conditions necessary for the critique of the past. This interplay of narratives, however, risks simply exchanging one narrative for another. For Gonzalez-Ruibal, the archaeology of supermodernity involves making these alternative narratives possible, but also preserving the potential for new revelations. As Þóra Pétursdóttir and Tim Flohr Sørensen (2023) have urged archaeologists of the contemporary world to embrace “sensory, affective, speculative encounters” that allow us to critique existing ontologies, epistemologies, and, most importantly, ethical positions. For Pétursdóttir and Sørensen, a messy aesthetic offers a window into the messy and uncertain world precipitated by the Anthropocene. The capacity of archaeology to produce fragments which it shares with its contemporary technologies of photography and the aesthetic style of modernist literature, is not a flaw, but rather a feature that allows archaeology to support multiple narratives. Thus archaeology parallels the fragmentation of the modern world, replete with disjunction, discontinuities, and abrupt shifts.

Contemporary scholarship and criticism has likewise explored the potential of fragments to embody the experience of contemporary world. Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, for example, recognizes how the narratives that inform geology as an approach to scientific knowledge are grounded in racist and extractive world views. Her call for a “Billion Black Anthropocenes” is a recognition that the Anthropocene, as a geological narrative, nevertheless preserves the dominant framework of extractive geology. In its place, Yusoff suggests a plurality of alternative narratives grounded in Black experiences. This allowed the possibility of redeeming the explanatory power of the narrative without requiring that narrative to be totalizing. Rosi Braidotti frames this as “‘we’ are in this this together, but we are not one and the same” in her article articulating the challenges in crafting effective and affective responses to the COVID pandemic (2020). In this context, she urges us to resist scholarly practices that tend toward “syntheses and to authoritarian anthropocentric injunctions.” Again, recognizing the plurality of perspectives, which in Braidotti’s case involves the posthuman acknowledgement of both human and nonhuman agents, requires that we see the fragmentation of the world not as a staging area for synthetic narratives, but as a way to recognize and engage with the diversity of experiences in our world. By understanding the relational character of the fragments that surround us, we can discern a plurality of perspectives and the potential for alternative understanding. As we sought to come to terms with our work in the Bakken and the myriad narratives offered in this context, we found Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s book, The Hundreds (2019), particular powerful. Berlant and Stewart offer a series of one hundred, one-hundred word essays on ordinary life rather than the global crises engaged by Braidotti and Yusoff. The banality of the objects, events, and situations in these texts and their fragmented sensibility of the book presents an affective text that resists a unifying narrative. The multiple indices in the back off the book further reinforce the irreducibility of these fragmentary texts to a single lexical narrative.

The Hundreds directly influenced a brief publication that Bret Weber and I prepared in 2023 for an edited volume. Titled “The Bakken Hundreds,” we alternated contributing 100-word excerpts from our field notes, publications, interviews, and other texts associated with the project. Rather than arranging these texts chronologically, we provided the price of West Texas Intermediate crude as a loose indicator of the situation in the Bakken at the moment of the text. The lack of narrative structure of the article and the only loose connection between the price of oil and the situation on the ground reinforces the stochastic character of human experience. This was particularly significant to us as the history of oil and the Bakken oil boom in particular tend to follow certain narratives. The introduction of oil, for example, promoted a narrative of mobility, freedom, speed, and efficiency. The precarity of the oil boom, in contrast, implies a bust. The acceleration of human mobility made possible by oil gives shape to the velocity of the boom, but unlike narratives of continuous growth and progress, the narrative of the oil boom concludes in the bust.

The images that follow this introduction follow the trajectory set by ”The Bakken Hundreds.” While organized chronologically, they offer challenges to a simplified narrative of boom or bust. Moreover, their fragmentary character and mise-en-page encourages viewers to construct distinct relationships between the images and to create webs of relational meaning to spill out beyond any sense of progress or inevitable collapse. By recognizing our contemporaneity with the photos (and the photographer), we stand face to face with our own fragmented experience.