Writing Wednesday: Fragments on Oil and Photography

Some time last week, I posted on doing some low stakes writing on a Bakken project tentatively titled Work Force Housing. I posted an outline and some general thoughts about the project. 

Here’s the outline as a refresher:

0. Introduction

1. Archaeology of work force house both in the US and World Archaeology. 2. Industrial archaeology and the archaeology of extractive industries. 3. Archaeology of the contemporary world.

4. Oil and Modernity 5. Mobility and Modernity: Viscosity  6. Fixity in the age mobility: the suburb.

7. Photography and archaeology: permanence in the age of ephemerality. 8. Fixity and fragments. 9. Narrative and fragments.

10. Conclusion

Over the last week or so I’ve put some words down on quite a few of these sections. My main goal has been to pull together — rather haphazardly — the main currents in current literature with the goal of weaving in our Bakken evidence once the larger intellectual landscape is sketched out. I think this will lean into what a reviewer once described as a “somewhat discursive style”  Obviously some topics are broader than others and reward more discursive treatment than others. 

Here’s a bit of my low stakes writing this past few weeks. I’ll share more as it comes into focus over the next few weeks.

4. Oil and Modernity

It might be a cliche to argue that all archaeology of the modern (and certainly the contemporary) world is ultimately the archaeology of oil. Any number of modern commentators have observed that Industrial Revolution and the emergence of 20th century consumer culture is the product of the proliferation of inexpensive energy. Coal and oil as well as natural gas have allowed the amplification of human labor in production, the acceleration of distribution, and the proliferation of new materials including plastics. As fossil fuels — and more narrowly petroleum — have become increasingly vital for the functioning of the global economy, the control over the extraction, distribution, and processing of oil has become a central concern for states and supranational entities from production consortia such as OPEC to multinational companies. The burning of carbon based fuels has transformed the environment and ultimately usher in a period of catastrophic global climate change. Efforts to mitigate the impact of industrial, post-consumer, and atmospheric pollution has come to shape not only global politics but also the mundane routines of our daily lives. 

7. Photography and archaeology: permanence in the age of ephemerality.

If fossil fuels and ultimately oil served as the lubricant for modernity producing the middle class, tourist, and the suburb. The connection between the modern tourist and the archaeologist is well known (Johnson 2011). At the same time there is an indisputable link between tourism, archaeology, and photography (Shanks 1992; Hamilakis et al. 2016) which continues to attract the attention of scholars in these fields. In recent years, the relationship between photography and archaeology has become the focus on scholars looking to interrogate the extent to which archaeology can be disentangled from its modern roots. This is particular important in the 21st century as modern problems, ranging from global climate change to the convulsions associated with late capitalism and overripe nationalism, beg for solutions that operate outside of the systems which have caused the current sense of crisis. 

This has prompted among archaeologists approaches to photography that go beyond the critiques of representational practices. Indeed, Dan Hicks and Leslie McFadyen have argued that archaeology and photography form ”an idorrhythmic coexistence” rather than the latter being dependent on representational ways of seeing embedded within the visual language of the former. This approach to photography, that Hicks terms “photology,”allows viewers to consider photographs not as documents representing the past, but as objects that are contemporary with the viewer and every bit as unstable and fluid as the viewer’s understanding of their own world. This commitment to the contemporaneity of the photograph and its independence from some original archaeological object parallels the development of an archaeology of the contemporary world that places the archaeology in the same frame as the world that they study. The inability to distinguish the archaeologist from the period that they study or to separate archaeological work from the formation processes that produce the contemporary world also makes impossible the traditional acts temporal or spatial distancing at the core of the epistemologies that makes archaeological knowledge possible. This is a particularly valuable way to understand the archaeology of oil, for example, because it foregrounds how the viscosity of oil renders inseparable the archaeologist from their own modernity. Thus, photography, archaeology, the archaeologist, and the tourist continuously co-create an understanding of the world. 

The photographs included in this volume, then, are not meant to represent the work of the North Dakota Man Camp project or to have captured some kind of momentary reality that occurred “on the ground.” Instead they embody archaeological knowledge and invite critical engagement both within and between the photographs in this archive. This means in some ways, relieving these photographs — or indeed this essay — from carrying too great a theoretical burden.