Writing Wednesday: Modernity and Oil

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been trying to get a book manuscript finished this past few months. The book, which still lacks a title, will focus on oil, archaeology, the Bakken, and photography (in some order and in some relationship). It’s going to be a weird book, but I’ve basically outlined it here.

I first drafted this chapter in February, but it underwent some pretty major revisions over the last week or so and I offer it here in something close to its penultimate form. I also added the very short introduction to the chapter as well. I’m adding these short chapter introduction to each chapter to give the book a bit more continuity. I expect to expand them when I do a final read through later in the year.

Chapter 3: Oil, Modernity, and Mobility

This chapter explores the role of oil in the construction of modernity. While this narrative is well-known and encapsulated in concepts such as petromodernity and “living oil,” this chapter will focus on the tension that oil creates between permanence and fixity and viscosity and mobility. The viscosity of oil created distributed methods of production that relied upon terminals, refineries, and storage areas spread over vast distances and connected by pipelines. Oil also allowed for the proliferation of automobiles which likewise transformed the global landscape. In the US, automobile culture created new suburbs that defined the post-war world and contributed to the spread of mobile home parks and trailer courts as embodiments of the fluidity of petroleum fueled American population. As much as suburbs and trailer courts relied on the mobility of provided by cars and petroleum, they also sought to preserve a sense of permanence by evoking the seemingness timeless character of rural life and the countryside. Even the ephemerality of the trail court populated by mobile homes defined by their mobility often belied the sense of connection, permanence, and community present in these sites. Workforce housing sites in the Bakken, especially the Type 2 camps which consist of mobile homes, RVs, and campers, often reflected these same tendencies toward permanence with suburban touches and aspects of community creating a sense of fixity despite the precarity and mobility inherent in the boom. Ironically, modern extractive industries, particularly in the oil fields, also leave permanent traces in landscape. The permanence of supermodern violence, including fracking the earth’s crust to extract tight oil from the Bakken formation, contrasts with the fluidity of oil and the mobility of the workforce. This tension between fixity and mobility and permanence and ephemerality shapes the way in which archaeology

3.1. Oil and Modernity

It is not an exaggeration 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 inexpensive carbon-based energy fueled the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of 20th century consumer culture. Coal and oil as well as natural gas have amplified human labor in production, accelerated the distribution of goods, and led to 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 ushered 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.

In an effort to describe these things, Stephanie LeMenager coined the term “petromodernity” to describe the way that oil has produced new forms of American life in the 20th century (LeMenager 2014). For LeMenager, petromodern consumer culture transformed how Americans lived in the world. We no longer simply benefited from the surplus wealth generated by oil, but it has come to define who we are. The 20th century witnessed a world shaped by the use of plastics, our dependence on cheap global transportation, and our commitments to mass media. Each of these phenomena became possible through easy access to oil. As the media, plastics, and global economic integration form an important aspect of the emergence of consumer culture and ultimately a sense of ”consumer citizenship,” it becomes increasingly clear that oil suffuses not simply our everyday lives, but how we understand our various social, political, economic, and professional identities. Just as the mass media helped forge national identities over the course of the 19th century, consumer culture in the 20th century created new forms of social and political identities. In the Bakken, for example, oil company workers often wore American flags on their corporate coveralls in seeming imitation of military uniforms. This made visible a form of petromasculinity that Cara Daggett has associated with authoritarianism (Daggett 2018). Truck stops across the region featured a bewildering array of oil themed t-shirts, truck accessories, and tchotchkes. Many of these consumer objects combined images associated with oil work with nationalist rhetoric and iconography making explicit the link between oil and political identity. These are only the most explicit examples. On a daily basis we mark our identity with goods manufactured with oil, circulated through petroleum fueled networks, and purchased in climate controlled stores or via the internet and its insatiable need for carbon based energy. Microscopic fragments of these very consumer goods suffuse our bodies in the forms of microplastics and other forms of synthetic environmental pollutants. “Living Oil” for LeMenager represents this entanglement with oil that permeates our society and our bodies.

Timothy Mitchell makes clear that much of what passes for modern democracy is the product of our dependence on fossil fuels (Mitchell 2011). Coal, for Mitchell, introduced mass democracy in the late 19th century, and the shift to oil, exposed it limits at the end of the 20th century. The coal miner and rail worker’s role in the energy economy of the late 19th century made them vital for the energy needs of state even as they toiled in relative invisibility under ground. This allowed workers to represent a viable threat to the nation’s energy needs. Oil needs fewer, more visible and more widely distributed the workers. The smaller numbers and higher degree of specialization made them more easily supervised and less prone to collective action. The distinct character of labor associated with the extraction, distribution, and refining of oil combined with its role in producing a century of consistent economic growth to produce new forms of political culture. Nations came to expect economic growth and at the same time lost the capacity for labor, in particular, to mount any sustainable political action to resist its consequences (Mitchell 2011; Szeman 2019). The historical consequences of oil are manifest in the early 21st century context for the Bakken boom. It coincided with the intersection of the subprime mortgage crisis and the rise of the Occupy movement. Imre Szeman argues that the inability of the latter to articulate demands, much less produce meaningful change, even amid the displacement and expulsions associated with the “Great Recession” confirms Mitchell’s assessment. As later sections in this chapter will show, the same mobility that contributed to modern displacement also made possible the arrival of thousands of new workers in the Bakken.

Considering the deep entanglement of our modern world and oil, it is hardly surprising that the development of archaeology has not escaped from our growing dependence on carbon based energy. It is unnecessary to outline the well-known arguments that situate archaeology as a modern discipline and therefore inseparable from the various political, social, and material forces that created the modern world (Thomas 2004; Johnson 2011). Scholars have demonstrated how archaeology is complicit in the rise of the nation-state, colonialism, and the commodification of the natural and cultural environment. More practically, the need to travel, the use of mass media to publicize archaeological findings, and, from the later 20th century, the growing dependence of electronic and digital tools in field and lab work practices reflects the dependence of the modern discipline on oil. The post-war link between archaeology and capital, in particular, witnessed the growing use of archaeology to compensate for the expulsion of communities in the name of economic development. Partnerships between archaeology and extractive industries streamlined the construction of the infrastructure necessary to bring petroleum to the market on a global scale by mitigating the sense of cultural loss (for example: Barry 2013; MacEachern 2010). A single pipeline project in the Bakken revealed almost 100 sites with at least 5 and as many as 28 potentially eligible for inscription in the National Register of Historic Places (WBI Energy Transmission, Inc. 2020). This is just one example of how the Bakken oil boom was also a boom in archaeology for the region as contract archaeology companies acquired lucrative contracts to survey pipeline, rail, and roadways constructed with federal funds (Hill 2014; Gregg et al. 2021). At the same time, this work has revealed the limits of current compliance archaeology in involving communities in the preservation of heritage (Fischer and Fischer 2016). Academic archaeologists have increasingly offered critical resistance to the entanglement of archaeology and oil whether in the context of heritage and culture resource management (Plets 2016) or in the context of the energy committed to maintaining the professional practices in the discipline (e.g. Herman et al. 2022). Archaeologists are only starting to struggle to to unravel the cost in fossil fuels of travel to field work and academic conferences, to process increasingly complex digital datasets, and to publish the findings of archaeological work.

Fossil fuels are central to the development of the modern world. As Stephanie LeMenager puts it, the birth of petromodernity has made us “living oil.” Archaeology is inseparable from modernity and remains both dependent and complicit in its development even as it has sought to subject our dependence on carbon fuel to increasingly incisive critique. Mobility, in particular, stands as central aspect of both modernity and archaeology. The ability of archaeologists to travel to sites around the world, the role archaeology plays allowing extractive industries exchange profits and petroleum for the destruction of heritage, and the rapid rate of displacement and precarity among a workforce that is buffeted by the relentless flow of capital reveals our complicated dependence oil.