Writing Wednesday on a Thursday: Modernity and Oil

There is much written on petromodernity that it hardly seems writing more about it even if it is for a book that deals with the intersection of oil and photography. That said, I can’t ignore it, so I decided to put together some words here on modernity and oil. This is from my evolving, fragmentary, and chaotic book project. You can check out the outline for my book here.  

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. 

Stephanie LeMenager coined the phrase “petromodernity” to describe the way that oil has produced new forms of American life in the 20th century. 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 comes 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. 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. 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. 

Considering the deep entanglement of our modern world and oil, it is hardly surprising that the development of archaeology also parallels our growing dependence on carbon based energy. 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. It is hardly surprising that archaeology as a discipline also came of age in parallel with the rise of the nation state and waves of 20th century identity politics. The 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. 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. Academic archaeologists have increasingly offered critical resistance to the entanglement of archaeology and oil whether in the context of heritage and culture resource management (MacEachern 2010; Plets 2016) or in the context of the energy committed to maintaining the professional practices in the discipline. 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.