Writing Wednesday: Organizing the Book

After a week of travel, it’s a bit hard to get back into the swing of things, but I managed a little time to write on Monday and even on Tuesday amid a bunch of grading. My main focus has been on re-reading my manuscript and trying to give it a more coherence. As readers of this blog know, I’ve been concerned with fragmentation both as an aspect of early 20th-century modernism and as part of my early 21st-century writing process.

On Monday, I started to add some verbiage making the organization of my little book (my micrograph) a bit more transparent to the reader. In turn, it’ll help guide my own efforts to organize my writing.

For those of you who don’t know, my book is essentially a book of photographs taken over a few years at a “man camp” in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. After pitching it to several presses, I found one who was interested, but they asked that I add a substantial (and ideally substantive) explanatory essay to these photographs. At first, I grumbled about it, but once I started to write, I found it pretty enjoyable to articulate my thoughts. 

I produced a little outline that looks like this:

1. Introduction

2.1. Archaeology of work force house both in the US and World Archaeology. 2.2. Industrial archaeology and the archaeology of extractive industries. 2.3. Archaeology of the contemporary world.

3.1. Oil and Modernity 3.2. Mobility and Modernity: Viscosity  3.3. Fixity in the age mobility: the suburb.

4.1. Photography and archaeology: permanence in the age of ephemerality. 4.2. Fixity and fragments. 4.3. Narrative and fragments.

5. Conclusion

On Monday, I produced a bit text describing the organization of the book. 

The book is organized around the four, parts of three chapters each. The first part of this book starts with our fieldwork in the Bakken oil patch. Three short chapters provide some preliminary remarks on the North Dakota oil boom, the study of work force housing, and the character of the following book.

 I then make an effort to situate our work amid recent debates on the role of archaeology in providing critical perspectives not only on the development of the modern industrialized world, but also on our contemporary society. Industrial archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary world are, in many ways, the archaeology of fossil fuels and during the 20th and 21st century, this means the archaeology of oil. 

The third set of three chapters further excavates the relationship between oil and modernity and pays particularly attention to the role that oil played in the unprecedented mobility of the modern world. The very viscosity of oil made it easy to transport and made it essential to the working of aircraft and automobile engines. This introduced a new era of mobility which allowed and sometimes required individuals to move at the increasing speed of capital. Workforce housing in the Bakken represents just one expression of the accelerating world powered by petroleum. At the same time, a desire for stability and fixity continued to influence the shape of domestic life. The desire for property ownership, in particular, seem to defy the dynamic mobility of the modern age. 

Photography represented another manifestation of the tension between the fixity and mobility. The final part of this book makes the argument that photography sought to capture the dynamism of the modern world by creating a sense of fixity and stability. Photography not only sought to create a sense of permanence amid the mobility and contingency of the modern world. This effort to create permanence through the practice of photography relied on strategies of fragmentation. Efforts to isolate moments in the continuous experience of the modernity created a sense of fragmentation. This influenced modernist writers and thinkers who argued for the disintegration of the human experience and challenged the capacity of narrative to reproduce reality. Archaeologists have similarly come to recognize the distinct role of photography in the discourse of modernity. 

The conclusion recognizes photography as a key tool in documenting the modern world and this situates photography as a key tool for understanding the central role that oil and other carbon based fuels has played in the formation of the contemporary world and will play in defining our increasingly perilous future. Our project used photography — the quintessentially modern instrument for reproducing reality — as a way to document the homes of oil field workers.