Writing Wednesday: Petromodernity, Mobility, and Viscosity

Over the last month of so, I’ve been slogging through some revisions on my book manuscript focusing on archaeology, oil, and photography. I’ve basically outlined it the book here. Last week, I posted the first part of the third chapter which explored the intersection of oil, modernity, and archaeology.

This second part of this chapter focuses on mobility and petromodernity (with some attention to viscosity). This is all setting up the final chapter of the book which argues that fragmentation is a response to mobility and viscosity and photography’s capacity to freeze movement plays an important role in this.

3.2. Petromodernity, Mobility, and Viscosity

Among the most obvious features of the Bakken oil patch and petromodernity is the prevalence of mobility. From the endless rumble of trucks across the Bakken to the sleek and angular design of mobile homes and RVs, the landscape is pregnant with motion. We recognized the central role of mobility in the Bakken from our first visits to the region. As our project developed, we spent as many productive hours in the truck traveling between our study sites as we did on our sites. This time in motion not only gave us hours to discuss what we were seeing in the Bakken, but informed our decision to document the region through the use of a tourist guide (Caraher and Weber 2017). The guide as a genre not only reflected the hours spent driving through the oil patch, but also foregrounded the role that ”petromobility” played in the production of the tourist and ultimately modernity (Follett 2023; Bondre 2023). The parallel between our mobility as archaeologists, the mobility of oil workers, and the mobility of capital in the Bakken oil patch created a moving target for archaeological investigation.

In many ways mobility is the dominant feature of the modern age. Fossil fuels made unprecedented mobility possible (Penrose 2007; Merriman 2013). By the 1920s, cars powered by oil were transforming personal mobility which scholars sometimes call “automobility” (Urry 2004; Sheller 2004). The close connection between mobility and oil is nowhere more obvious than in the opening scenes of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927) where “Bunny” Ross and his Dad are barreling across the California landscape in a car on the way to negotiate an oil lease. By the mid-20th century, the “road novel” had become such an institution in American fiction that Amativ Ghosh could joke that it was only a matter of time before a graduate student would calculate the carbon emissions from a classic American road novel (Ghosh 1992). By the end of the 20th century, mobility in “petrofiction” as often referred to works like Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) which traced the displacement of a community from an Arabian oasis as a result of the discovery of oil. It offers a tragic counter point to Wallace Stegner’s heroic description of Thomas Barger’s discovery of oil on the Arabia peninsula (Stegner 1971; Vitalis 2007). In the 21st century, we see oil as both an agent of displacement and a fuel for the very displacements it affects. Gilles Châtelet refers to these individuals as petronomads (2014).

Archaeologists have shown interest in roads and travel in the past (Kalaycı 2023) and in the contemporary period (Merriman 2013; Penrose 2007) as well as the various roadside sites that support motorized travel particularly in the UK where archaeology of the contemporary world is rather more developed (e.g. Jones 1998 study of petrol stations). Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have done even more research in these areas (for a recent survey see: Sheller 2021). In particular, the archaeology of the contemporary world has long understood the challenges of active site archaeology where the objects of study are in motion. One of the early classics in the sub-discipline was the “excavation” of a 1991 Ford Transit van used by an archaeological field projects (Myers 2010). The very mobility of this vehicle shaped the kind of assemblages it produced. Automobiles are not only among the most valuable objects that many people own, but are also spatially and temporally diverse assemblages. The van itself, like most vehicles the late 20th and early 21st centuries, represented multiple places of manufacturing brought together only in final assembly. The objects deposited over the course of the van’s history likewise reflected its mobility by connecting the van to various sites of activity over its 15 year history.

The archaeological attention to abandoned cars at a Finish border crossing demonstrates how similar methods applied to different vehicles can contribute to our understanding of mobility on a transnational scale (Seitsonen 2017). The vehicles showed relatively few signs of their use by migrants who had crossed into Finland north of the Arctic circle: some cold weather clothing and blankets, notes with Russian and English phrases, addresses for relatives, cheap meals and drinks, and sometimes toys. The ephemerality of the migrant in the material record is characteristic of their mobility (Kourelis 2019). In the Bakken, mobility compensates for the precarity of employment and the volatility of the oil boom. When a resident left a Type 2 camp towing their trailer behind them, for example, they sometimes left piles of trash, abandoned mudrooms, and outlines left by weather skirting around the base of the RV. Often, at the height of the boom, the operators of the RV parks cleaned up after the previous resident has departed in order to make the site usable again. Type 1 camps often sold communities on the ephemerality of their installations by juxtaposing them to more permanent housing solutions which require greater investments in infrastructure and risk glutting the housing market once the boom subsides. When the need for a Type 1 camp was over, the camp could disappear.

The RV present throughout the Bakken demonstrate how “automobility” shaped the living situations of the residents in Type 2 (and Type 3) camps. The streamlined character of most RVs, exemplified by the iconic Airstream style campers with their aviation inspired shape and aluminum construction, projected their mobility even when arranged in neat lines in the RV park (Sheller 2014, 103-104). The RVs also evoked the culture of recreational travel intrinsic to their name “recreational vehicle” (Hart et al. 2002, Twitchell 2014). The parallel forms between the arrangement of RVs at tourist destinations, national parks, and other recreational areas and those of the Bakken workforce housing sites reflect their shared origins in automobility. In the Bakken, the arrangement of RV lots encouraged space for both the RV and a parking area. As a result, the RV and the car or truck occupied nearly equal and parallel spaces in the lot emphasizing the importance of mobility at these sites. The use of shipping pallets to create surfaces and the storage of tires, as two very common examples, further infuse the space with a sense mobility. These parallel origins likewise contributed to our inclination to describe the Bakken through the genre of the tourist guide.

A view of RVs, roads, and routes as crucial to the modern petroliumscape as oil well, refineries, and pipelines demonstrates how crucial the viscosity of oil and provided by oil is for our understanding of modern and contemporary mobility. Mitchell argues that because oil flows and can be pumped, we can transport it over long distances with relatively ease especially compared to coal (2011). Our ability to transport oil over long distances in pipeline relies on the viscosity of oil itself to facilitate its own mobility. Consequently, it subverts modern notions of place by blurring political borders and not only embodying viscous mobility, but also making it possible as a fuel. For Reza Negarestani, in his philosophical novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, the viscosity of oil combined with its thickness and stickiness to account for its ubiquity across political and social discourses; it suffuses colonialism, warfare, and capitalism as an uncontrollable agent of petromodernity (2008). The result of this viscosity is the gradual spread of both modernity as well as its consequences. The most obvious implication of this for the Bakken is that the mobility of oil enabled the mobility of the workforce who came to the area at the start of various booms. The challenges of controlling its viscosity (and volatility) required new expressions of colonialism manifest in risks associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline and toxic spills that transformed the entire region into a zone of sacrifice (Estes 2023; Silva 2022; Braun and Thomas 2023; Sheller 2021, 50). Its viscosity transformed the remote region of North Dakota and Montana and made it accessible to extractive industries. In this way, oil made not only possible the mobility necessary for its extraction, but also the mobility at the core of contemporary society.

The darker side of the mobility that oil provides and requires is that it has also fed the growing displacement of populations around the world. The emphasis on mobility among the workers in the boom, for example, represents the precarity of their employment and in many cases, their displacement from regions with deeper economic issues. Negarastani and Munif are not obscure when they attributes oil to the cause for many conflicts including those that have wracked the Middle East over the last half century. The displacement of refugees from war torn Iraq and Syria has led to the proliferation of camps and provisional and temporary housing along the borders of Europe. The role of oil in climate change, perhaps the most abstract, but totalizing expression of its viscosity. It is tragically ironic to note the reuse of mobile housing units deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Type 1 camps in the Bakken (Caraher 2016) and the parallel between workforce housing in the Bakken and that used to house refugees from the California wildfires. This presents a material connection between individuals employed in the petroleum industry with those displaced as a result of global climate change.

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