Writing Wednesday: Revising the Introduction

I’m neck deep in revising my book manuscript on oil, photography, archaeology, and The Bakken. I wrote a bit about what I was planning to do last week, and I am more or less on schedule despite struggling to find the time and the space to write consistently. 

Here is part of my revised introduction (which I called a “prelude” in my earlier organization of the book) which establishes the organization of the book. At the suggestion of the reviewers, I’ve integrated some of the key authors that the book engages with here in the introduction to the chapters on the recommendation of the reviewers. You can compare what I have here to what I wrote in January last year. I think their guidance has made this section better.

The book is organized around four chapters with three parts each. The style of these chapters deliberately mimics the capacity of photographs to create fragments. These fragments embrace the the potential of abrupt juxtapositions to produce unexpected connections. Each section of the book, despite being aggregated into chapters, has ties to the others, but also stands alone as a statement much in the way that a photograph stands alone as a statement. As part of this fragmentary and fragmented approach, the sections offer context to the photographs, but do not draw upon the photos as evidence nor do they provide an template for reading the photographs that encourages a particular outcome or interpretation. Instead, this introduction offers a broadly mimetic parallel to the photographs which is open ended and riven with potential contradictions, inconsistencies, and challenges to a linear narrative.

The first chapter of this book starts with our fieldwork in the Bakken oil patch. Three short sections provide some preliminary remarks on the various North Dakota oil booms, the study of workforce housing, and the character of the following book. I discuss the challenges that led us to use photography as our primary method for documenting and encountering the Bakken and how our first publications engaged with the concepts of mobility led us both to the experiences of displacement and, ironically, tourism. My colleagues and I used the heuristic of tourism to trace the connections between settler-colonial and productive landscapes in the Bakken. Scholars such as Nick Estes, Nestor Silva, and Sebastian Braun do more to emphasize indigenous perspectives on the boom, and Estes, in particular, introduced discussed the boom and the colonial encounter against the the longer trajectory of indigenous time. This concepts of movement, displacement, booms, and time emerged as inchoate within the project’s first publications and those of other scholars working the region and form a foundation for the work of this book.

The second chapter of the book situates 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, and this means the archaeology of oil. To do this, this chapter connects the archaeology of worker housing — especially in the works of Stephen Mzozowski, Michael Roller and Paul Shackel — to the emerging field of the archaeology of oil. Chris Witmore’s view of oil using Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobject which exceeds our capacity to append its totality presents a theoretical perspective on the expansive character of Caroline Hein’s concept of “petroleumscapes.” Thinking of the archaeology of oil at this scale offers a context not just to workforce housing in the Bakken, but also the broader field of archaeology of the contemporary world. I conclude this chapter by considering how oil suffuses Alfredo González-Ruibal’s “supermodernity” and inscribes violence of the contemporary moment across the Anthropocene.

The third chapter zooms in more narrowly on the relationship between oil and modernity and pays particularly attention to the role that oil played in the unprecedented mobility of the modern world. Stephanie LeMenager coins the term “petromodernity” to describe the entanglement of petroleum and the modern world and described our contemporary world as “living oil” which has shaped notions of work, masculinity, democracy, colonialism, and archaeology. The literal viscosity of oil made it easy to transport and made it essential to the working of aircraft and automobile engines and contributed Chris Witmore’s understanding of oil as a viscous hyperobject as well as Reza Negarestani’s fantastic view of oil as lubricating the world. This introduced a new era of mobility which allowed and sometimes required individuals to move at the increasing speed of capital. This inspired a century of “petrofiction” ranging from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! to the America road novel or Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) as well as a growing interest among archaeologists into mobility, road, roadside features, and even vehicles themselves. 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. Inexpensive gasoline fueled the growth of the post-war suburb which embodied this tension by relying on growing road networks around cities while also offering the illusion of the fixed, persistent, security of rural life.

Photography represented another manifestation of the tension between the fixity and mobility. The New Topographics and their successors produced photographs that set the vast timelessness of the western landscape against the marks of human interventions: suburbs, parking lots, roads, and pipelines. The fourth chapter of this book makes the argument that photography sought to capture the dynamism of the modern world by creating a fragmented sense of stability. Photographs produce permanent objects that appear to defy the mobility and contingency of the modern world. This effort to create permanence through the practice of photography relied on strategies of fragmentation. In this way, photography sought to arrest the experience of acceleration that made it more and more difficult to isolate moments in the continuous experience. The speed with which modern technology could transport information, goods, and ourselves over vast distances causing abrupt encounters with discontinuity to punctuate every day life. These experienced influenced modernist writers and thinkers who argued for the disintegration of the human experience and challenged the capacity of narrative to reproduce reality. Nora Goldschmidt has show how the imagist poets — such as T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Ezra Pound — deliberately invoked fragments as a gesture toward the discontinuities and disjunctions of the modern world. Walter Benjamin witness the multiple temporality present in the Parisian Arcades and inspired the work of Shannon Lee Dawdy and Laurent Olivier as they have sought to find new metaphors to make sense of the contemporary. Photographs embody multiple temporality by dint of their contemporaneity and resist reduction to narrative. Michael Shanks’s “photowork” and Hicks’s and Leslie McFadyen’s “photology” emphasize the duration present in the photograph and the temporal instability of the photograph’s contemporaneity. In doing so, they make clear that photographs resist narrative. The final part of this section introduces Byung-Chul Hans’s approach to the fragmentary present not as an opportunity to reconcile fragments into new or counter narratives, but as an opportunity for contemplation and new forms of understanding.

The conclusion recognizes photography as a key tool in documenting the modern world and for understanding the central role that oil and other carbon based fuels both have 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 temporary homes of workers in the oil patch. This introduces a human scale to the expansiveness of petromodernity and anchors our work in fragmented expression of human experience.