Writing Wednesday: Revisions to my Book

The last couple of weeks have been focused on revising my archaeology, oil, and photography book. At some point, I’ll need to settle on a proper title, but for now the need for a complete and revised manuscript seems to trump other issues.

Revising doesn’t do much for the old “Writing Wednesday” blog post, but it is vital aspect of my writing process and it seems worth sharing. I’ve tentatively told my press that I will have a complete manuscript ready for copyediting done by May 1. This seems optimistic, but not impossible.

To get this done, I’ve identified three writing tasks.

Prelude

One of the challenges of this book is that it was meant to be an introduction to the photographs. Over time, however, it has become something else. That means, ironically, what was designed to be an introduction now needs an introduction. The manuscript has crept closer to a “minigraph” than anything else, I realize that I need an introduction that both establishes the key theoretical and historical touchstones for my book and also makes clear my work’s contribution.

This means foregrounding the key works that informed my perspective in archaeological photography (Leslie McFadyen and Dan Hicks, Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis, and Michael Shanks), in the study of oil (Stephanie LeMenager, Timothy Mitchell, and Imre Szeman), in archaeology of the contemporary world (Chris Witmore, Alfredo González-Ruibal, and Shannon Dawdy) as well as broader theorists (Timothy Morton, Benjamin, Han, Nora Goldschmidt). All I need to do here is point forward to the book itself. 

The larger task and one that I’ve shied away from is explaining how my work contributes to (gestures wildly) some field (mainly, probably, archaeology of the contemporary world). I can actually hear my old buddy Dimitri Nakassis asking me: “what question is your work answering?” And, of course, imaginary Dimitri is right, and I probably can’t quite answer that. This is mostly because my work is “discursive” to a fault, but I do think I can suggest that my work presents not just a distinct perspective on archaeological photography (on that might be useful) but also gives the reader the photos themselves. 

Revisions

So far, I’ve revised the first three parts of the book (and I’ve not re-written the prelude that I described above), and I’ve saved the most complicated section for last. Section 4 is titled “Photography and Archaeology of the Contemporary World,” and it traces the relationship between photography, archaeology, fragmentation, and narrative. This is where I need to fold Byung-Chul Han into my work more fully. His work will help me not only explain why the contemporary lacks a narrative (and can’t be made to produce or conform to a narrative), but also how the reader should engage with these fragments. One of my reviewers argued that fragments have no meaning. I think Han would disagree (or at least say that if photographs constitute fragments, they are far from meaningless). In fact, I think Han would argue that our inability to make sense of fragments is a product of both the collapse of narrative and our reluctance to dwell in a fragment, to linger, and to find meaning from the fragment itself.

It also directs the reader to the photographs in the book and the archive that they represent. 

Appendix

The biggest lift of my current revisions is writing the appendix that I casually outlined in my post last Wednesday. The appendix will basically outline the basic conclusions from our work in the Bakken. It’ll be around 5000 words, summative and organized across three scales: the landscape, the camp, and the unit. Each section will include select case studies.