TOXIC WITHDRAWAL
Graham Harman theorizes withdrawal in his object-oriented ontology (OOO) - that objects or their qualities never fully touch, always at least partially receded from one another. Levi Bryant, another founding member of OOO, has noted the ethical and political tensions that exist (though never explicitly by Harman) in Harman's withdrawal, claiming it is "a protest against all ambitions of domination, mastery, and exploitation." Bryant expands on his claim linking withdrawal to the themes of both hope and caution: the hope "of being otherwise... that there's always an excess that allows the possibility of the 'more,' the encore, and the otherwise" for the former and the caution against "narcissistic pretensions of mastery... that entities always harbor hidden surprises and are liable to behave in ways that we don't expect" for the latter1
.This caution has been ignored throughout history, especially with regards to industrial processes, such as mining and smelting natural ores and other substances to produce technological products. Humankind's attempts at "mastery" over nature often result in toxic qualities of these processes infiltrating the natural landscape. However, these effects are often invisible, withdrawing from being immediately at hand - often only appearing through statistical data, health symptoms, and sensationalist media. While Jennifer Peeples notes that the toxic sublime is an emerging art aesthetic that can be appropriated to aid in the environmental communication of toxic landscapes, these images only explore the qualities of the toxins that have permeated through the environment2. The toxic substances themselves are impossible to fully view aesthetically; they have withdrawn.