Perceiving Extraction: Landscape, Use, and the Conditions of Visuality

This dissertation argues that environmental work, from resource extraction projects to environmental assessment, and from Land Art to eco-criticism, privileges harm rhetorically. This means, among other things, that such work carries along with it a sense of past, present, and future destruction. As a result, resource extraction companies, and the settler-colonial State, have a conception of the violence that they create and that they participate in. I show that the conception they have requires an infrastructural framework, one which I read out of environmental assessment and land-management documents. These documents set the visual conditions not just for extraction projects, but for environmental objects in general. The Environmental Humanities have rarely treated the rhetoric of management. But I argue that it not only materially produces their object of study, but also produces the field of visibility in which that object appears and others don't—establishing the criteria for what counts as a claim and what registers as an effect. I suggest that this creates a visual regime which finds a parallel in, for instance, the work of Edward Burtynsky and Timothy Morton. However, while these discourses try to manage the appearance of violence, suggesting that ongoing destruction can't be seen, they can't control it. Via a reading of the Land Art movement, I show how landscape is one place where these conflicts appear. And through Chantal Akerman's documentary film, among others, and an analysis of the colonial dispute at Standing Rock, I construct a contrary visual regime, one which recognizes ongoing non-fungible destruction