Elemental exposure: Ontolocational politics and the limits of negative ontology

Abstract

This commentary responds to Özge Can Doğmuş's account of vanishing lakes and the negative ontology of space. It argues that the article's powerful treatment of absence, withdrawal, and finitude can be extended by bringing negative ontology into conversation with ontolocational politics and elemental thinking. Ontolocational politics, my term, specifies how exposure to finitude is patterned across place, infrastructure, social position, and the life course. Elemental thinking, in turn, complicates the language of loss by situating lakes within wider circulations of water, air, earth, dust, salinity, and sediment. From this perspective, disappearance is not only world-loss but the uneven relocation of elemental conditions of life. The commentary therefore affirms Doğmuş's central provocation while arguing that absence must be understood as situated, redistributed, and materially consequential. That argument leads to the conclusion that an elemental ontolocational geography can sharpen debates about care, justice, evidence, and responsibility in a finite world.

Özge Can Doğmuş's article, The ontology of absence: Vanishing lakes, care, and the limits of human geography offers a compelling provocation. Advancing a ‘negative ontology of space’, the work reframes vanishing lakes as hydrological crises or governance failures and ontological events. These are moments in which disappearance discloses the fragility of dwelling, or the uneven exposure to finitude experienced by humans and the more-than-human, or the limits of managerial reasoning. Effectively, Doğmuş extends political ecology and hydrosocial scholarship into geo-philosophical registers. Thus, disappearance may be construed as a remediable deficit, yet it may be as, or more productive to consider it a condition with which to rework ideas about evidence, obligation, and justice.

This conceptual and political pivot matters. Treating absence as constitutive calls attention to the existential weight of social and environmental change. In Doğmuş's terms, cracked shorelines and salt-encrusted lake basins are ecological indicators and events in which worlds and processes of worlding are (un)made. In my terms, they are powerful sites in which to think about the elements. While Doğmuş does not adopt an elemental framework, the sensibilities she invokes are implicit (Engelmann, 2025; Engelmann and McCormack, 2021; Hawkins, 2020). The retreat of lakes has, at its centre, the element of water and it also summons dust, salinity, and sediment and draws air and earth into processes through which absence is materialised and experienced.

Treating absence as constitutive also unsettles longstanding tendencies among human geographers to view loss as a secondary effect of other processes rather than as a spatial condition in its own right. In much geographical work, absence has been read as an outcome of influences such as ruptures to flow, production and reproduction and as part of how presence itself is registered – each of which is examined next. Those using a negative ontology challenge that reading and may therefore treat absence as something remaining once something else has vanished. And they may treat absence as an active condition implicated in how relations and capacities are (re)organised and (re)distributed such that worlds are rendered more or less liveable.

Doğmuş's invitation to shift how we think about vanishing lakes to account for negative ontology thus unsettles enduring investments in ideas about flow as a central analytic. From early work on space–time compression to recent accounts of global circulation, mobility, and relational connectivity, we have repeatedly foregrounded movement as basic to sociospatial life (Massey, 2005; Sheller, 2020). In such accounts, interruption appears as blockage, breakdown, or chokepoint (Carse et al., 2020). Absence is read as a lack of flow. Treating it as constitutive reorients attention from circulation to withdrawal. Doing so prompts questions about how retreat is elemental in reorganising spatial relations, redistributing exposure, and producing new forms of latency and fixity, particularly in terms of slow emergencies (Anderson et al., 2020) and spaces of negativity.

When absence is viewed as constitutive, new approaches to interruption and disruption in Marxist, feminist, and more-than-human geographies are required to understand how spaces and processes of production and reproduction are transformed. Among possible approaches are several Doğmuş refers to, including landscapes, infrastructures, subjectivities, and socio-natural relations and all are reconfigured by the presence of absence, rather than diminished by it. She maps how, in some – including foundational – accounts, absence has been viewed as a residue of deindustrialisation, abandonment, dispossession, or uneven development (Katz, 2001; Mackenzie and Rose, 1983; Mitchell, 2021; Smith, 1984). A constitutive account of absence neither denies those processes nor refuses to treat loss as their aftermath. Instead, absence becomes a generative condition (Bissell et al., 2021). As such, it shapes what can be produced, maintained, or imagined vis-à-vis production, including in terms of social infrastructures (Hall, 2022) or more-than-human care (Benschop, 2021).

Finally, Doğmuş's reorientation unsettles how geographers and others might then privilege presence. Even where geographers have turned to absence in studies of ruins, haunting, or vacancy, such absence is often tethered to other terms such as trace, memory, or lack (Edensor, 2005; Maddern and Adey, 2008). It remains derivative of prior presence. Granting it autonomous ontological status has implications for our capacity to flourish, even in situations of profound loss (Stratford, 2025). Doing so reveals how withdrawal shapes space without reference to an original fullness (Meier et al., 2020). It also shows how absence might form atmospheres, infrastructures, and modes of dwelling through what is no longer – and may never have been – present but remains operative (Frers, 2013).

An ontolocational politics of vanishing lakes?

Thus, absence does not operate in abstraction: vanishing and exposure to finitude are never placeless and – in my terms – they always involve ontolocational politics. That term, my own, names how identities, capacities, and claims emerge in the co-constitution of being, place, and movement across varied geographies. It foregrounds how where, when, and with whom life unfolds and shapes recognition, power, and possibility.

The ontolocational politics of vanishing lakes unfolds unevenly across regions, infrastructures, social positions, and life-course stages. Vanishing lakes disclose fragility in variegated ways, concentrating exposure in some locations and displacing or buffering it in others. So where does fragility gather, and for whom? How do life's ontolocational and political coordinates shape the capacity to endure, repair, or project futures under withdrawal, vanishing, and absence? How might these questions change when vanishing lakes are understood as lost places and the condensation of wider elemental dynamics or new spaces of possibility?

In what follows, I extend Doğmuş's ideas about negative ontology in two ways mindful of those questions. First, I suggest the ideas could be thickened in conversation with ontolocational politics: finitude is patterned as/in timespace. Second, I suggest that elemental thinking complicates the language of loss by situating lakes within processes of redistribution and transformation. Thus, disappearance and absence involve world-loss and the uneven relocation of elemental conditions of life.

From negative ontology to ontolocational politics

Doğmuş has referred to ‘uneven exposure to finitude’, a formulation reframing justice as more than allocation. In my reading, unevenness is patterned in specific spatial, infrastructural, and temporal arrangements. Ontolocational politics names them. It attends to how the where of life – its emplacement within particular ecologies, economies, and infrastructures – conditions what forms of endurance remain possible.

Consider three registers. First, regional differentiation. In some lake basins, disappearance manifests as rupture: fisheries collapse, agriculture falters, migration intensifies (Mahanty et al., 2023). Elsewhere, a similar withdrawal is encountered as atmospheric latency – dust plumes, contagion, respiratory harm – in diverse settings (Eickelkamp, 2024). In other contexts, lake recession enters through metrics: satellite imagery, declining storage volumes, predictive modelling (Kamaruzzaman et al., 2025). The ontological disclosure of finitude thus takes distinct forms depending on the locational configuration of exposure.

Second, infrastructural mediation. Dams, canals, diversion schemes, and commodity chains redistribute water and its afterlives (Heyns, 2025). A lake's retreat is bound to prior reallocations that stabilise other worlds at a distance (Ballestero, 2019). Ontolocational politics asks how infrastructures concentrate fragility in some places, buffer it in others, and shape whose worlds are rendered precarious first (Cantillana et al., 2024).

Third, disappearance. This is differentiated across the ontolocational politics of the life course. As Doğmuş sets out, people encounter loss and disappearance in varied ways across their lives. For children and young people in receding lake regions, future foreclosure may shape schooling, livelihood expectations, family strategies, or the likelihood of migration. For adults, lake loss may intensify pressures related to work, care, debt, relocation, and household continuity. For elders, withdrawal may register as the loss of places that hold intergenerational knowledge, embodied orientation, and the accumulated evidence of a life lived. For those embedded in mobile or precarious labour circuits, disappearance may unsettle dwelling by tightening the link between environmental change and forced movement.

In sum, negative ontology foregrounds the fragility of dwelling. Ontolocational politics specifies how that fragility is spatially distributed and temporally sequenced. Disclosure is legible as an ontological event and a geographically differentiated exposure.

Elemental thinking: from loss to redistribution

A second extension of Doğmuş's ideas about negative ontology concerns lakes’ ontological status. She rightly resists the temptation to treat lakes as mere resources. Yet if disappearance is framed as a loss of worlds, might it retain a subtle container ontology: the lake as a bounded place whose withdrawal signals absence? Elemental thinking rescales the problem (Macauley, 2010). Lakes are places and also condensations within broader elemental circulations – atmospheric evaporation, subterranean flows, seasonal pulses, planetary hydrological cycles. When a lake vanishes, water may be diverted, extracted, evaporated, commodified, or poisoned. Its absence in one location may correspond to intensified, transfigured presence elsewhere (Visentin and Kaaristo, 2024).

From this vantage point, disappearance entails redistribution. Irrigation regimes sustain distant agricultural economies. Urban expansion stabilises metropolitan growth. Hydropower infrastructures generate energy for industrial networks. Simultaneously, exposed lakebeds produce dust, salinity, and heavy metal dispersal that accumulate in bodies and soils. Elements are re-routed. Thinking about them as such complicates negative ontology without negating it. Withdrawal remains real, but it is accompanied by transformation. The questions remain what is lost, how are elemental forces reorganised, how does such reorganisation redistribute the conditions of life, and how, for whom, and how does all that register? It is here that ontolocational politics and elemental thinking converge.

Towards an elemental ontolocational geography

Doğmuş situates care as a hinge between ontological disclosure and responsibility. I take that insight seriously while extending it by specifying the ontolocational distribution of exposure to finitude, and by situating disappearance within wider elemental processes of redistribution and transformation. Read together, ontolocational politics and elemental thinking help specify negative ontology's conditions of operation: where fragility gathers, through which relations it is mediated, and by what elemental processes it is redistributed.

From this point of view, care remains a response to threatened worlds and is a situated practice of negotiating reconfigured elemental conditions. Care work unfolds amid saline soils, altered rainfall, exposed sediments, unstable shorelines, dust-laden air, and the social infrastructures that absorb or fail to absorb these changes. Such care is material, spatial, and political. It requires effort to sustain where life's conditions are altered, displaced, or volatile.

Correspondingly, ideas about justice tend to ‘thicken’. Asking what is just means thinking about how some losses are measurable, others relegated to utilitarian ideas about impact rather than the felt effects of atmosphere, memory, or grief. Equally, those seeking to advance justice must address elemental asymmetries: some places receive irrigation, energy, or urban growth; others receive dust, salinity, or toxicity. In this sense, disappearance is both an environmental deficit and the unpredictable and uneven redistribution of elemental capacities and forces.

Here is where ontolocational politics registers. Vanishing lakes disclose finitude somewhere, for someone, and in relation to specific histories and geographies. No one and no thing is exposed to disappearance in the same way. None possesses the same capacities to endure, move, repair, or imagine because the conditions are always located, relational, and asymmetrical.

An elemental ontolocational geography would therefore ask how does absence materialise, where does exposure accumulate, and how are elemental processes rerouted under pressure. It would ask how water's withdrawal activates the elements such that what vanishes in one place may reappear elsewhere in altered form. It would also ask how these transformations reshape the horizons within which life can be sustained.

If negative ontology reveals the fragility of dwelling, ontolocational politics and elemental thinking specify its coordinates and conditions. Disappearance is not only world-loss. It is the uneven relocation of elemental conditions of life: an ongoing reorganisation of where and how dwelling remains possible in a finite and profoundly differentiated world.