The Ethics of Attention: 1 Attention Is Not Perception

At first glance, the distinction seems pedantic. Of course attention has something to do with perception. Of course it involves seeing, hearing, noticing. In everyday talk, we treat paying attention as though it were simply perception intensified — more clarity, more resolution, more uptake.

But this assumption quietly misleads us. Attention is not perception turned up. It is a different relational posture altogether.

Within a relational ontology, neither perception nor attention is a matter of accessing a pre-given world. There is no unconstrued substrate from which content can be extracted. What we call perception is already a construal — a stabilised cut in the field of potential relations that allows phenomena to appear as recognisable, inhabitable forms.

Perception, in this sense, settles.

It brings a field into workable coherence. It binds distinctions tightly enough for orientation, coordination, and continuity. Without such settling, no phenomenon could appear at all. Perception is therefore indispensable — but it is not neutral. Every settled construal closes off other possible relations, other possible ways the phenomenon might have been held.

Attention operates differently.

Attention does not undo construal, but it modulates it. Where perception stabilises, attention sustains. Where perception binds the cut, attention resists tightening it too quickly. Attention is not about taking in more; it is about remaining with what has appeared without demanding that it resolve itself prematurely.

This is why attention cannot be reduced to information processing. Information presupposes settled forms that can be transmitted, consumed, and exhausted. Attention, by contrast, is durational. It dwells. It holds a relation open long enough for meaning to continue to emerge rather than collapse into outcome.

The confusion between perception and attention is therefore not merely conceptual. It is ethical.

If attention is treated as nothing more than noticing, then its withdrawal appears inconsequential — a lapse, a distraction, a private failure. But if attention is understood as a mode of participation in meaning-making, then withholding attention is never nothing. It alters what can occur. It narrows the space of possible meanings. In some contexts, it constitutes a refusal.

To attend is not to extract significance from a phenomenon, but to remain answerable to it.

This is also why attention cannot be automated. Perceptual stabilisation can be delegated. Pattern recognition, classification, and discrimination can be performed by machines precisely because they operate over already-settled distinctions. Attention, however, involves commitment without guarantee. It requires patience, endurance, and a willingness to let meaning take time — including the possibility that it may never fully arrive.

Beckett’s work makes this distinction palpable. His writing offers little reward to perceptual cleverness. There are no hidden structures waiting to be uncovered, no final interpretive synthesis to be achieved. What is demanded instead is attention: the capacity to stay with repetition, delay, and minimal variation without converting them too quickly into significance.

To read Beckett perceptually is to become frustrated or bored. To read him attentively is to encounter the ethics of waiting.

This matters because, on a relational account, meaning is not located in texts, objects, or experiences themselves. Meaning is actualised in the sustained relation between a phenomenon and a participant who remains open to its ongoing play. Attention is the condition of that openness.

Perception allows phenomena to appear as something.

Attention allows them to continue to matter.

For this reason, attention should not be confused with effort. Effort strains toward outcome and mastery. Attention relaxes into duration. Effort asks what is this for? Attention asks how can I stay with this without foreclosing it?

Contemporary discourse often treats attention as a scarce resource to be captured, managed, or optimised. This language already betrays the error. Resources are consumed. Attention, properly understood, is not spent. It is given — and what is given can also be withheld.

To begin speaking of the ethics of attention, then, is not to moralise focus or prescribe better habits. It is to recognise attention as a constitutive dimension of participation in meaning itself — one that carries responsibility precisely because it offers no guarantee of reward.

In the episodes that follow, we will explore what attention demands, how it can be exhausted, and why it requires constraint. But for now, the first cut must hold:

Attention is not perception.

It is the discipline of staying.

Not in order to extract meaning.

But so that meaning may continue to occur.