The Ethics of Attention: 3 Saturation and the Exhaustion of Attention

If waiting risks being mistaken for emptiness, saturation risks being mistaken for abundance.

Contemporary culture often treats excess as a virtue. More information, more content, more perspectives, more connectivity — all appear as signs of openness, inclusivity, and richness. Where waiting seems inert, saturation seems alive.

From the standpoint of an ethics of attention, however, saturation poses a distinct danger.

Attention, as we have seen, is durational. It requires time, restraint, and the capacity to remain with what appears without forcing it to resolve. Saturation undermines this capacity not by closing meaning too quickly, but by overwhelming the very conditions under which attention can be sustained.

Saturation does not refuse openness. It multiplies it.

But openness without constraint is not inexhaustible. When too many relations are activated at once, none can be held long enough to matter. The result is not richness, but flattening — a continuous present in which nothing settles sufficiently to invite sustained attention.

This is how attention becomes exhausted.

Exhaustion here is not a failure of the individual. It is a structural effect. When systems continually demand responsiveness to proliferating signals, attention is forced into rapid perceptual stabilisation: quick recognitions, swift judgements, immediate closures. What appears as engagement is often merely defensive compression.

In such conditions, attention collapses back into perception.

The distinction matters. Perception can operate at speed because it relies on settled distinctions and rapid patterning. Attention cannot. When pressured to keep pace with saturation, attention either withdraws or hardens into extraction — seeking shortcuts, summaries, and outcomes in order to survive.

This dynamic explains why saturation often masquerades as openness while producing impatience, irritability, and fatigue. The system appears endlessly generative, yet the participant experiences a narrowing of meaningful relation.

Artistic practices have long explored this limit.

James Joyce’s later work, particularly Ulysses, stages saturation deliberately. Episodes proliferate, styles multiply, references cascade. Each section is locally coherent, yet globally resistant to synthesis. The reader is not meant to master the whole, but to inhabit sequences of excess.

For some, this produces exhilaration. For others, exhaustion. Both responses are telling.

Joyce exposes the ethical demand saturation places on attention. The work does not fail when it overwhelms; it reveals the cost of insisting on total participation. To read Joyce attentively is not to absorb everything, but to learn when to let go — when to relinquish the fantasy of completeness.

Peter Greenaway’s films perform a similar operation visually. Images, texts, catalogues, and systems overlay one another in relentless profusion. The viewer is offered no privileged vantage point, no stable hierarchy of importance. Attention is pulled in multiple directions simultaneously.

Here again, the question is not whether meaning is present. It is whether attention can remain inhabitable.

Saturation, pushed far enough, produces a paradox. Openness becomes indistinguishable from noise. Participation gives way to scanning. Attention fragments into micro-gestures of recognition without duration.

This is not a failure of viewers or readers. It is the signal that openness itself requires constraint.

An ethics of attention therefore cannot celebrate saturation uncritically. Nor can it retreat into minimalism as a universal cure. What matters is the calibration between generativity and restraint — the shaping of conditions under which attention can stay without collapsing.

Saturation teaches us this lesson by excess.

It shows what happens when the demand for openness outpaces the capacity for attention. It reveals that meaning is not maximised by multiplication, but sustained by rhythm.

In the next episode, we will turn from excess to its apparent opposite: silence. There, we will see how attention encounters not overload, but invitation — and why absence can be as ethically charged as abundance.