The Ethics of Attention: 5 The Reader, the Viewer, the Listener

1. From Attention to Participation

If the previous episodes have traced attention as an ethical stance rather than a perceptual mechanism, then this movement must confront its necessary consequence: attention always positions a participant.

There is no neutral reader, no passive viewer, no merely receptive listener. To attend is already to enter into relation — not as an interpreter extracting meaning, but as a locus in which meaning is actualised through construal.

The ethical question therefore shifts. It is no longer what does this text, image, or sound mean? but what kind of participant does it require me to become?

This is not a psychological question. It is a structural one.

2. The Reader Who Cannot Stand Outside

Traditional critical models often imagine the reader as standing outside the work, surveying it, explaining it, mastering it. But such a position is incoherent once meaning is understood relationally.

A text does not contain meanings awaiting retrieval. Nor does the reader project meanings onto an inert surface. Meaning arises only in the event of construal — an event that binds reader and text into a temporary system.

To read attentively, then, is not to decode correctly, but to accept implication. The reader becomes answerable for how the work is held together, where its silences are respected, where its tensions are prematurely resolved.

This is why nonsense, excess, and minimalism all function as ethical tests. They deny the reader the comfort of stable explanatory distance.

3. The Viewer and the Refusal of Total Vision

Visual media intensifies the ethical stakes of attention because it tempts us with the fantasy of total access.

Greenaway’s cinema stages this temptation relentlessly: frames overloaded with detail, references, and formal symmetry. The viewer is invited to look everywhere — and inevitably fails.

But this failure is not a defect. It is the point.

Attentive viewing does not mean exhaustive seeing. It means recognising where vision must yield to relation: where one must stop scanning and begin inhabiting. The ethical viewer is not the one who sees everything, but the one who knows when looking has become acquisitive rather than responsive.

4. The Listener and the Burden of Silence

Listening radicalises participation further, because it exposes the listener to time without visual mastery.

As Cage makes unmistakably clear, the listener cannot stand outside sound. Even silence implicates the body: breath, movement, anticipation. Listening therefore makes explicit what reading and viewing can sometimes conceal — that participation is unavoidable.

To listen attentively is to accept responsibility for timing, patience, and restraint. It is to allow value to arrive — or not — without forcing it into articulation.

Silence, in this sense, is not the absence of music, but the redistribution of agency.

5. Participation Without Mastery

Across reader, viewer, and listener, a common ethical figure emerges: the participant without mastery.

This participant does not renounce judgement, but defers closure. Does not abandon interpretation, but resists premature totalisation. Does not seek purity of openness, but cultivates appropriate constraint.

Such participation is neither passive nor heroic. It is disciplined, responsive, and situational.

Importantly, this stance preserves the distinction between meaning and value. Attentive participation does not guarantee harmony, coordination, or social success. It guarantees only that meaning is not violated by being forced to perform as value.

6. The Ethics of Attention, Revisited

We can now restate the central claim of the series more precisely:

Attention is ethical because it determines how meaning is allowed to come into being.

In an age of saturation, acceleration, and compulsory response, the ethics of attention is not about focusing harder. It is about knowing when not to force articulation, when not to extract, when not to resolve.

The reader, the viewer, and the listener are not consumers of meaning. They are co‑participants in its temporary actualisation.

And this participation, once recognised, cannot be undone.

It can only be practised — carefully, responsibly, and with joy.