Concept
Attentionality
Joint attention as the ground of language, ethics, and the scene
“I have argued previously for the priority of “attentionality” over “intentionality”—attention must precede intention, and “intention” individualizes what is “joint” in attention, making it more of a declarative than an ostensive concept.”
From the Archive
“I insist, though, on making “attentionality” the prior, constitutive concept.”
“But intentionality depends upon having one’s attention drawn to the object, and having one’s attention drawn depends upon attending to another who brings the object into view and, finally, upon becoming an object of attention of others (an attention one can’t share).”
“In shared, or joint attention, is the fundamental equality-on-the-scene that constitutes the human.”
“All the resources we need for thinking about ethics lie in joint attention, in our ability to point to something, and approaching ethics in this way might enable us to create more minimal, more pared down, ethical vocabularies.”
“We can trace the emergence of intentionality from attentionality, whether by “intentionality” we mean the more philosophical notion of constituting an object or the more everyday use of the term as meaning to do something.”
“ethics involves both ostentation and conferring a completed ostentation upon others, or the conversion of attentionality into intentionality.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Michael Tomasello's developmental research on joint attention provides the empirical foundation for what Center Study frames theoretically. Infants acquire language not by learning words and grammatical rules but by developing the capacity for joint attention — the ability to share a focus of attention with another and to know that the sharing is mutual. This capacity distinguishes humans from even the most cognitively sophisticated other primates.
Three orders. Katz distinguishes three orders of attentionality. First-order attentionality is the ability to direct attention toward something. Second-order is the understanding that others can direct their attention toward something — the ability to represent another's attention. Third-order is the understanding that others know you're directing attention — the ability to represent another's representation of your attention. Language requires third-order attentionality because the sign works only when all participants know that all others are emitting and receiving the same sign.
Attentionality and the originary scene. The originary scene is the scene of third-order attentionality: each participant perceives that all others are reaching, perceives that the others perceive them reaching, and converts the gesture into a sign that acknowledges this mutual perception. The sign is what third-order attentionality produces under conditions of mimetic crisis.
Attentionality as ethics. Katz's key move in Attentionality and Originary Ethics is to argue that attentionality is not merely a cognitive capacity but an ethical one. To attend to another — to genuinely direct your attention toward them, to make them the center of your scene — is already a moral act. The failure to attend, the withdrawal of attention, the refusal of joint attention, is already a moral failure. Ethics begins not with obligations derived from principles but with the practice of attending to others as potential centers.
Upclining. Katz develops the concept of "upclining" — the ethical practice of directing attention upward, toward those who have more to teach, rather than downward, toward those who can only receive instruction. Upclining is the educational posture that makes learning possible: it requires humility before the center (the teacher, the text, the archive) rather than the performance of already-achieved mastery.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“In other words, attention is not joint until all the participants show, through signs, that they are letting the object be so as to see what it has to show, to hear what it has to say—in which case, each participant must be inspected, so to speak, or credentialized, by having the sign they put forth validated. For one’s joining of the line of attention to…”
“The ethical stance is not so much learning the language of the other, or teaching the other one’s own language, because “language” is not a static entity that can stand still long enough for it to be the same language once it has been learned as it was when it began being taught. Rather, ethics involves learning the emergent language that arises at the…”
“The short answer here is that a shared attentional state is a necessary condition for language, and the proof is simply that language works. While each individual at the scene may differ in some ways, the originary hypothesis claims that they must understand the essential meaning of the sign in the same sense, or else the sign would not function as it did…”
“There is never what we call shared joint attention between the rivals. Of course an attempt to grasp the object will elicit a response from a hierarchical superior, but this response is to an undesirable obstacle, not to a shared desire; replacing the inferior conspecific with a scavenger of another species would not change the mental configuration. Now…”
“Considered at its most minimal, language is grounded, as Michael Tomasello along with Eric Gans has shown, in joint attention—the capacity to pay attention to the same thing at the same time, to know that we are doing it, and to know that we know (to let each other know). It should be possible, then, to analyze all human, which is to say social, phenomena,…”
“This act of “joint shared attention” is the inception of a new, uniquely human attitude toward the world, focused on an object to which it attributes for the first time a significance , not a simple appetitive attraction but the mediated product of one so great as to defer appetitive action. This is the origin of linguistic performativity, the…”
“I have argued previously for the priority of “attentionality” over “intentionality”—attention must precede intention, and “intention” individualizes what is “joint” in attention, making it more of a declarative than an ostensive concept. We can trace the emergence of intentionality from attentionality, whether by “intentionality” we mean the more…”
“Eventually, I found that I had to make one exception to the exclusivity of the grammatical vocabulary, and that was the concept of the “center.” The concept of “attention” has already to be entered into grammatical discourse, because some minimal mention of the mode of being capable of using these signs is necessary even to speak of the signs, and there’s…”
“There’s a kind of spatial problem involved with speaking of the center and I think I’m ready to resolve it at this point. What I mean is that “the center” is always what draws your attention right here and now—and, even if it’s something you’re looking at by yourself, the fact that you are directing human attention towards it means that the attention is…”
“To start with, if we can fold moral reciprocity into the shared attention constitutive of the sign and scene, couldn’t we say that what is immoral and a denial of reciprocity is whatever interrupts that shared attention? There are two ways shared attention can be interrupted: first, through some kind of distraction; second, through some kind of fixation.…”
Key Texts
The essay where Katz coins and develops attentionality, grounding ethics in joint attention and the threats of distraction and fixation.
States the priority of attentionality over intentionality most plainly and traces how intentionality emerges from it.
Anthropoetics editors' newcomer-friendly framing of the essay as a re-examination of moral reciprocity through shared attention.
Applies attentionality ethically as the conversion of attentionality into intentionality through restoring the line of attention.