Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“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 become evident and thereby accepted as legitimate, that attention must first land on oneself as its object—in other words, each new participant on the scene represents a potential interruption of shared attention At this crucial point upon which one’s entry into the scene depends, one can only avoid becoming a distraction and potential source of fixation in others by doubling that attention back on oneself by joining it, becoming a sign and hence invisible, insofar as others are redirected back to the object through you. In that case, you will have shown others that the line of attention passes through your own eyes; unless, of course, your self-referentiality simply intensifies your distractiveness. Whether a distraction has taken place will depend upon whether those attended to or, in Louis Althusser’s term, “interpellated,” as potential objects of resentment or desire will have restored the line of attention by incorporating the interruption into the scene’s founding sign. Perhaps an analogy would be helpful here. The neuroscientist Daniela Schiller has discovered that that memories are not unchanging physical traces in the brain.”

— Eric Gans, Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining · Spring 2013 · Anthropoetics