Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“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. Distraction (distracting others; allowing oneself to be distracted) tears us away from the scene of joint attention, opens the possibility of unchecked approach to the object, and thereby demands a renewed, necessarily risky effort to redirect attention to the object—that is, distraction causes regression to a higher threshold of significance; fixation involves tearing oneself away from the scene and, ultimately, turning the other participants into objects of rather than participants in, one’s now singular attention. Joint attention involves some equipoise amongst the participants of the scene: each knows that the other(s) could advance towards the object while accepting the signs given and given off by the other as warranty that they won’t without sufficient advance warning. Distraction, we could say, is the introduction of noise into the information thereby exchanged —either not putting forward sufficiently unequivocal signs oneself or subtracting from the univocality of those put forward by other(s). Fixation, meanwhile, is the securing for oneself a system of processing information that reduces all information to univocality, on terms not subject to reciprocal exchange.”

— Adam Katz, Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining (Adam Katz) · Essays & Articles