The margins of attention

cleidi hearn

Perception no longer begins in quiet. Before looking begins, signals have already decided what will demand attention. Each carries an implied instruction. Look here. Act now. Respond.

What becomes visible is often what asks something from us. What remains quiet tends to recede.

In such conditions, attention is treated less as a relation and more as a resource. It is measured, captured, redirected, and optimised. Economic language seeps into everyday description. We speak of spending attention, losing it, monetising it. The field of perception begins to resemble a marketplace in which stimuli compete for extraction.

This organisation of looking has consequences. When every object arrives with a demand, perception contracts. It becomes selective in advance. The eye searches for use, for instruction, for reward. Things that do not immediately declare their function appear irrelevant. They fall into the background.

Plants offer a simple example. Their changes are gradual. Their presence does not announce itself. They do not ask to be consumed or decoded. Within an incentive-driven perceptual field, they are easily overlooked. They do not compete well with urgency.

Yet this marginal position is instructive. It reveals something about the structure of attention itself.

If attention only responds to what insists, then perception is already conditioned before contact occurs. The world becomes legible only through demand. Objects are granted visibility in proportion to their usefulness or intensity. In this sense, attention becomes extractive. It approaches things for what they provide.

A different possibility emerges when these demands are reduced. When the signals of urgency and reward are suspended, attention does not immediately stabilise. It often hesitates. Without clear instruction, perception wavers. The eye moves without settling. Time seems longer. The absence of direction can feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. This hesitation is telling. It shows how accustomed perception has become to command.

Gradually, another rhythm may appear. Looking slows. Small variations become perceptible. Differences that were previously negligible begin to register. Form is encountered without the pressure to interpret or use it. The object is no longer required to justify itself. Nothing spectacular occurs. No revelation is guaranteed. What changes is simply the mode of relation.

Attention becomes less acquisitive. It stays longer. It allows things to appear without immediate conversion into information or narrative. Presence is not heightened through drama. It emerges through duration. In such moments, perception is not performing a task. It is not solving a problem. It is simply demonstrating presence.

This shift can be understood as ethical rather than aesthetic. The issue is not how something looks but how it is approached. To attend without extraction is to allow the other to persist without being reduced to function. It is a minor adjustment in posture that alters the terms of encounter.

Importantly, this posture does not demand skill or specialised knowledge. It does not require retreat from ordinary life. It only requires the temporary absence of pressure. When incentives recede, attention reorganises itself. Sometimes it disperses. Sometimes it gathers. Sometimes it does very little. All outcomes are valid.

What becomes visible through this suspension is not an ideal state of concentration but the variability of attention itself. One begins to notice how quickly perception seeks purpose, how uneasy it feels without reward, how often it turns away from what does not offer immediate return. The condition of presence therefore functions as a diagnostic rather than a goal. It does not promise clarity or calm. It reveals the current state of one’s perceptual habits.

Within a culture structured by acceleration, such spaces are increasingly rare. Most environments are engineered to direct behaviour. Quietness becomes unusual. Non-demanding objects become difficult to encounter. Creating conditions where nothing insists is therefore not an escape from the present. It is a way of making the present legible.

When nothing calls for attention, the way attention behaves can finally be observed.

Presence, then, is the condition that reveals the state of our attention.