The Ethics of Non-Extractive Looking

cleidi hearn

Looking is often described as passive: a neutral intake of visual information. Yet, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed, perception is always embodied and situated. To look is to select, to prioritise, to organise the visible. When directed toward plants, this act is rarely neutral. Flora are commonly approached as resources or scenery, reduced to objects of utility or objects of spectacle. Both modes extract. Both reduce the plant to something that can be used or consumed.

A non-extractive encounter with flora begins by suspending these demands. It does not seek function, symbolism, or affective payoff. It does not search for narrative or metaphor. Instead, it treats perception as a relation that neither consumes nor instructs. This stance, aligned with certain strands of contemporary phenomenology and post-humanist ethics, requires discipline: it resists the urge to master, name, categorise, or decode.

In contemporary visual culture, speed shapes perception as much as utility. Images circulate rapidly, rewarded for clarity, legibility, and instant comprehension. Within such conditions, slow looking becomes an ethical gesture. It shifts perception away from extraction—what can be taken from the image—and toward recognition—what can be acknowledged within it. Plant studies scholars such as Emanuele Coccia and Michael Marder remind us that plants operate according to temporalities that do not align with human expectations of drama, transformation, or revelation. Their presence is continuous rather than theatrical, gradual rather than declarative. To see a plant properly is often to slow down.

Non-extractive looking does not claim neutrality. Neutrality would imply a position outside history or perception, which does not exist. Instead, it acknowledges, in the spirit of Donna Haraway’s insistence on “situated knowledges,” that all looking is contextual and partial. The work lies not in eliminating bias but in softening the demands placed upon the object. Suspended from the need to interpret, instrumentalise, or instruct, plants may appear as presences rather than motifs. Presence, here, is neither symbolic depth nor narrative meaning, but the simple fact of being—irreducible, temporal, and not entirely for us.

This posture resists two dominant tendencies in contemporary image culture: narrative and spectacle. Narrative seeks resolution, insight, or moral clarity; spectacle seeks intensity, scale, or emotional impact. Both assimilate the plant into human frameworks. In contrast, a phenomenological encounter with flora—echoing the attentional sensibilities of thinkers like David Abram, who highlights perception as ecological participation—does not require conclusion. It allows the viewer to remain with the subject without converting it into message. Such withholding is not evasive, it is in fact a refusal of dominance.

Attention, understood in this way, becomes an ethical act. It gives time without demanding return. It recognises without appropriating. It observes without converting the plant into symbol, decoration, or resource. This resonates with the relational ethics advanced by Baptiste Morizot, for whom attentiveness to non-human beings forms a politics of cohabitation rather than conquest. To see a plant without immediately categorising it is to acknowledge its autonomy, however minimal.

Within this framework, the viewer’s role shifts. Instead of decoding, the task is remaining—remaining long enough for variation to emerge, for detail to register, for time to become visible. Remaining without the assurance of comprehension. This form of looking invites patience rather than consumption, and proximity rather than distance. It acknowledges, following Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, that the non-human world possesses its own agencies and rhythms, even if they do not align with ours.

Non-extractive looking is not a technique or a rule. It is an attitude toward perception that recognises the biases of sight and attempts, however imperfectly, to soften them. It asks what it would mean to encounter plants without converting them into imagery, metaphor, or utility. In doing so, it opens the possibility that flora—often relegated to background or function—may stand in their own right, not as symbols nor as resources, but as presences that persist beyond our interpretive frameworks.