The Slack Rein
Attention and the Way of Being-With
The previous two essays — The Return to the Origin: Readymade Abstraction and the Critique of Perception and The Road Comes From Walking: An Archaeology of Perception, A Genealogy of Seeing — laid out the direction and method of “perceptual critique.” The reader already knows how to see: suspend, gaze, purify, release. But after finishing the second essay, I fell silent for a long time. Not because I had nothing left to say, but because a deeper question had never been touched: what is it that lets this kind of seeing continue at all?
In an age when attention is precisely sliced by algorithms into three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds, the answer to “how to see” is no longer enough. The more fundamental question is: when your eyes have been trained to linger only three seconds, when your attention is continually captured, segmented, sold — how do you let “seeing” continue long enough for an encounter to happen at all?
The child lying against his mother's back did not “know how to see” — he simply did not leave. He had no purpose, no task, nothing that needed to be accomplished. He simply stayed, in that rainy day, together with the swaying of the ten thousand things, for long enough that the spring color flowed into his body of its own accord.
The first two essays dealt with how to see; this one deals with how to let seeing continue. The first two answered a question of method; this one asks after a condition. And that condition is the thing I have circled around, again and again, without ever naming it — attention.
It is not a sociological analysis of the “attention economy,” not the feel-good language of “mindfulness,” not even a technical training in “focus.” It is something more primary — a capacity to let seeing remain present, in place, even when nothing is gained. Like the rein my father held, slack in his hand: it was not there to drive the ox, but to let two different beings walk the same road at their own respective paces, all the way to the end. Attention is that thin line you can barely feel, and yet never let go of.
This essay is an inquiry into that condition. Deleuze, Bataille, Levinas, Stiegler — each, from a different direction, flows into the same riverbed: how attention is released from output, how it is awakened by the other, how it might be repaired under present-day technological conditions. They are signposts, not destinations.
At the same time, I remain clear-eyed about this: Western philosophy is not my mother tongue. It is a second language I acquired as an adult. My mother tongue was carved into my body, wordlessly, in my grandfather's brush and ink, my grandmother's scissors, my father's silence, my mother's calling out at dusk, and those evenings of barefoot running across the hills. Those words had no nouns, only actions; no definitions, only rhythms. What I am doing now is nothing more than searching, in a second language, for an echo of the first — letting certain distant concepts meet specific moments of a life, to see what they might illuminate, and also to see at what boundary they must fall silent.
I. Deleuze's Fissure: The Percept and the Origin of Attention
Deleuze and Guattari, in What Is Philosophy?, draw a distinction: perception is a psychological state of the subject, while the percept is something art holds independently in its own right — it stands apart from the state of whoever experiences it.[1] The aim of art, they argue, is precisely to extract the percept from the perception of an object and the states of a perceiving subject.
Reading this passage, I thought of “The Grey I Could Not Enter.” I was not “refused” by it — rather, no percept ever arose between us. Those “successful” walls — mottled, flaking, eroded by rain — at a certain instant, my perception of them stopped, and they shifted from “objects being seen” into what Deleuze would call an independently persisting bloc of sensation. In that instant, the wall was no longer “a wall in my eyes,” but became what Deleuze calls a non-human landscape.
In his discussion of Cézanne, Deleuze makes a claim I lingered over for a long time: Cézanne's art achieves a becoming — the human becoming landscape, becoming Mont Sainte-Victoire, becoming apple — the artist no longer a subject standing outside the thing, but one who “becomes,” together with the thing, within the circulation of sensation.[2]
Reading this, the image that rose in my mind was not Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire, but another, more specific picture.
It was an autumn evening in my childhood. My father was pulling the water buffalo through the paddy field — not spring plowing, but turning the soil after the late rice had been harvested. He walked slowly; the thin rein between man and ox, in the dusk light, looked like an unbreakable, silent line. I sat on a rock at the hilltop, watching him and the ox from a distance, and the whole village behind him, its cooking smoke rising. The rein hung slack — neither taut nor dragging on the ground — holding, exactly right, that wordless relation between man and ox.
I sat there watching for a long time, long enough that dusk turned to night, long enough that my father coiled the rein, shouldered the plow, and walked home along the field ridge. That scene bore no trace of “art” — no composition, no color, nothing that could be “aesthetically appreciated.” But it left something in my body — that co-presence sustained between man and ox by a slack rein, that companionship needing no “understanding” to last an entire day.
Zhuangzi, in the “Horse Hooves” chapter, describes Bole, famed for his skill in training horses — branding, trimming, shoeing, haltering, penning — the text notes that two or three horses out of every ten died from it.[3] This is an excessive artifice, a power that forces the thing into human order by violence. The slack rein between my father and the ox is precisely the opposite of Bole. It does not “train” the ox; it simply lets the ox walk its own pace through an entire day's road. My father never read Zhuangzi, but he was the kind of person who does not “destroy heaven with the human.” He did not “train” the ox skillfully — he simply stayed with it.
And what I try to do with a wall in Seeing Without Seeing is exactly the same thing — not to “train” the wall, not to let it become my aesthetic object, not to let it be skillfully “trained” by my camera. Only to let the wall walk, at its own pace, the road of being a wall. And the reason I am able to stand before a wall for forty minutes rests on precisely the capacity my father unknowingly taught me: to hold my own attention the way one holds a slack rein — not gripping tight, not dragging, simply keeping that line at the loose tension of “able to continue at any moment.” The slack rein — not conquest, not control, but letting two different beings walk the same road, together, each at its own speed.
But there is a fissure here that Deleuze cannot fully cover. Deleuze's “percept” ultimately opens onto an affirmative ontology — the independent persistence of sensation, the intensity of life, the eternal becoming of difference. What my grey wall marks is not this affirmative ontology, but something more silent, something that refuses to become. It is not a “bloc of sensation.” It is not even “the absence of sensation” — it is a thoroughgoing existence that enters no relation at all.
That “Grey I Could Not Enter” brings to mind a Chan gong'an. A monk asked Zhaozhou: “What is the meaning of the Patriarch's coming from the West?” Zhaozhou said: “The cypress tree in the courtyard.” The monk pressed further; Zhaozhou repeated the same answer, again and again. When I was young, I always thought this gong'an was saying “the ordinary mind is the Way.” But standing before that grey wall, I suddenly understood a colder layer of meaning: Zhaozhou is not “giving you” an answer — he is refusing a question. The very act of separating the Buddha out from the cypress tree, of asking that question at all, had already missed the point. That grey wall is my own “cypress tree in the courtyard.” It is not a bloc of sensation, not an entry point into becoming — it is only a wall. And every inquiry of mine has been an attempt to separate it out from being “a wall.” What that wall does is exactly what Zhaozhou did: stand there silently, and hand the question back to you.
So Deleuze is useful to me — but not because he offers an answer. He is useful because he helps me mark a boundary: the percept is possible, but not for every thing, not at every moment. Some things will never become a percept. They are simply there. The deeper meaning of “letting the thing show itself” may be this: accepting that some things will never “show,” and still choosing to stand before them. And this capacity to “still choose to stand there” requires not a technique, but a particular kind of attention — one able to remain present even when nothing at all is gained.
II. Three Tributaries of Attention
Deleuze marks a boundary. But once across it, the question I face is this: when a thing refuses to become a percept, when “becoming” does not occur, when that grey wall is simply silent — how can I still stand there?
After Deleuze, there are a few more thinkers — not systematically “read,” but resonating strangely with my practice in certain passages, certain sentences, certain moments. This time, I let a single inner thread run through them: attention. If “the slack rein” is an ideal state — two beings walking the same road, each at its own pace — then Bataille, Levinas, and Stiegler each answer the same question: why does this rein always tend to go taut, to snap, to be seized from your hand? They touch, from different sides, the same problem: what captures our attention, what expends it, what awakens it, and how it might be repaired. This answers directly to the core concern I raised earlier under “perceptual politics.”
Tributary One: Bataille and “Unproductive Expenditure” — Attention Detached from Output
Georges Bataille, in Literature and Evil, returns again and again to a concept: unproductive expenditure. Genuine vital energy, he argues, should not be entirely folded into the cycle of production and utility — some part of it must be “expended”: wasted, sacrificed, spent on acts that produce no output at all.[4]
Reading his discussion of “uselessness,” I thought of my grandfather's writing.
When my grandfather copied out those geomantic manuscripts, he used coarse handmade paper and ink he ground himself. He copied slowly, but every character was written with the same gravity as positioning a geomancer's compass. Those manuscripts had no possibility of “publication,” no function of “circulation” — even in the village, fewer and fewer people could still read them — yet my grandfather kept copying. Page after page, stroke after stroke, using up who knows how many sheets of coarse paper, in that materially scarce era.
As a child I didn't understand. I asked him once: “Grandfather, hasn't someone already copied this book? What's different about you copying it again?” He didn't look up, and kept writing. After a long time — long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer — the ink slowly spreading on the coarse paper, as though a character were becoming itself — he said: “It's different. Once I've copied it, it's mine.”
He wasn't speaking of “mine” in the sense of copyright. He meant: through the act of copying, the book's content passed from “someone else's knowledge” into “something that has passed through my hand.” That process produced no new “knowledge” — it simply let those characters, those calendrical stems and branches, those constellations, those formulas for divining auspicious days, flow once more beneath another person's brush-tip. This was a form of unproductive expenditure: adding nothing to the world's total store of knowledge, changing no one's fate — only a person, using his own brush and ink, letting those characters pass through his body.
Later, photographing Seeing Without Seeing, standing before a wall, adjusting the frame again and again, waiting for the light to shift — was that process not also a kind of “copying” of that wall? I add nothing to that wall, change nothing in its physical state — I simply let its mottling and flaking pass, once more, through my camera. My grandfather's manuscript was “letting characters pass through my hand”; my photography is “letting the wall pass through my eye.” At its core, this is the same kind of expenditure — letting something, outside of any output, walk its full course within my body, in its own way.
Bataille lets me understand this: the essence of art may lie not in its “useful” part, but in its “useless” part — the gesture of my grandfather closing the cover after copying a book no one will ever read is closer to the core of art than any “result.” And of those works that can be exhibited, collected, priced — when a viewer stops before them, gains nothing, produces nothing, but for one instant forgets the whole logic of output and gain — that forgetting, itself, is the expenditure. It is the initial gesture by which attention is released from “usefulness.”
Tributary Two: Levinas and the Ethics of the Face — Attention Awakened by the Other
Bataille is concerned with how attention detaches itself from output. Levinas goes a step further — his concern is not the attention “I” actively cast outward, but how attention is “captured” and “awakened” by the other.
Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, writes something that landed in my body like a stone: the face of the other speaks to me, and resists my possession, my power, my world. The face is not an object that can be “observed” — it is a presence that issues an ethical summons to me, demanding a response, and before I can respond, I have already been captured by that summons.[5]
Standing before “The Grey I Could Not Enter,” what I felt was exactly this experience of “being summoned.” It has no face, no eyes, no expression, nothing recognizable as an expression. But its indifference toward me — that thorough indifference, entering no relation at all — was itself like a summons from an other. It was not saying “look at me.” It was saying: “You cannot possess me, and you must face this impossibility of possession.”
This brings to mind my grandmother's paper-cuts. The patterns she cut — the character for fortune and fish motifs at Spring Festival, auspicious flowers and dragon-and-phoenix designs for weddings — pasted on windows and walls, letting through a translucent red in the morning light. But she never “kept” them. Once the festival had passed, once the day had gone, those paper flowers faded, curled at the edges, were torn by the wind — and she peeled them off and replaced them with new ones. The old ones were thrown away, or used as kindling.
I once tried to save some of her paper-cuts — before they had faded, carefully peeling them off, pressing them into a book. My grandmother saw me do it. She didn't stop me, only said: “Once that flower's day has passed, it isn't a flower anymore.”
She was right. That red paper flower, pressed inside a book, was no longer the marker of a “day” — it had become an “object,” something that could be preserved, displayed, owned. But the one pasted on the window, glowing red in the morning light of the fifteenth day of the new year — that was the flower. Because it would disappear. It knew it would disappear.
Levinas says the face “resists my possession” — so do my grandmother's paper-cuts. They resist being “preserved,” being “collected.” They exist only on the day they belong to, and then naturally fade away. This fading is not a flaw, but the very essence of their being a “face” — they exist only in the instant of being attended to; once fixed, they lose the power to summon. What I pursue in Beyond Appearance — that unrepeatable, moment-bound visual experience, the one-time flow of flower-shadow in a long exposure — may be exactly a continuation of this temporality: not made to remain, but made to pass through; not made to be possessed, but to be seen, in the moment it belongs to, and then to leave.
What Levinas lets me understand is the second movement of attention: passive openness. Attention is not always something I actively cast outward — sometimes it is awakened, by an other I cannot possess, cannot name, cannot fix in place. And the whole of my preparation is only to place myself in a state capable of being awakened.
Tributary Three: Stiegler and the “Pharmacology of Attention” — Attention in Need of Detoxification
The first two thinkers reconstructed the texture of attention from the angles of “expenditure” and “summons.” Stiegler offers a more contemporary diagnosis: attention itself is a pharmakon — possessing, at once, the properties of remedy and poison.
Bernard Stiegler, in Technics and Time, proposes a claim that unsettles me: attention is both our capacity for sincere encounter with the thing, and something that can be entirely captured, segmented, and sold by technology. The contemporary attention economy is exactly this pharmacological toxicity made manifest.[6] If my “perceptual critique” is placed within Stiegler's framework, it is no longer merely an aesthetic position, but a pharmacological practice of attention. When I stand before a wall for forty minutes, I am not only “looking” at that wall — I am also “detoxifying” my own attention, releasing it from the three-second span preset by the algorithm, letting it recover a rhythm of its own.
This brings to mind an older, more concrete “discipline of attention.” As a child, my father once had me guard an orchard alone, in a valley in the mountains — not for a day or two, but an entire summer vacation. There were no companions in that valley, no toys, no books — only fruit trees, stream water, cicadas, and a long, unbroken silence. At first it was unbearable. But by the second day, the third day, a shift occurred — I began to notice how sunlight moved across the earth, slowly crossing from one side of the tree canopy to the other over an entire afternoon; I began to distinguish the sound of the stream striking different stones, guessing which one might be hiding a crab beneath it; I began to smell how the fruit's fragrance changed as it ripened, from green to faintly sweet to rich.
That was not “aesthetic appreciation” — it was simply “attention”: an attention forced, by having nothing else to do, by having no information to consume, by loneliness, toward the ten thousand things. That attention needed no technical apparatus to “capture” it, because at that time there was nothing capable of capturing it at all. It simply, naturally, slowly — like a stream wearing down a stone — wore thin the boundary between myself and those fruit trees, that stream, those cicadas, that sunlight. Later I read the Chan saying, an empty mountain, no one there; the water flows, the flowers bloom — that “emptiness” is not “nothing there at all,” but “nothing seizing your attention.” Once the seizing stops, the ten thousand things begin to flow in, each in its own way, of their own accord.
What Stiegler lets me understand is the third movement of attention: repair. Today, when attention has already been fully captured by technology, “letting the seizing stop” is no longer a natural state, but a repair that must be actively practiced. That summer in the valley cannot come again, but every time I stand before a wall, every time I put down my phone, every time I let myself remain present while gaining nothing — each is a small dose of detoxification for attention.
Bataille, Levinas, Stiegler — each, from a different direction, flows into the same riverbed: Bataille releases attention from “output”; Levinas lets attention be awakened by “the other”; Stiegler warns how attention is captured by technology today, and how it must be repaired. Together, the three form a practical ethics of attention: repairing the capacity for sincere encounter between person and thing is, at its root, repairing the manner of our attention — letting it no longer be held hostage by usefulness, no longer captured by the desire to possess, no longer segmented by algorithm. And the starting point of repair is not more advanced technology, but letting the seizing stop — placing yourself, as in that summer in the valley, somewhere nothing is left to seize your attention.
III. The Last Steps
Bataille, Levinas, Stiegler — these names have completed their task. They are not destinations, only signposts. Their concepts are like several beams of light striking from different directions, briefly illuminating certain sides of that wall. But the wall itself has never changed, not by the smallest degree, for having been lit. Theory is light; the wall is darkness. The meaning of light lies not in illuminating the dark, but in letting the one who stands before the dark see their own shadow clearly.
That “Grey I Could Not Enter” remains, to this day, in my archive. It has not become anything. It is simply there.
Before returning to that wall, I want to present an exhibition that will never be shown. It has only text labels, no images. Each “wall label” records the archive of an encounter — not a successful encounter, but those that “never happened,” or “happened and left no trace”:
Label One — May 2016. A grey cement wall on the outer side of an abandoned factory. Stood for an hour. No photograph taken. Named “The Grey I Could Not Enter.”
Label Two — April 2023. A wildflower. Crouched for forty minutes. Thirty-six frames shot, all deleted.
Label Three — November 2024. A mountain road. Walked for three hours. No camera brought.
Label Four — March of this year. A freshly painted white wall. Did not wait. Not because I didn't want to, but because I knew waiting would be of no use.
This exhibition exists only in my notebook. It constitutes an artist's labor more truthfully than any exhibited work — those “encounters that never happened” were not wasted; they were lived. My grandfather's manuscripts, which no one will ever read, are exhibits in this same exhibition. So are my grandmother's paper-cuts, destined always to become kindling. So are those slack, unproductive afternoons between my father and the ox, with no “result” to show for them.
If Deleuze's “percept” exists, it is not in any successful photograph — it is in the shutters never pressed. If Bataille's “expenditure” is real, it is the gesture of my grandfather closing the cover after copying a book no one will read. If Levinas's “face” can be sensed, it is what that grey wall told me in its silence: you cannot possess me, and you must face this impossibility of possession. What Stiegler calls the “detoxification of attention” is letting the seizing stop — and the highest form of letting the seizing stop is to stand before a wall, doing nothing for an hour, simply letting that wall, in its own way, in its own silence, walk out its hour of being a wall.
Responding to OOO: Not the Thing's Secret, But My Own Boundary
Writing “doing nothing for an hour,” I think of a name that has recurred throughout the second essay: Graham Harman. Object-oriented ontology would say that this wall has already, ontologically, “withdrawn” — that I cannot reach it not because of any failing of mine, but because of the very way the thing exists. That explanation is too comfortable. It attributes “I cannot enter” to an ontological structure, letting me off the hook from facing a more naked fact: it is I who cannot get there. Not the thing's secret — my own boundary.
I do not deny the thing's withdrawal. Harman may well be right — that any interaction can only touch a thing's “sensual qualities” or “effects,” never the thing itself. But what “The Grey I Could Not Enter” marks is not a universal philosophical law, but the manifestation of one person's finitude, in a specific time and place. That grey wall is “unenterable” not because all things are unenterable, but because it does not fall within the frequency of resonance shaped by the aesthetic habit I learned as a child. If I misread this as a universal ontological law, I gain a false comfort — “it's not my problem, the thing itself is simply unenterable” — and it is precisely this comfort that would dissolve the entire reality I felt standing before that wall: that powerlessness, that being-refused, that clear-eyed awareness of being nothing more than a mortal with a particular kind of ear.
So Harman's “withdrawal” is a mirror, not a ruler. It lets me see my own limits clearly, rather than measuring the ultimate structure of the world. That grey wall's silence is not a display of cosmic law, but a mirror of my own boundary. It does not let me console myself with “the thing-in-itself is unknowable” — it simply stands there, silently, stripping away all my vocabulary with its indifference, and lets me see clearly: it is I who cannot reach it, not that it refuses anyone entry. This grey wall has taught me more than every moment of resonant communion put together. It tells me: return is not arrival, but accepting the impossibility of arrival. And within that naked failure, unguaranteed by any philosophy, I have encountered, more truly than in any successful image, that which cannot be named — not the “nature” of the thing, but the fissure, forever unable to be filled, and forever unable to be canceled, between myself and the thing.
IV. A Final Reflexive Turn: These Names May Be Only Another New Suit
I have written down Deleuze, Bataille, Levinas, Stiegler. But I know my father does not know them. Neither does my grandfather. And that grey wall knows them even less — it does not even know my name.
I write these names down, perhaps only so that this long trek might find a foothold within some recognizable coordinate system. But the true foothold was never in the coordinate system. It is on that slack rein, in those shutters never pressed, in that child lying against his mother's back, who had not yet even heard the word “art.”
Might these concepts, drawn from Western studies, be nothing more than another new suit I have sewn for myself? In the first two essays, I warned myself: do not let a new theoretical discourse conceal the old, unsolvable question. Now, once again, I must face that same metaphor — this new suit called “theory.” It is, admittedly, presentable to wear. But standing before that grey wall, the wall does not care what I am wearing. It simply stands there, stripping away all my vocabulary with its indifference.
In that moment of complete nakedness — no “percept,” no “expenditure,” no “face,” no “pharmacology,” no “withdrawal” — I can feel that the old question was never discarded. It has remained pressed against my skin the whole time, older, more enduring, closer to my own body's warmth, than any new suit. That old question — how to meet the thing sincerely, how to perceive without the aid of concept, how to return to that spring on my mother's back — is not a problem needing to be solved, but the texture, unable to be stripped away, that constitutes who I am.
A Final Presence
Before that grey wall, I am still standing. No camera, no theory, no expectation.
Standing there, I think of my father. The night he said “the road comes from walking,” we did not walk far — only a loop around the edge of the village, and then home. Along the way, we hardly spoke at all. But that was the most real companionship I ever shared with my father: no destination, no topic, nothing that needed to be conveyed. Only walking the same road, breathing at the same rhythm.
Before that grey wall, I feel exactly the same thing. The wall will not become anything, and neither will I, but we are together — in the same silence, in the same unenterability. This is not resonant communion. It is a co-presence more basic than resonant communion.
The child lying against his mother's back, feeling the spring color, the warmth, the sway — that too was a co-presence: not the co-presence of “understanding,” but the co-presence of “being-with.” On his mother's back, the spring surging all around him, there was no “relation” between him and the spring — only being-with.
I have written three essays now, and they have all only been circling the same circle. At the center of that circle is the child lying against his mother's back — he has no question, no answer, nothing that needs to be spoken. He is simply there, in that rainy day, together with all the ten thousand things.
I walk back toward that rainy day — not in order to return. I cannot go back. But I can stand at the edge of that rainy day, no longer trying to “explain” it, no longer trying to “reproduce” it, only letting that moment of being-with happen again, in its own way, within my body. With all the time I have left, I will practice that being-with which does not question, does not capture, does not name, and does not leave.
Before that grey wall, I am still standing. The rein hangs slack; I do not know whether it counts as a “connection,” but my father and the ox walked through that whole afternoon. I stand before the wall; I do not know whether this counts as “being-with,” but my hand has not tightened, and my feet have not moved away. Perhaps the way of being-with was never a taut rope — it is only a thread, holding, between you and it, exactly the right slackness to walk through an entire afternoon. The wall is silent, and I am before the wall, and I have not walked away.
From here, there is no road. But as my father said — where there is no road, walk on, and let the road become the road itself.
Translator's Notes
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991), distinguish perception (a psychological state of the subject) from the percept (what art holds independently, apart from any subject's experience of it). Rendered here as paraphrase rather than direct quotation, consistent with this project's approach to extended citation from copyrighted twentieth-century philosophical texts.
[2] Deleuze's discussion of Cézanne and “becoming-landscape” draws on remarks scattered across several of his works, including Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and What Is Philosophy?. Rendered here as paraphrase.
[3] Zhuangzi, “Horse Hooves” (马蹄) chapter: the parable of Bole (伯乐), celebrated as a master horse-trainer, whose branding, trimming, shoeing, and penning of horses the text reports killed two or three animals in ten — presented in the Zhuangzi as a critique of imposing artificial order upon the nature of things (“destroying heaven with the human,” 以人灭天).
[4] Georges Bataille's concept of dépense (“expenditure” or “unproductive expenditure”) recurs throughout his work, including Literature and Evil (1957) and earlier essays such as “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933). Rendered here as paraphrase rather than direct quotation.
[5] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961), develops the ethics of “the face” (le visage) of the Other as a presence that resists possession and issues a pre-reflective ethical demand. Rendered here as paraphrase.
[6] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time (three volumes, 1994–2001), and later work such as Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2008), develops the notion of the pharmakon — technology, and by extension attention itself, as simultaneously remedy and poison. Rendered here as paraphrase.