An Anticipation of Mediated Attention (Without Mediation)
One of the most striking features of the text—written in 1985, before the internet age—is that it constructs a regime of attention later formalized by technology, without relying on mediation of any kind.
The narrator’s relation to the observed man is defined by several stable characteristics: sustained observation without interaction; repetition structured by routine; asymmetry of visibility; anxiety triggered by the possibility of reciprocal recognition; and dependence on sameness rather than communication. Nothing in the text requires devices, screens, or instruments. Yet the logic of attention described here closely resembles forms of mediated observation that would later become commonplace.
Importantly, the text does not imagine observation as intrusive or illicit. The narrator does not spy, hide, or trespass. Observation takes place entirely in public space, under ordinary conditions. This establishes a crucial premise: alienated attention does not require concealment or technology. It can arise naturally from repetition, anonymity, and the rhythms of shared space.
The fear that structures the text is therefore not moral exposure but structural reversal. The narrator’s anxiety is not that he will be discovered, but that he will be addressed. What threatens collapse is not being seen in itself, but the loss of asymmetry — the transformation of observer into object. The imagined catastrophe is not punishment but reciprocity.
In this sense, the text anticipates a later cultural condition in which watching is normalized, presence is continuous, and reciprocity is optional. Yet the work remains decisively pre-technological in one essential respect: the narrator’s body bears the full cost of attention. Paralysis, breathlessness, vertigo, and temporal distortion recur throughout the text. Attention has not yet been externalized or buffered. There is no interface to absorb its strain.
The piece thus records a pure form of attention, prior to its delegation to devices. Within the logic of the text, later technological mediation can be understood as a way of distributing precisely the burden that the narrator here carries alone.
The Ethics of Non-Reciprocity
The narrator’s vigilance is governed by an implicit ethical code. He avoids eye contact, proximity, intervention, and recognition. Observation is careful, restrained, and deliberately non-intrusive. The text insists on this restraint, suggesting that ethical observation is observation that does not interfere.
This ethic anticipates later anxieties about surveillance and visibility, but without moral alarmism. Watching itself is not condemned. What proves intolerable is the breakdown of asymmetry. Mutual visibility threatens the fragile equilibrium that allows perception to remain stable. When reciprocity becomes possible, the body responds with panic, immobility, and disorientation.
The text therefore does not argue against observation, but delineates the conditions under which observation remains bearable. Once those conditions are threatened, the mind and body cease to cooperate.
Scale, Substitution, and Perceptual Collapse
The later sections of the text, in which substitutes proliferate and distinctions blur, can be read as the failure of unmediated attention under conditions of scale.
As observation intensifies, difference collapses into similarity. Familiar markers lose their reliability. Recognition becomes uncertain. The effort to replace the original figure produces not resolution but confusion and paralysis. The narrator gains information but loses orientation.
This is not a failure of memory or intelligence. It is a structural limit of perception itself. Sustained attention, without mediation or relief, does not sharpen identity; it erodes it. The text thus charts a progression from stabilizing repetition to destabilizing excess.
Conclusion
Read in this light, the text can be understood as an exploration of attention before it learned how to protect itself.
It stages a condition in which observation is sustained, reciprocity is feared, repetition stabilizes meaning, and disappearance threatens collapse. Later technological systems would normalize, distribute, and anonymize these dynamics. This text records them in their exposed form, when the full phenomenological cost is borne by a single consciousness.
The work therefore functions not only as phenomenological prose, but as a prehistory of modern attention. Written before its external supports existed, it is able to register its strain with unusual clarity and precision.
Yego’s Chronicles 