Reaching

Or maybe overreaching?

Here's another abstract sent off for another conference!!

"Little brown jobs" (LBJs) names small, visually similar birds resisting easy identification. This paper approaches LBJs phenomenologically, attending to how they appear: as movement without individuation, presence without clear objecthood, familiarity in the perceptual periphery. They are irrecusable—there, again and again—yet do not resolve into distinct figures of attention.

Such appearance matters ethically. LBJs are taken as ever-present even as they undergo shifting baselines and unnoticed decline. Their indistinguishability troubles ethical frameworks relying on visibility, charisma, or narrative distinction, revealing how attention distributes through perceptual salience rather than proximity.

Attending to LBJs requires effort: looking that does not possess or complete what it sees, but follows what appears and lets it be. LBJs function as an "other of thought" (Glissant): a persistent reminder of a shared world remaining partially obscure, where ethical responsibility arises from sustained attention to what neither fully yields nor disappears.

My Ukrainian work colleague calls them "grey little birds", but it's the same idea.

What I should be doing now is reworking my AI abstract... but instead I am procrastinating. Why? Because it maybe needs a rewrite rather than a rejig and I don't quite have the fortitude.