Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

The potential of paying attention: Tripping and the ethics of affective

attentiveness
Maria Cichosz
University of Toronto, Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly simple act of paying attention and
Received 27 December 2012 choosing what one pays attention to. Taking this power seriously, I explore the ethical value attunement,
Received in revised form or the state of paying attention, holds in relation to affect and its circulation. Because the affective texture
17 May 2013
of the everyday is not always directly accessible to experience, the ethical potential of becoming attuned
Accepted 24 May 2013
to this texture can be more effectively examined through a conceptual framework of a radically altered,
affectively-mediated state of consciousness: the trip. Conceptualizing tripping allegorically, as meaning
Keywords:
something other and more than what is literally said, I use this mode of experience as a framework to
Affect
Potential
think through the question of what ethical potential lies in practices of affective attentiveness. Exploring
Attention the connections between affect, attention, and tripping, I bring these concepts together in a close reading
Tripping of excerpts from David Foster Wallaces The Pale King and This is Water. Engaging with the work of a
Drugs writer who has always seen attention as an ethical imperative, I show that an indenite, shifting un-
Ethics derstanding of affect can have concrete ethical applications in day to day life.
2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Consulting a dictionary yields no fewer than twelve denitions
for trip: a journey or excursion, especially for pleasure; an act of
going to a place and returning; an exciting or stimulating experi-
ence; a stumble or fall due to catching ones foot on something; a
mistake; and of course, a hallucinatory (or otherwise strange)
experience caused by taking a psychedelic drug. While we usually
think of tripping as hallucinatory and tied to the consumption of
narcotics, not all trips are hallucinatory and not all drugs are psy-
chedelics, or even narcotics. Indeed, some trips require no drugs at
all (or rather no drugs that we recognize as Controlled Substances)
and are comprised entirely of intense, strange, disturbing, pro-
found, and unexpected affectively-mediated psychic experiences
that challenge our ideas about intoxication and sobriety, erasing
clear dividing lines between the two.
Moving tripping away from traditional, drug-centred deni-
tions, I think of it more broadly, as a mode of being encompassing a
wide spectrum of experiences. In other words, I consider tripping
metaphorically, not as separate from other forms of experience,
such as reading, art, sport, or meditation, but as an affectively-
amplied part of a continuum of consciousness that can teach us
something about how we relate to the world. In dening tripping
E-mail address: maria.cichosz@utoronto.ca.
more broadly I think of the trip the way the eld of Addiction
Studies considers drugs and addiction: not as contingent socio-
logical terms, but as conceptual and philosophical frames for
thinking about modes of being in culture (see Alexander and
Roberts, 2003; Redeld and Brodie, 2002).
There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly
simple act of paying attention and choosing what one pays atten-
tion to. Taking this power seriously, I explore the ethical value
attunement, or the state of paying attention, holds in relation to
affect and its circulationdthat which is hidden in plain sight all
around us. Because the affective texture of the everyday is not al-
ways directly accessible to experience (Massumi, 2002b: 33), the
ethical potential of becoming attuned to this texture can be more
effectively examined through a conceptual framework of a radically
altered, affectively-mediated state of consciousness: in this case,
the trip. Conceptualizing tripping allegorically, as meaning some-
thing other and more than what is literally said, I use this mode of
experience as a framework to think through the question of what
ethical potential lies in practices of affective attentiveness. Out-
lining my understanding of affect as undened, and thus different
from emotion, to explain why attentiveness constitutes a particu-
larly ethical stance towards affect, I examine how such an ethics
might look in practice in a close reading of excerpts from David
Foster Wallaces The Pale King and This is Water. Engaging with the
work of a writer who sees attention as an ethical imperative, I show

1755-4586/$ e see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.05.001
56 M. Cichosz / Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62
that an indenite, shifting understanding of affect can have con-
crete ethical applications in day to day life.
1. Affect as something
As an interdisciplinary term of study, affect lacks a cultural-
theoretical vocabulary specic to itself. As such, it is often used as
a synonym for emotion, devoid of specic, contextualized meaning
(Massumi, 2002b: 27). While scholars generally agree that affect
encompasses the various capacities of bodies (whether animate or
inanimate, living or non-living) to affect and be affected, and refers
to forces and intensities that are visceral, precede conscious
knowing, and insist beyond emotion (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010),
many studies of affect take denite, clearly circumscribed emotions
as their starting point. See, for instance, Sara Ahmeds The Cultural
Politics of Emotion, where various socially-categorized emotions
such as hate, fear, disgust, shame, and love are taken as points of
entry to explore how naming emotions involves different orien-
tations towards the objects they construct (Ahmed, 2004: 14).
Naming emotions is key in theoretical models that categorize and
label affects so that they can be more effectively analysed. The
terms affect and emotion are used interchangeably, as synonyms,
with no clear distinction between the two.
Consider, as a point of contrast, Kathleen Stewarts Ordinary
Affects, where a careful distinction between affect and emotion is
maintained by referring to forces and intensities only as something,
consistently refusing to give any feeling a determinate name or
category. Stewarts understanding of affect encompasses impulses,
sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of
relating, [.] forms of persuasion, contagion and compulsion, [.]
modes of attention, attachment, and agency (Stewart, 2007: 2)da
variety of experiences that are not quite emotions and cannot be
easily classied as such. Affects are not like emotions or any other
formal structures that have been socially categorized, such as ide-
ologies, worldviews, or systemic beliefs, but more like Raymond
Williams structures of feeling, which do not have to await de-
nition, classication, or rationalization before they exert palpable
pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action
(Williams, 1977: 132e133). This distinction between affects as un-
dened intensities and emotions as categorized feelings is impor-
tant, as it is precisely amorphousness and a lack of denition that
opens affect to a form of ethical potentiality more denite un-
derstandings of emotion foreclose.
Tripping, an affectively-mediated experience, alerts us to this
difference and its signicance. A trip is primarily felt rather than
understood, and imparts mainly affective, or sensuous knowl-
edgeda knowledge that is difcult to communicate in any coherent
way, rendering itself largely non-narrativizable. Trips are like af-
fects in that they do not have to await denition to exert palpable
pressure on those who undergo them. Deleuze and Guattari
emphasize this affective dimension of tripping in their description
of the trips accompanying phenomena, such as hallucination, in
which something one sees, hears, or realizes actually presuppose
[s] an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their
object (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a: 20). A trip is an affectively-
based (I feel) event that exposes levels of meaning beyond those
available in the realm of everyday experience, ones that do not
necessarily make analytical sense.
It is difcult to name or dene precisely what occurs during a
trip, where the body becomes the Body without Organs: a
connection of desires, conjunction of ows, continuum of in-
tensities (2004b: 179). In tripping there are affective intensities
that cannot be easily pinned down for analysis, momentary feelings
that pass before they can be fully grasped as disparate emotions.
Many writers have argued that as an occurrence that is strange,
outside of ordinary human experience, and primarily felt rather
than understood, a trip is inherently unrepresentable, or always at
least partially inaccessible through the symbolic, or semiotic level
of language. Following an extensive attempt to convey the feeling of
an LSD trip, Tom Wolfe gives up and writes:
But these are words, man! And you couldnt put it into words. The
White Smocks liked to put it into words, like hallucination and
dissociative phenomena [but.] The whole thing was.the
experience.this certain indescribable feeling.Indescribable,
because words can only jog the memory [emphasis in original].
(Wolfe, 1968: 44e5)
Even Edgar Allan Poe, who declared that he never had a
thought which [he] could not set down in words and did not
believe that any thought, properly so called, is out of the reach of
language found his opium dreams to be a class of fancies, of
exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, [he
has] found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language (Poe,
1902: 88). Tripping shows us that undened intensities exist
before becoming identiable as specic, socially-categorized
emotions, and that these amorphous affects nonetheless shape
our world in very real ways.
This lack (indeed, impossibility) of denition marks the trip as a
space of openness and potential. Henri Michaux, who spent a great
deal of time attempting to write about his mescaline trips, described
tripping as being as if there was an opening, an opening like a
gathering together, like a world, where something can happen,
many things can happen, where theres a whole lot, theres a swarm
of possibilities, where everything tingles with possibility (quoted in
Plant, 1999: 146). Anything can happen during a trip, and trips
routinely exceed the intentions with which they are undertaken.
Openness of denition makes room for potential. Affectively
speaking, this can be understood by looking at Deleuzian theories
of expression, in which expression is a movement from the force of
that which is expressed, whether linguistic or extra-linguistic, to
content, the concrete form this expression takes, mediated by the
process of their passing into each other: in other words, an
immanence.[a] gap between content and expression (Massumi,
2002a: xviii). What happens in this gap is crucial, since the force
of expression has no concrete existence, only dynamic potential,
until it is captured by a content-expression articulation, as in a
net (xx). Coming to rest momentarily in a concrete object such as
a body, expression becomes more denitely signied, allowing its
content to emerge, but also limiting its potential by restricting its
circulation. In other words, once expression stops its process of
immanent movement and becomes static, or captured without the
chance of renewal (as in a concrete denition), all dynamic po-
tential is lost.
Returning to Stewarts Ordinary Affects, it is easy to see how
affects, knowable only as a vague something that is happening,
make the world tentative, charged, overwhelming, and alive,
rendering it a beginning dense with potential (Stewart, 2007:
128e9). Because nothing is dened, the potential for something
new to take place is enormous. Discussing Deleuzes model of
expression, Brian Massumi points out that the actual denition
says too much in being born: it annuls the potential, bringing a
current of expression to the end of the stream (Massumi, 2002a:
xxxii). If denition turns formless affective expression into content,
such as a discernible emotion, it is clear that dynamic potential
cannot exist in an affective model using denite emotions as its
starting point. Once captured in the content nets of specic emo-
tions, affects lose their capacity for movement and change.
This is not to say that emotions do not have any radical po-
tential, only that their potential functions differently than that of
affects and their undened somethingness which is the focus of my
 M. Cichosz / Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62
exploration. Feminist scholars have written about the mobilization
of concretely dened outlaw emotions such as anger and
bitterness and their political potential (Ahmed, 2004; Campbell,
1994; Jaggar, 1989; Lorde, 1997). Similarly, feminist psychoana-
lysts such as Julia Kristeva have argued that affects (drives) can
only hold true potential after they have been actualized through
denition (Kristeva, 2002). Megan Boler argues that drawing dis-
tinctions between affect and emotion can serve to re-gender
emotion within a binary framework and ignore the potential
emotion holds for forming its own radical lines of ight (Boler,
2012). Not all understandings of affects potentiality are the
same, and I have chosen to focus on this particular conceptuali-
zation of affects as lacking denition and containing immanent
potential because it best facilitates my discussion of attentiveness
as an ethical practice, particularly within the context of Wallaces
work.
2. Why attentiveness?
What designates attention to affect and its ows as an ethical
project? Of all possible stances one could take in relation an un-
derstanding of affect as lacking denition, in motion, and con-
taining immanent potential, why is attentiveness particularly
important? Further, if the existence of such potential is dependent
upon affects remaining amorphous and undened, knowable only
as a something that is happening, why is it worthwhile to pay
attention to them at all? And how does a conscious act such as
paying attention t into a model in which much that is affective is
also pre-subjective?
In short, attention to affect is implicated in ethics because
thinking about affect is another way of thinking about potential, and
potential is a way of conceptualizing changednot only that which is
possible, or which we can imagine happening, but also that which is
indeterminate and radically new. Change depends upon the
fostering, tending to, and strategic actualization of the potential
found in affect. Massumi explains that an ethics of potential
is a basically pragmatic question of how one contributes to the
stretch of expression in the worlddor conversely prolongs its
capture. This is a fundamentally creative problem. Where
expression stretches, potential determinately emerges into
something new. [.] To tend to the stretch of expression, to
foster and inect it rather than trying to own it, is to enter the
stream, contributing to its probing: this is co-creative, an
aesthetic endeavour. It is also an ethical endeavour, since it is to
ally oneself with change: for an ethics of emergence[, .] an
ethico-aesthetic paradigm. (2002a: xxii)
The individual is involved in this ethics of emergence to the
extent that they foster and afrm or capture and nullify the in-
tensity of affects potential. The paradigm is ethical because the
fostering of potential is necessary for change, and it is aesthetic in
that it demands us to think creatively about how to foster this
potential. Potential moves from body to body as affect, and if it is
not incarnated in an individual body capable of renewing it, it
would cease to be expressed[,] it would dissipate, unperceived,
like the lightning ash you just missed seeing (xxix). On the most
basic level, the question of an ethics of potential is the question of
how well ones stance, attitude, and mode of being facilitate the
existence of potential, and thus the existence of change on a daily,
moment to moment level. And how better to foster the stretch of
expression without owning it or giving it any concrete form than
by simply paying attention, and being aware of its movement?
But attentiveness and affect appear to be at odds. Affect, espe-
cially when understood as an ambiguous something, is generally
thought to be a pre-subjective phenomenon that precedes ones
57
conscious perception of it (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), and not
something subject to any conscious effort, including the exertion of
attention. There is certainly a gap, and this gap between expression
and content poses a problem: how to pay attention to something
that has no denition, as of yet? To that which hardly exists, but is
nonetheless already there.
It is worthwhile to consider that though the potentiality
inherent in affect may not be directly accessible to experience, it is
not exactly outside of conscious experience, either. Massumi
(2002b: 36) argues that while affect is amorphous, it cannot but be
perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture, such as
emotions. Stewart makes a similar argument, claiming that the
ordinary texture of the everyday registers perceptible intensities.
Though eeting, such intensities can be seen, obtusely, in circuits
and failed relays, in jumpy moves and the layered textures of a
scene, sometimes even registering as a physical trace (Stewart,
2007: 4). Clearly, there are moments in daily life where it is
possible to register the movement of affects and their immanent
potential, even if it is in something small like a resonance or
shudder, a shock or side perception, or any other fragment of
unfolding sensory experience that does not yet make sense in
symbolic terms.
My notion of attentiveness, then, entails a mode of being that is
less concerned with rational intentionality, which is only a step
away from the desire to classify an undened impulse, and more
concerned with living in a state of openness to all sorts of sensa-
tions, even ones that cannot be immediately understood or do not
necessarily feel good to us. Rather than trying to know affects in a
way that pins them down as static objects of analysis, or
attempting to catch such sensations at the very moment of their
incipience in some utopian effort to eliminate the preconscious
gap (which would be impossible, anyway), attentiveness requires
us to simply be aware that something is happening, an undened
something that may require a response from us, or not. This is not
a utilitarian approach, as it does not contain the expectation that
any given affective relay will contain some kind of insight, or
provide an opportunity for critique (which is another mode of
dampening potential). It merely requires that we be effective
conductors who can recapitulate and foster conditions of emer-
gence, creating room for the new.
Attention and attunement are ethical modes of being towards
affect because they ensure we are both conscious of affects
movement and in a position to foster the continuation of potential
immanent in this movement. The act of fostering this potential is a
way of opening ourselves to change, whether personal or political.
Paying attention to subtle, vague, or ordinary manifestations of
affect allows us to be conduits to affective ows without monop-
olizing them through denition or categorization, only tending to
and furthering their stretch in an openness and commitment to the
potentiality of the everyday.
Stewart (2007: 127), who also suggests that close ethnographic
attention is a tting mode of approaching an undened and
emerging present, reminds us that the vague and unnished
quality of the ordinary is not so much a deciency as a resource.
While it is tempting to say that attention and its intentionality have
no place in affect, which is unpredictable and unquantiable, to do
so would be to leave aside the question of ethicsdindeed, to ignore
a vast offering of immanent potential present in the most mundane
recesses of the everyday. If we choose to leave ethics out of affect in
an effort to preserve it in some kind of pure, anti-intentional form,
we inevitably come to the conclusion that all that can be said about
affect is that it happens, and attempt to describe how it happen-
sdboth of which are intellectually interesting, but neither of which
is particularly ethical. Ethics requires honouring the impulse, no
matter how vague, that involves us as agents of change, and not
58 M. Cichosz / Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62
damping down potential before it has a chance to emerge, which is
tantamount to a refusal of the new.
3. Ethical attentiveness in practice
How does an ethics of affective attentiveness look in practice?
Thinking of the trip conceptually, as a mode of experience capable
of radically shifting ones attention in unforeseen ways, is helpful to
understanding how attentiveness can be ethically productive on a
daily, moment to moment level.
Take, for instance, habit, the bodys best defense against the new.
Massumi (2002b: 11) identies habit as an acquired automatic self-
regulation, one that encourages us to dampen affects potential by
disregarding the singular contours of the arriving impulse: dis-
missing its potentially torturous anomalies as functionally insig-
nicant (2002a: xxxi). In other words, the singular, unique affective
impulse that hits any given body as a force of expression becomes
disregarded through habit and its accompanying inattention, a lack
of attunedness that prompts us to carelessly or unconsciously
choose the calming alternative of directing this potential-laden
impulse into something familiar, closed, and easily dened.
Habit and its predictability are fundamentally at odds with the
ethical project of fostering change precisely because habit requires a
commitment to inattention. Megan Boler argues that inscribed
habits of emotional inattention, the embedded, cultural habits of
seeing and not seeing, are comfort zones of dominant cultural
values we inhabit unconsciously (Boler, 2004: 122). Such habits
involve a building up and solidication of certain desires resulting in
a limited capacity to attend to uncomfortable or difcult knowl-
edges and sensations, which are disregarded and consequently
dampened in their potentiality by shutting down any opening that
might have facilitated the existence of something new. Signicantly,
Boler suggests that the most effective way of combatting such habits
of emotional inattention is through a pedagogy of discomfort, which
disrupts emotional habits and unquestioned attachments and en-
courages an often uncomfortable re-evaluation of ones unconscious
mode of relating to the world. Quoting Buddhist psychologist Mark
Epstein, she argues that the more we bring our attachments into
awareness, the freer we become, not because we eliminate the at-
tachments, but because we learn to identify more with awareness
than with desire [my emphasis] (120).
Crucially, this is not an easy process, but one that mandates
disruption, discomfort, and a destabilization of all that is taken for
granted in ones daily reality. Breaking the complacency of habit
requires a major shift in attention and a new awareness of the par-
ticulars of the materiality of the everyday, allowing these emergent
singularities to unsettle us and making their capture through un-
conscious modes of classication difcult. I want to emphasize that I
see attentiveness here not in a grand, nebulous sense, but as rooted
in the ordinary, where small undulations of potential reside, hidden.
Through an ethical attentiveness to the mundane, we see that the
world is in a state of constant dynamic change, no matter how
minute, and through this recognition it is possible to imagine how
things might be different than they currently are.
If habit is the predictable and determined, the trip is the inde-
terminate variation par excellenceda repetition with profound
difference. Tripping facilitates a major shift in attention that allows
one to suddenly see things in a new, previously unconsidered way,
one antithetical to the entrenched nature of habit. Daily life, as
Michel Foucault knew, is comprised of a multiplicity of force re-
lations that are omnipresent, come from everywhere, and are
permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing (Foucault,
1990: 92e93). To trip, on the other hand, whether by stumbling
over the curb on ones way to the streetcar or by nding oneself
suddenly in the grip of a serious Fear, as Hunter S. Thompson
routinely does (Thompson, 1998: 84), is to become over-
whelmeddindeed, possesseddby surprise.
Tripping, then, whether physically as over a curb, psychically as
on drugs, or metaphorically as in any intensied state of con-
sciousness, is a break in the repetition of the everydayda mistake,
albeit a productive one. It is a moment in which a slippage in
repetition might, in Judith Butlers terms, ope[n] the way for an
inauguration of signifying possibilities that exceed those to which
the term has been previously bound (Butler, 1997: 94). Michaux
calls mescaline an accelerative, repetitive, agitating, accentuator,
overthrower of all reverie, interrupter and a demonstration of the
discontinuous (quoted in Plant, 1999: 138). Tripping mandates an
openness to surprise, and to sensations that are new, possessing the
power to forcibly disrupt habits of inattention.
Habit, of course, is related to power and its increasingly com-
plex, shifting mode of operation in a postmodern world. A radical
shift in ones practices of attention, such as that involved in trip-
ping, is ethically productive not only in disrupting habit, but also in
offering us a concrete theory of how it is implicated in and foun-
dational to powers ows in a way systemic explanations do not
account for. Stewart writes:
Models of thinking that slide over the live surface of difference
at work in the ordinary to bottom-line arguments about bigger
structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a
reeling present is composed of heterogeneous and noncoherent
singularities. (Stewart, 2007: 4)
In other words, totalizing shorthand terms like neoliberalism,
advanced capitalism, and globalization explain only macro-level,
systemic aspects of power structures while ignoring the paradox-
ical fact that these larger systems, though they appear xed, con-
crete, and immutable, are actually composed of vague sensations
present in the everyday. Disregarding these undened intensities
that seem gone almost as soon as they are felt results in a view of
power as something that has already happened, rather than as a
number of immanent forces constantly assembling and reassem-
bling, coming together. If one considers, as Stewart does, that the
animate circuit of affective movements is the very contact zone
where the overdeterminations of circulations, events, conditions,
technologies, and ows of power literally take place, and where
forms of power and meaning, very much like habits, become con-
tained in singularities (2007: 3), then affect and its vagueness
actually have the potential to ll gaps left by totalizing structural
explanatory mechanisms.
Power, like affect, is a thing of the senses, irreducible to ideology,
structure, or any other concretely dened concept. Recognizing this
and keeping ones senses in a state of affective attentiveness is an
excellent (and thoroughly ethical) way of remaining attuned to its
minute, moment to moment functioning without which the total-
ized systems that often become isolated objects of analysis could
not exist. It is also a mode of sensing openings, moments of dif-
ference that involve us in change. Benjamin, having just taken
hashish, writes that waiting to feel the drugs effects is as if the
whole world was holding its breath: always the same worlddyet
one has patience (Benjamin, 2006: 100). Patience that something
new will emerge if we pay attention closely enough. Patience
culminating in a dull feeling of foreboding and uneasiness;
something strange, ineluctable, is approaching (117)dthe affective
force of expression that must be attended to, and fostered.
4. The terrible power of attention: affect, attentiveness, and
tripping in Wallaces This is Water and The Pale King
To concretely demonstrate these connections between affect,
attention, and tripping as a conceptual framework, I turn to David
 M. Cichosz / Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62 59

Foster Wallaces The Pale King and This is Water. Though it may thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is
appear counterintuitive to look through a ctional text to under- that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get
stand something about real world affective encounters, I contend lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to
that ction is not divorced from lived reality, but actually contains whats going on in front of me (46e48).
vast repositories of sociological, affective information different than
In other words, the work of shifting ones attention is not
those available through other modes of knowing.
necessarily rational. It is affective work easily endangered by over-
While certainly privileged, ethnography is not the only method
intellectualization or a slide into critique, that tempting mode of
we have for understanding the rich texture of the everyday. That
potential-dampening intellectual ownership. Further, it requires
we do not consider the ctive a legitimate source of information in
attention not to large overarching structures, but to the mundane
sociological contexts says more about our arbitrary distinctions
quality of boredom, frustration, and the grind of actual life routine,
between fact and ction than about the potential of literature,
day after week after month after year (73). It is an attentiveness to
which can address uid, difcult to pin down truths that might not
concrete materiality, the dullness of which contains what is so real
otherwise be available to us (see Gordon, 2008). Fiction deserves
and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us (131)daffect
serious consideration, particularly when it comes to addressing
and its immanent potential, omnipresent yet hardly there.
affect, that elusive not yet formed thing. If one hopes, as I do, to
The Pale King is Wallaces nal and unnished novel, published
focus on relays not directly accessible to experience, then there are
posthumously in 2011. Very much like This is Water, it is a text
few more appropriate places to look than in a novel, that wonderful
thematically concerned with the terrible power of attention and
medium that asks us to slow down and pay attention as it eshes
what you pay attention to (Wallace, 2011: 91). It establishes this
out the intricacies of ordinary encounters in ways difcult to
focus through its subject matter: the United States Internal Revenue
replicate in real time.
Service (IRS), its employees, and its bureaucratic practices, the
Wallace is an American ction writer and essayist who, until the
functioning of which no one will pay attention to because no one
time of his death in 2008, had been much concerned with attention
will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues
and its ethics in his work. This focus on attentiveness is present in
monumental dullness (84). Dullness and boredom are the sources
nearly all his texts, which foreground it thematically and ask the
of a psychic pain that is challenging because it fails to provide
reader to exercise it by engaging with the work in difcult,
distraction from a deeper pain, that of grappling with difcult truths
demanding, and sometimes painful ways. Perhaps no text centres
or uncomfortable knowledges present in daily life and necessary for
Wallaces concern with attention better than This is Water, a
breaking inscribed habits of inattention. Indeed, Wallace argues
commencement speech he delivered to the 2005 graduating class of
that there is great ethical potential in negotiating boredom as one
Kenyon College on a subject of his choosingdthe only such address
would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes (85). In
he ever made. The speechs subtitle, Some Thoughts, Delivered on a
Wallaces novel, the IRS functions not as a symbol of bureaucracy or
Signicant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, links its
tedium, but as an allegory for the difculty and ethical value of
main theme, critical awareness, or being conscious and aware
choosing to pay attention to what is hidden in the texture of the
enough to choose what you pay attention to (Wallace, 2009: 54), to
ordinary. As a novel that is not only about attention, but also de-
compassion, and thus to an ethical orientation towards the world. In
mands that readers attend to it through Wallaces signature textual
this speech Wallace argues for the value of the totally obvious (15),
strategies of long, unbroken sentences, extensive multi-page foot-
emphasizing that the most important realities in daily life are the
notes, and a non-linear story, The Pale King is an excellent text to
ones most difcult to see, describe, and pay attention to. For Wallace,
examine in relation to themes of attention and affect.
being attentive to the value of the obvious requires taking seriously
The excerpt I have chosen to discuss is one of several in which
that what is truly important is not so much the capacity to think, but
employees of the Service narrate how they came to work for the
rather the choice of what to think aboutdin other words, the choice
IRS. In this particular segment, Chris Fogle, an employee who has a
to make a move towards ethical attentiveness.
penchant for long-winded explanations that contain far more detail
Positioning attention as intimately connected with the totally
than most people might deem necessary, describes his decision to
obvious links it directly to habit. Wallace describes habit as
work as an accountant as part of a major shift in attention that
immensely limiting and fundamental to shoring up interior modes
occurred in his life after a number of closely connected events,
of selsh inattention:
including the matter of recreational drug abuse during this period,
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep and the relation of certain drugs to how [he] got [to the IRS] (177).
belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, Tripping as a radical mode of shifting attention is crucial within
most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think Fogles narrative. He explains that the
about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because its so
ickers of deeper awareness, whether drug-induced or notdfor it
socially repulsive, but its pretty much the same for all of us,
is arguable how much that ultimately mattersdprobably had
deep down. It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at
more of a direct effect on my life and directions change and my
birth (36e38).
entering the Service in 1979 than did my fathers accident, or
Attentiveness is an ethical effort because it requires us to do the possibly even more than the dramatic experience I underwent in
difcult work of getting free of this natural, hardwired default the Advanced Tax review class that I had sat in on by mistake (189).
setting, staying alert and attentive instead of becoming hypnotized
Fogles narrative shows how a trip, or intense affectively-
by the constant monologue in ones head. Not surprisingly, this is
mediated experience, in this case drug-induced (though this is
uncomfortable work, as challenging entrenched habits requires
more of a signpost than a requirement, as we will see), can be part of
inhabiting a more ambiguous and often unsettling sense of self,
learning to consciously shift attention by prompting one to do
such as that outlined by Bolers pedagogy of discomfort.
difcult, habit-altering workdin Fogles case, tedious work within
Signicantly, Wallace asks how much of this work of atten-
the IRS.
tiveness requires actual knowledge or intellect:
Recalling his college years, Fogle describes a time that now
The answer, not surprisingly, is that it depends what kind of seems as unfocussed to him as he was back then, fuzzy and abstract.
knowledge were talking about. Probably the most dangerous He explains that he not only had trouble paying attention to
60 M. Cichosz / Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62
anything going on outside his immediate sphere, but also did not
know how to focus his attention in any meaningful way, wasting
psychic energy on entrenched habits. There is pleasure in routine,
and habits of inattention can masquerade as games. Stewart calls
these sensory games: modes of supercial, banal attentiveness in
which you can check yourself out of the ow of things while
remaining seemingly attuned (42). Fogle created a number of
sensory games in his youth, one of which involved counting the
words in a text instead of actually reading them, as if these two
modes of attending were interchangeable. For example, Here
came Old Yeller to save me from the hogs would equate to ten
words which [he] would count off from one to ten instead of its
being a sentence that made you love Old Yeller in the book even
more (160). He emphasizes that he did so almost unconsciously,
skimming over any potential for meaning in a practice of habitual
inattentiveness.
In another sensory game, Fogle recalls smoking pot after high
school classes, watching television and eating Tang out of the jar
with his nger until he looked down and could not believe how
much of it he had consumed. The activity was totally meaningless:
Its like I was dead or asleep without even being aware of it, as in
the Wisconsin expression didnt know enough to lay down
(Wallace, 2011: 158). This example is important, as it highlights the
framework of the trip as metaphorical rather than literaldhere
Fogles pot smoking, though certainly drug-oriented, was not in any
way conducive to ethical attentiveness. Drugs are not inherently
radical or liberatory, as is obvious here, where attention is not at all
shifted, but loosened and synced up with habit. Thinking of trip-
ping allegorically, as a conceptual framework, means emphasizing
the psychic elements of a trip rather than its common sense link-
ages with drugs per se.
As he aged and entered college, these sensory games became
what Stewart (2007: 94) calls oating games: habitual modes of
taking pleasure in irony and critique for their own sake. Seeing
himself as a hip nonconformist, purposefully unfocussed and
nihilistic, Fogle took great pleasure in attempting to own and pin
down, rather than foster, undened potential. In his most elabo-
rate oating game, Fogle and his equally nihilistic roommate
gathered at their dorm room window each evening, staring out at
a podiatric clinic with a rotating sign in the shape of a foot to
watch it nish its automated rotation at the end of the night. If the
sign stopped with the foot facing away from them, they would go
to library and study,
but if it stopped with the foot or any signicant part of it facing
[their] windows, [they] would take it as a sign (with the
incredibly obvious double entendre) and immediately blow off
any homework or supposed responsibility [they] had and
instead go to the Hat, which at that time was the currently hip
UIC pub and place to hear bands, and would drink and play
quarters and tell all the other kids whose parents were paying
their tuition about the ritual of the rotating foot in a way that
[they] all appeared nihilistically wastoid and hip (163).
Here attention is channelled into banality, reected in Fogles
admission that he can remember neither the name of the clinic nor
his roommate.
Fogle certainly practiced forms of attention, but none that were
too heavy or sustained. His lack of attention to his affective in-
vestments during his youth and college years allowed habits of
inattention to form and solidify, shaping his daily routines. He
interpreted these pervasive modes of inattention as conscious
choices to play ironic games, or be part of a college scene he
thought he was somehow above due to his self-perceived status as
a nonconformist. By allowing his attention to be unconsciously
pulled in this way, Fogle operated on his hard-wired default
settings, the very worship and centring of self that Wallace sees as
antithetical to living ethically. This is
[.] the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after
day, getting more and more selective about what you see and
how you measure value without ever being fully aware that
thats what youre doing. (Wallace, 2009: 114)
Such a centring of self is a way of refusing ethical potentiality
and treating the everyday not a resource, but as a playground for
ones own pleasure, thus siding with the ease and gratication of
habit.
Fogles shift in attentiveness came with Obetrolling, his radi-
cally consciousness-shifting trip experience. Obetrolling is Fogles
name for taking Obetrol, a drug chemically related to Dexedrine
and Ritalin, substances prescribed to increase the users awareness
and focus. Unlike pot, which all but destroyed his ability to
concentrate, Obetrol put Fogle in a state of doubling, or extreme
attentiveness that manifested as being intensely aware of seem-
ingly mundane details, such as sitting upright in a dark green easy
chair with a cigarette burn on the right armrest, and the cigarette
burn being black and imperfectly round. Doubling, as its name
suggests, also involved a second level of awareness: noticing the
changes and being affected by them, and by the fact that [he] knew
[he] was noticing them. That [he] was aware of the awareness
(2011: 183). Fogle explains that stated so openly, this amount of
detail might seem tedious or insignicant, but was actually indis-
pensable to the process of emerging from the inattentive drift of his
life at that time. As though I was a machine, he says, that sud-
denly realized it was a human being that didnt have to just go
through the motions it was programmed to perform over and over
(182). As if he had awakened to the affective ow of moment to
moment existence, and seen that in it lay the potential to disrupt
unconscious patterns.
A surprising number of things can be gleaned from attentive-
ness to ordinary surroundings. For instance, Fogles rst serious
understanding that power is a thing of the senses, whose circuits,
and ones implication in them, are visible in singularities, such as a
dorm rooms walls. Having never studied his walls colour or
texture before, Fogle remarks that
[i]t was kind of striking. Their texture was mostly smooth, but if
you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the
little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave
when theyre paid by the job and not the hour and thus have
motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can
almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who
made it was on (182).
Seemingly insignicant details contain the minutiae of powers
operation, hidden everywhere in plain sight. For those attentive
enough to be aware of them, such details bring with them un-
comfortable knowledge, the kind required to do the difcult work
of breaking inscribed habits of inattention. Fogle notes that his
awareness of belonging to an institution whose existence is
dependent upon the labour of less privileged others he would not
normally consider is not necessarily pleasant, but it is real and
important, and available to him in the affective texture of his very
room. It involves an uncomfortable decentering of self, and having
to consciously feel and be aware of these inner reactions instead of
just having them operate in [him] without quite admitting them to
[him]self (184).
Decentering oneself and questioning old habits during a trip
opens a space for new possibilities. For instance, listening to his
roommate trying to impress a girl on the phone while Obetrolling
makes Fogle aware that not only does he feel contempt for the
roommates effort to convey false hipness, but he is also
 M. Cichosz / Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62
[.] uncomfortably aware of times that Ive also tried to project the
idea of myself as hip and cynical to impress someone, [.and] it
makes me see similarities and realize things about myself that
embarrass me, but I dont know how to quit doing themdlike, if I
quit trying to seem nihilistic, even just to myself, then what would
happen, what would I be like? [emphasis in original] (184).
The answer is not clear, and the prospect of being other than one
is used to being is frightening, but even asking this question, rather
than unconsciously identifying with nihilism, is a major step for-
ward for Fogle. Here tripping opens him to a mode of becoming
through attentiveness, and what he becomes exceeds anything he
could have imagined.
Massumi argues that attention to the movements of affect and
its potential is nothing less than the perception of ones own vitality,
ones sense of aliveness, of changeability (often signied as
freedom) [emphasis in original] (Massumi, 2002b: 36). Further,
the perception of this self-perception, its naming and making
conscious, is what allows affect to be effectively analysed (36), not
in a way that captures it, but in a way that fosters and afrms its
potential through attentive modes of being. Signicantly, Fogle
remarks that Obetrolling made him feel alive, like he owned him-
self instead of just renting, and could nally direct his attention in
meaningful ways. This involved discovering there were depths in
him and in his ordinary surroundings that exceeded
[.] just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and
vanity that [he] let drive [him]. That there were depths to [him]
that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not
abstract but actually much realer than [his] clothes or self-image,
and that blazed in an almost sacred wayd[.] and that these
realest, most profound parts of [him] involved not drives or ap-
petites but simple attention, awareness, if only [he] could stay
awake off speed (187).
Tapping into this vitality of daily life is an ethical act in and of
itself, and does not require that something practical, or utilitarian,
immediately come of this practice. It is not abstract, but grounded
in the most innitesimal details of materiality, and involves moving
away from selsh impulses and drives. Tripping and the extreme
changes in consciousness it mandates carry the potential for those
who undergo them to form new sensory habits, such as watching
and waiting, learning to make a record of ones own ordinary
attention to things.
If only he could stay awake off speed. I solved the secret of the
universe last night, writes Arthur Koestler, but this morning I
forgot what it was (quoted in Plant, 1999: 131). Anybody who has
ever taken a drug and tripped knows this feelingdthe frustration of
trying to remember why that surreal, highly affective journey
seemed so profound at the time but now does not make much
sense. Part of the frustration of tripping is its stubbornly non-
narrativizable nature, which poses a distinct problem: how to
make anything productive out of an experience that is difcult to
make sense of, let alone remember? Fogle admits that when he
came down from the Obetrol he could barely recall any of the vivid
details he had been so intensely aware of, which now seemed
covered with a mental fuzz:
The memory of the feeling of suddenly coming awake and being
aware felt vague and diffuse, like something you think you see at
the outer periphery of your vision but then cant see when you try
to look directly at it. Or like a fragment of memory which youre not
sure whether it was real or part of a dream. (Wallace, 2011: 185)
But whether he could remember or not is irrelevant, since the
value of tripping does not depend on its recollection, or rational
61
analysis, but rather on its status as a powerful conceptual frame-
work for thinking through (and experiencing, in Fogles case) what
it means to allow ones conscious attentive and affective states to
radically shift.
The trip serves as an instruction manual, a conceptual tool that
can help us understand the openness and attentiveness necessary
to ethically orient ourselves as bodies willing to foster the stretch of
affects potential. It is difcult to practice a mode of consciousness
one nds alien, or jarring, without some sort of model for reference.
Obetrolling was important to Fogle not because drugs are necessary
to attain states of affective attentiveness, but because without them
his awareness of such states would have been nonexistent. I like
now to think of the Obetrol and other subtypes of speed, he
explains,
as more of a kind of signpost or directional sign, pointing to
what might be possible if I could become more aware and alive
in daily life. In this sense, I think that abusing these drugs was a
valuable experience for me, as I was basically so feckless and
unfocused during this period that I needed a very clear, blunt
type of hint that there was much more to being an alive,
responsible, autonomous adult than I had any idea at the time
(186).
Crucially, Fogle does not continue Obetrolling to attain this daily
aliveness, but thinks of the experience allegorically, as meaning
something other and more than literally consuming narcoticsdas a
metaphor for what being attentive requires of us psychically. I think
here of Benjamins profane illumination: a materialistic, anthro-
pological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else
can give an introductory lesson (Benjamin, 2006: 132e3). Intro-
ductory because the point is not to transcend daily life through
intoxication, but to use the experience of intoxication dialectically,
as a signpost from which we can learn something that might illu-
minate our day to day, profane existence in a totally new way.
Indeed, Fogles major life-changing experience occurs not dur-
ing one of his trips, but afterwards, when he accidentally stumbles
into an Advanced Tax lecture while searching for the location of one
of his nal exams. The lecture is understandably over his head,
since he has not even nished Intro Accounting yet, but Fogle
emphasizes the content of the lecture does not matter to him so
much as his awareness of its effects on himdan awareness he could
not have had without an attention to minute, unformed affective
ows. He allows himself to be open and attentive to this new
experience, one he might have previously disregarded, in his
habitual cynicism, as unhip, because he has been so primed for
experiencing it this way, as [he]d already had a kind of foretaste or
temblor of just this experience shortly before through Obetrolling
(Wallace, 2011: 220). Having been primed to practice ethical
attunedness through tripping, Fogle goes on to live it in the most
sober, mundane way possible: by becoming a Certied Public Ac-
countant for the IRS, where attention to the ordinary constitutes a
way of life.
Tripping inspires a something to be done, a longing for something
moredthe desire and willingness to repeat potential-laden expe-
rience in the future. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, one of the rst writers to
record their experiences with hashish, was sure hed seen enough
wonder to last him a lifetime after his initial hashish trip. However,
with time he found that the memory of the wondrous glories
which [he] had beheld wooed [him] continually like an irresistible
sorceress until he was forced to reconsider and decided to trip
again, and again, and again (Ludlow, 1857: 45). Michaux recorded a
similar feeling of restlessness that remained with him after eight
hours (that is to say a century), with mescaline. He could not stop
thinking, thinking, these variations, these variations of intensity, of
62 M. Cichosz / Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 55e62
speed, these variations that hed experienced. They were some-
thing so immense, unforgettable, unique, that [he] thought, that
[he] did not stop thinking (quoted in Plant, 1999: 147). Obetrolling
certainly got Chris Fogle thinking, and did not let him rest until he
found his way into the obscure world of the IRS.
Tripping here is not about intoxication for its own sake, or even
about drugs. To trip is to be forcefully served with a reminder of
what ethical attentiveness looks like in practice. Because with-
drawing into habits and concerns of the self is a very real danger of
daily life, as Wallace takes such pains to explain, we all need such
reminders from time to time. Tripping is a method, not an end in
itself, and trips, as intense, unexpected affectively-mediated psy-
chic experiences, can take many forms: reading a really great book
that forces one to slow down; meditating; running until awareness
is narrowed to such particulars as breathing, pace, and sound;
looking at a piece of art; or practicing a dwelling-in-place of
making a conscious effort to watch, listen, and sense non-verbally
(Carbaugh, 1999). Though such experiences cannot be lived
constantly, and are by their nature eeting, they have the power to
open us to new possibilities and encourage us to form better habits
of attentiveness.
5. Attention as ethics in an inattentive world
There are strong connections between affect, an ethics of
attention, and the trip as a conceptual framework that can
demonstrate links between the two. While attentiveness may
initially seem banal and not worth considering as an ethical stance,
it actually constitutes a concrete, practical orientation towards
affect that can be practiced on a day to day, moment to moment
level, fostering potential on the same scale that power work-
sdthrough the senses and how we allow (or dont allow) affect to
relay through them.
In the context of a Western society driven by the speed of cap-
italism, internet, and mass media, there appears to be little room
for attention. Even a simple task like writing a paper becomes
fragmented through the presence of multiple windows, screens,
and points of focus. In such a context it is worthwhile to note, as
Wallace does, that the so-called real world will not discourage
you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called
real world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely
on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the
worship of self (Wallace, 2009: 115) that are the products of
inscribed habits of inattention. In this context, signposts, or
methodological frameworks highlighting the value of attention, are
precisely what we need. Though such conceptual tools are not total
solutions to the ethical problem of fostering change, they are
certainly a concrete starting point from which we can imagine that
through the circulation of affects immanent potential, the world is
always qualitatively changing. Indeed, frameworks that point out
the importance of attentiveness involve us in this change on a
moment to moment basis in a way that is both impossibly simple
and incredibly profound.
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