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

• Affect and attention are examined in relation to tripping.
• Attentiveness is discussed as an ethical stance that can foster affect's potential.
• The trip is employed as a methodological framework demonstrating these connections.
• Attunement to affective flows constitutes an ethical imperative in postmodernity.

There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly simple act of paying attention and choosing what one pays attention to. Taking this power seriously, I explore the ethical value attunement, or the state of paying attention, holds in relation to affect and its circulation. Because the affective texture of the everyday is not always directly accessible to experience, 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: the trip. Conceptualizing tripping allegorically, as meaning something 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. Exploring the connections between affect, attention, and tripping, I bring these concepts together in a close reading of excerpts from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King and This is Water. Engaging with the work of a writer who has always seen attention as an ethical imperative, I show that an indefinite, shifting understanding of affect can have concrete ethical applications in day to day life.