Following the rising interest in affective aspects of social experience, there has been a rush to set aside poststructural critique and embrace methods that are seen to be more in touch with emotional truths and embodied sensations. The central claim is that critique has become routinely suspicious, always searching for hidden motives or seeking to debunk false consciousness, and is therefore unable to read people's everyday beliefs for ‘what they are’. Bruno Latour (2004), for example, argues that critique has now ‘run out of steam’ and likens the critic to a conspiracy theorist, obsessed with unveiling hidden motives. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997) similarly writes that critics are stuck in a cycle of ‘paranoid reading’ and need to adopt more ‘reparative’ approaches to read cultural texts. Inspired by these influential arguments, a variety of methods associated with affect, non-representational and actor-network theories have been promoted as the way forward (Law 2004; Thrift 2007; Liljeström and Paasonen 2010; Felski 2015). Though this is framed as a new turn in theory and method, Critical Affect argues that the perceived split between poststructural critique and affect theory reiterates an enduring, interdisciplinary debate about which genre best captures the emotional complexity of social life, a debate that remains provocative and unresolved.

Scientists, sociologists, novelists, auto/biographers and journalists have all grappled with the question of whether the verifiability of fact or the emotional truth of fiction can most accurately capture the dynamic and intricate nature of social experience. From the ‘two cultures’ debate between scientists and literary scholars in the 1950s to more recent conflicts between social theorists and scientists in the 1990s ‘science wars’, the fraught question of which method produces the most authentic account has been at the forefront of intellectual debate. However, in most cases, eff orts to answer this question have been stymied by the need to privilege fact over fiction or vice versa. The recent turn from critical to affective concerns in cultural theory similarly presents the problem of method as a choice. Scholars are often asked to choose structure or affect, critique or creativity, detection or description. But should our notion of methods be so fixed and divided? Indeed, might social life be more complex than a straightforwardly critical or affective approach alone can truly capture?