Debates about the competing verity of fact and fiction routinely ask us to decide which genre or method produces the most authentic and useful truth. I have endeavoured to ask a different question, namely how determining the rules and exclusive value of various genres might determine the kinds of truths that can be told. I was drawn to debates about affect and method because they so richly capture the paradox of desiring a raw, untrammelled truth, while also being inherently implicated in mandating what this truth can include, as well as what form it should take. The paradoxes I have uncovered in the critique of critique, therefore, need not undermine a living notion of methodology. Rather, such tensions might challenge us to revisit the logic of inclusion, differentiation and recognition that underpins intellectual work more generally. This kind of analysis carefully parses out underlying questions about where and why we draw the lines that circumscribe what will and will not qualify for a complex field, a proper genre or an affective impulse, as well as how these lines work to shape and produce particular realities.

Current methodological turns are geared toward capturing the complex flux of social life. Focusing on the people and events these genres represent, they tend to gloss over broader issues about the contingent logic with which genres are shaped. But such an inquiry needs to look at the meta-level of genre determination because the ethical problems that affect theorists seek to remedy with ‘new’ methods – such as didactic authorship and the reduction of life to broad and familiar categories – are inherent to, and thus reproduced by, the very act of assuming that certain methods and not others are remedial. A method does have certain affects and effects, but these are not straightforwardly static or innate. Rather, their structure and logic is affected by social desires and momentums, or disciplinary pressures and intellectual trends. The truths we can know, in this sense, are dictated by the questions we are willing to hear and ask. The intents and investments that produce tensions within social truths are evident in the very methods social scientists develop to understand or ease them.