This chapter introduces recent critical debates about method and affect by illuminating their links to long-running, interdisciplinary discussions about the ethics of representation. The complex conflict between the truth-values of fact and fiction have been central in both public and academic debates about how to represent social life, from rifts between positivist sociologists and social novelists in nineteenth-century Paris, to controversies over New Journalism’s fictionalised reports in the 1970s, to the ‘crisis of representation’ about writing ethnographies in the 1980s, to scandals about the truth-value of embellished autobiographies in the 2000s. All of these cases reveal a provocative anxiety about how writers – of various genres – should represent experiences and events in a way that is both verified and resonant with the actual dimensions of subjective accounts.

By mapping a selective genealogy of the fact/fiction conundrum here, I show how the current debate about affect and method refigures an enduring conflict over how to represent the mutable and diverse truths of social life. The chapter is structured to lead readers through present and past debates about the politics of method, where similar concerns about how to tell the truth can be seen to shift in structure and terminology across multiple fields, but also maintain a provocative continuity and irresolution. Via this mapping, I argue that our eff orts to determine the most authentic mode of representation have been consistently challenged by the need to privilege one genre over another, or vice versa, rather than opening up the question of how genres are determined. In each instance, however, the capacities of particular modes of representation, while assumed to be fixed, remain difficult to pin down.

The current proposal that scholars should use creative methods to engage with the flux of affect because critical methods are outmoded presents a chance to re-examine the terms of the ‘two cultures’ and to explore how current debates refigure enduring concerns about social science methodologies. Looking at what appears to be a set of new questions within a rich cultural history reorients the trajectory of theoretical innovation away from a very linear idea of intellectual progress and recognises the intimate entanglement of past and present questions.