Critical Affect: The Politics of Method

Critical Affect explores the emotional complexity of critique and maps out its enduring value for the turn to affect and ontology. Through a series of vivid close readings, Ashley Barnwell shows how suspicion and methods of decoding remain vital to both civic and academic spaces, where concerns about precarity, transparency, and security are commonplace and the question of how we verify the truth is one of the most polarising of our age. Weaving together both the critical and affective dimensions of ‘paranoid reading’, Critical Affect opens crucial questions about the ethics of practicing theory and offers a new route into the critical study of affect.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Enduring Divisions 2. Evidence in Flux 3. The Crisis of ‘Non-Representation’ 4. Ordinary Paranoia 5. The Life of Genre Notes Bibliography

About the Author :
Ashley Barnwell is a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of several journal articles and book chapters, including a contribution for What if Culture Was Nature all Along? edited by Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Review :
Ashley Barnwell challenges the clear-cut separation of critical and affective approaches, examining how longstanding ideas of critique and criticism are applied by the recent wave of affect theory across the social sciences. As much a methodological reflection as a critique of existing literature, Barnwell offers both a meditation on how to read with ‘epistemic charity’ and a very timely provocation on what it means to be in academia today. In Critical Affect: The Politics of Method, Ashley Barnwell challenges the clear-cut separation of critical and affective approaches, examining how longstanding ideas of critique and criticism are applied by the recent wave of affect theory across the social sciences. As much a methodological reflection as a critique of existing literature, Barnwell offers both a meditation on how to read with ‘epistemic charity’ and a very timely provocation on what it means to be in academia today. This illuminating evaluation of the turn to affect examines particular methods of reading. Barnwell reanimates possibilities for doing sociology by showing that both suspicion and creative generation are necessary in understanding the world. She is generous towards the theorists examined, beautifully modelling how to think critically without destroying.