Over the past decade there has been a growing chorus of discontent with what are perceived to be the suspicious reflexes of critical methods. The common charge is that critique has become paranoid and stagnant, unable – and often unwilling – to register the dynamic attachments and affects that vitalise everyday life. My aim here is to unsettle the seemingly disparate identities that justify this turn – the critical, structural forms of attention assigned to the critic on one side and the affective, dynamic attentions that animate everyday life on the other. To open up the lived and creative dynamics of suspicious attention, the affects of critique, this chapter addresses an intriguing, internal conflict within a text that has been widely commended for its response to calls for methodological change, Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects(2007). Though it is marked as a departure from ‘paranoid reading’, I argue that Stewart's work gives us reason to reconsider the potential, character and social utility of suspicious attention, and thus the division of critical and social methods. By highlighting this counter-narrative within Stewart’s work, my discussion also addresses broader questions about the nature of affect and the value of critical reading that have arisen in recent and prominent debates about methodology.

In consonance with Stewart, I am in favour of inclusive forms of inquiry that consider non-human-centred modes of change and agency. However, I envision that this approach would mean not excluding a range of methods and possibilities from the outset. With this in mind, instead of asking how critique could be more than suspicious, with the hope of forging a new method, I want to ask a slightly different question, namely how might this suspicion be more than critique? And by ‘more than’ I mean how might the desire to reveal hidden motives and agencies have a broader social location and purpose? How might it resonate in and with logics that blur what are presumed to be the distinct realms of critical and common thought? In this frame, we have the potential to decentre critical hermeneutics in a way that does not seek to exclude or dismiss it as erroneous or obsolete, but rather considers the way that all methods – not just a select ‘better’ few – are immanent to the social affective spaces they engage.