"Practical criticism"

I always found it odd that I.A. Richards used Coleridge's phrase "practical criticism" to describe the method of his interpretation, because Richards' sense of "practical" cannot translate into Coleridge's so easily. This is because it is very specifically tied to a notion of communication that is more technical and more reified than Coleridge's. For Coleridge, language is logos, the revelatory word. For Richards, it is a thing, a medium. This is not to say that Richards thinks language cannot provide access to God. It means that Coleridge and Richards are going in opposite directions: Coleridge wanted to restore to the task of criticism (in the face of its proliferation in the literary magazines) its spiritual and philosophical basis. Making it more precise was only a means to this. Thus the language itself does not communicate in Richards sense. It conveys one up to the Almighty, even if it takes place here on earth. For Richards, the primary goal is communication irrespective of what is revealed. Though this is perhaps an overemphasis of where he really stands, this goal needs to be stressed in order to get at the real sense sense of the word "practical." He specifies it quite clearly:

That the one and only goal of all critical endeavors, of all interpretation, appreciation, exhortation, praise or abuse, is improvement in communication may seem an exaggeration. But in practice it is so.

-Practical Criticism, 10.

All this theorizing about the purpose of language is useless when we look at the actual method we employ when we go about reading: in practice, practically, its only motivation is to bring out the meaning in the phrase under consideration. Value judgments as to what it has produced come only afterwards. The whole thing turns on a distinction between theoria and praxis, and the fact that in any theorizing or evaluating there will always already be a practical act of reading that has taken place. There, in the space and time of that reading, which can always be reconstructed, took place the act of practical criticism.

People often say that practical criticism is defined by its claims to empirical objectivity. This is not so much false as it is misleading, because it fails to emphasize that phenomenon that Richards is always after: the reading that would be necessary to make a value judgement and that value judgements always presuppose. It is not really that this reading must have been empirical as that it must have taken place and had a definite, specifiable structure that we can always put back together. The call for practical criticism, then, is a call that people be accountable for the linguistic character of what they say, the practical act of reading that anything they say requires. In this sense, it is a call to recognize the alterity of language and its non-naturalness. Indeed, Richards will reinscribe this naturalness back into it by claiming that this linguistic site is fully recognizable (or not liable to play--thus the language with which Richards deals is not textual in the sense in which Derrida uses this word), but this I think can only be fully understood when we grasp that it stems from this sense of the practical. It isn't that Richards is an idealist when it comes to the nature of the linguistic element his mode of analysis presupposes so much as it is that the practicality of this mode, its call back to the precise structure of alterity always already related to in any act of language, happens to require a model of that alterity as a communicability that can be received totally.