"A co-operative technique of enquiry:" I.A. Richards

I.A. Richards, in Coleridge on Imagination, on taking some of Coleridge's ideas about critical method (as applied to literature) and furthering their development "into a cooperative technique of enquiry that may become entitled to be named a science" (all emphases are mine unless noted):

A large part of the subject matter of these enquiries is the behavior of words in poetry, and many people, by training, must resent any suggestion that this should be treated by a science. I may anticipate here to point out that one of Coleridge's clearest and most certain principles preserves the autonomy both of the poetry and the critic. "Could a rule be given from without [Coleridge's emphasis], poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art." None the less, a further development of Coleridge's method would fundamentally change current conceptions of the relation of Poetry to Life, and with this the contemporary tone of criticism. I do not mean that it would become more solemn or more acrimonious. Instead it would be more experimental and less self-assertive.
Most evaluative criticism is not statement or even attempted statement. It is either suasion, which is politics, or it is social communication. As social communion (in a lecture, for example) it is a method of preparing the scene and conducting the occasion, of maintaining the civilizing convention that things are well, of inducing a a reassured, easy and decorously receptive mood. It is a stream of gestures or ceremonies, a spirit calming and mildly stimulating ritual. If nothing happens, if nothing is said or nothing done, it is not the ritual that we should blame.
Experienced critics know this, more or less; though they do not often proclaim it so frankly as Professor Garrod at p. 158 of his Poetry and Life: "More than any other of the literary kinds, criticism approximates to a social [Garrod's emphasis] art--and this may be why the poets are unsuccessful in it. It is one of the most natural things in the world to discuss a book or a poem--far more natural than to write one. It is one of the most obvious of social acts or behaviors, but, like any other social act it perishes in the defect of those qualities which make a man interesting."
It perishes as one kind of social act, certainly; but has criticism no purposes beyond these? Are poetry and life only related so? Are there not other kinds of social acts, the invention of the radio valve [the vaccum tube] for example?
-Coleridge on Imagination, xxiii-iv.

It is a bit tough to reconstruct what Richards means here, because he moves quickly is pretty oblique--as usual. But it shows some interesting assumptions that he has. While Richards is usually the whipping boy for a sort of criticism that is disconnected from social activity, what we see here is that Richards was actually trying to expand and refine the social tendencies of criticism that were in place already.
In characterizing this criticism, and particularly its work of evaluation, he is thinking primarily of his old colleagues at Cambridge (England), now that he is safely ensconced at Harvard. These were professors who pontificated about the pure aesthetic pleasure of works, asking students how much more one certainly liked Shakespeare more than stodgy Pope (one can find a good--if polemical,--summary in the collected edition of the Leavises' Scrutiny). In other words, the evaluative aspect of criticism was the product of criticism being a little boys club, where people got together and liked books in conversation. One could talk about the worth of poetry or prose only in the most abstract and least specific way: with reference to personal experience and with a view to showing that one, like the rest of the group that is discussing the piece, is refined or cultivated.
So this is why he goes on to say that most criticism is not a statement about what is criticized. It is usually a way of maintaining decorum, like what one does at a party: you say that you liked that author but found him a bit tedious in some parts, and that is the end of your critical activity. What Richards wants to do is introduce this social tendency, this drive to talk about a work in this gossipy way, precisely into something that requires thinking and specificity about the work. This will actually produce a statement about the work.
But what is interesting then is that this statement is precisely not something performed by the isolated academic: it comes right out of a sort of social situation already there, as a new cooperative technique of inquiry. In fact, it is the disruption of the social situation that exists through the refinement of this social situation into a technique. This is so to the extent that, modified thus, the new social activity allows one to see that polite discourse in a classroom isn't the only kind of social activity--thus the reference to invention at the end of this excerpt. The lecture hall is brought back out to the world--not directly as a form of activism (as Leavis would have it), but as a recognition of the specificity of the particular communal act going on in the class (and not the perpetuation of it being taken for granted).