And such exercises frequently display the deformities common to excessive objectivity in criticism, which are predictability and pedantry and wearisome uniformity. Political judgments are certainly relevant to criticism, and political presuppositions are probably unavoidable in criticism. The problem has been that so much of politicized criticism is heavy-handed and closed to discovery. The impetus of politicized criticism is to exploit its subject for the ratification of itself. A critical agenda that confines itself to indignant denunciation seems to me awfully constricted.
Criticism has richer possibilities.
Good criticism is always a surprise. It is a surprise in the sense that you can't anticipate what a good critic will have to say about a given artifact. I don't think that the expression of conventional opinions constitutes interesting criticism. It must in order to function as the ideological adhesion for a collective identity. Even anarchists have an orthodoxy.