This manifests itself in different ways. It does not necessarily follow that I have the same politics as the producers or even the content of a text that I like. Charlie Bertsch in an earlier issue of Bad Subjects has elegantly restated Raymond Williams' caution against an aesthetic theory becoming a social theory, and I will not rehearse that here. My intention is to insist that a radical reading is not in and of itself necessarily a political act. Things do not 'subvert' simply because we say they do.
Textual criticism is too important a project to do poorly.
This does not hold simply for textual criticism. There is not some kind of magical pipeline taking political critique out into the broader political field. This is not to say that work within the academic institution itself does not have its own political stake. In my area, Communications, this entails teaching broad undergraduate courses, and giving students something they can take with them whether or not they major in the field. If 'necessary marginality' works to authenticate all academic practice as leftist, it also works to assure us that we will never be in positions of influence within academia, or elsewhere.