What is Data Criticism? "The "intellectual" has always said no, does always say no, and will always say no. He says no to each and every thing, as a matter of principle." - J. Goebbels I. Once upon a time there was critical theory. In 1937, the "Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung" (vol. 5) defined the stakes of this critique as the need to expose the object value of traditional theory as being class-defined. Criticism was the precondition for emancipation, and thus of democracy. Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, et al. had good grounds for making their statement. The totalitarian enemies of critique were doing everything they could to stamp out the "professional naysayers." To the Frankfort school, criticism and theory were inseparable. Their power lay in the fact that they offered no alternative, only negation. Positive critique was alien to them; on the contrary, they launched an attack on the communist pair of criticism & self-criticism, supposed to solve all contradictions. Although critical theory was not of this world, the social critics among the sixties generation were unconsciously solidarious with the latter. It was the heyday of criticism. But the negative critics' uncompromising nagging did not turn out to be the inner drive of the sixties after all. Criticism led to nothing. Everything had to be changed, to which end the alternative appeared more promising. Non-normative science was abandoned in favor of socially relevant research. People were no longer going to be passive observers, but were finally going to get the job done. Criticism thus succumbed to the ego trip of a better world that starts and ends with oneself. Ever since, a critical attitude has been a standard social skill, indispensible to get your career going. Unemancipated workers no longer make for loyal employees but have become obstacles to the dynamics of democratized business. In cynical thought, criticism is the hub of permanent reorganization. Thus, film criticism was once part of a comprehensive social critique. The intellectual workers, engaged in class war within the ideological body, followed the alternative as well, in admiration of the "politique d'auteur" of the likes of Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, and Rohmer. Authors like Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog and women filmmakers such as Dumas and Akerman were read as critical cineasts who offered a broader European alternative to Hollywood. The genre of the review was opened up to make cinema a weapon that would arouse the critical awareness of the masses. Profound sobriety was to exorcise the casual entertainment of spaghetti westerns, love stories, teeny movies and James Bond. To sketch the poetry of everyday boredom was to take political action. The spiritual slowness of Soviet filmmakers like Tarkovsky or Paradyanov and the subtle sense of humor of the Czechs and Poles were hailed as good news from another world. Their very incomprehensibility was the hallmark of quality. The next step in critical cinema was to dismantle traditional film institutions from within. No genre was left undisturbed; there were constant proclamations of the end of some unwholesome form of entertainment or other. Analogous to this development, academic film theory was founded. After taking on the whole of cinema, television was labeled the new enemy, whereupon all the old movies could be rediscovered as masterpieces. Once film was upgraded as the superior visual medium for both elitist and popular culture, the cinematographic museum represented the divestment of film criticism and critical filmmakers. II. In the eighties, criticism was found to have lost its sub- and object ages ago. Criticasters turned into losers who had missed out completely. Opinions were rapidly becoming exhausted, and yesteryear's absolute negation was degraded into today's critical note, a load of bull used by columnists to fill their day- and weeklies. Postmodernism, much against its own free will, was upgraded by opinion leaders from serial to dominant discourse. The dash of PoMo thought currently in vogue would say that the overall stories have lost out to deconstruction and that criticism has lost its Archimedean point. All ideas are equal (but some are more equal than others). Critique is true only if well written & in newspaper format. The fascination with the fluctuation of exciting viewpoints may have stood its ground for a while, but the free-floating individualist's precision arguments never met with resistance. The unbearable lightness of personal differentiation reactivated cultural discomfort. Nostalgia arose for an age in which critique had threatened the very fabric of society. The growing demand for engagement of the early nineties represents a revival of the quest for an opposable common denominator. In an era in which Marxism has been replaced by miscellaneous conspiracy theories, there can be no hope of convicting any one prime suspect on our increasing misery. Too many interconnections blur the big picture, no matter how hard we try to invoke this vision. The ingenuity of the sixties generation lay in their ability to reveal the political in the private. Thus, criticism had something to go on derived from its immediate environment, which it did not shun but thoroughly turned over instead. The family wasn't rejected, but replaced by the psycho-drama of the commune and experimental lifestyles. What was somewhat neglected was to puke on the lot. Today's negation was avoidable in that the alternative was already on offer before the outrage could ever gain momentum. There existed a workable solution to everything. Instead of theory, establishment of a praxis was now the goal. I was OK, you were OK. Now that the alternative has come of New Age, negative theory has been replaced by the philosophy that will (in its new capacity of spirituality) save you from all moral dilemmas. Again, film criticism faithfully keeps to the Zeitgeist, presenting itself as a special issue on visual culture in all its aspects. Pornography turns out to be just as entertaining as photography, cult movies, tv shows, found footage, religion, and the body. Even the review is back in style as a microstudy on the artisanal precision of editing, camera work, score, trackings and the interplay of author and actor. It is no secret that all one writes is an ad for the movie pages, just as one is but one of many elements in the film distribution process. Film criticism is just noise disturbing the formulation of the individual moviegoer's private reviews. The weekly verdicts have shrivelled to attitudes of experts who spit out opinions at random. The audience has come to find the empty theaters after some scathing critique quite silly. The industry in turn exploits this by releasing movies without a press showing, or by staging "sneak previews" of movies not yet maimed by the press, in which the audience has no idea what to expect. The sensation of having outsmarted the day- and weeklies is "totally addictive" (a sneaker). Even video stores stage their own premieres. Movie magazines are part of the motion-picture industry and are well aware of where the sponsors are. An option yet to be examined is to write about movies that will definitely never be released, or to review every Turkish or Hindi picture, old and new. More likely, criticism will play safe by subscribing to the metalevel of cult. III. Under the rule of unhistorical immaterialism, only absolute data criticism is a feasible option. Even film is no more than information. Within the current media system, criticism of the programmatic arrangement is no longer conducive to discourse. Sad though it may be, the situation is far from hopeless. Why should beauty be harmless? Or ugliness, for that matter. Fiction and reality are both marginal in relation to the omnipotent media concept. It's no use criticizing individual media. The only targets left for negation are the entire boot and root sectors of the media disk. Data criticism is the art of the absolute negation of information. It is not a survival strategy, but a head-on attack. Data criticism is no easily avoidable attitude. It is the denial of all that exists, it starts where cynicism ends; it does not put down the world, but responds to the challenge posed by the unpredictable. There is no alternative to data. Like a Medusa, the only option is to meet them - face to face. ??