written and directed by J a n i n a Q u i n t
funded by the Hamburg Film & Video Grant 44 min, "documentary" © 1996

DAVID PETERS
So I am going to try and arrange one of these flights out of New York to Hamburg and I will definitely be there.

JOSHUA NEUSTEIN
I have always loved Lyotard in fact I am going to Hamburg to hear him.

BETTY NEAL
I would love to hear him speak at Hamburg.

Lyotard/signature

VOICE OVER
On the 17th of June 1994 the City of Hamburg is buying itself a slice of culture. A living philosopher has signed a contract to give a talk. Now the world famous Jean-FranÁois Lyotard is flying in from Paris to fulfill the deal. The so called international response to this event confirms that the investment is paying off.

MY LIFE

TALK-SHOW HOSTESS
Good evening, welcome to our 71st series of MY LIFE. Today's guest is the French philosopher Jean-FranÁois Lyotard who is visiting Hamburg. Professor Lyotard is known as the author of postmodern philosophy. He radically objects to the unity of reason and language inherent in modernist theory. Plurality is the starting point of Lyotard's thinking. To begin with, we'll show you again a short biography...

Professor Lyotard you are a guru of philosophy, a jet-set philosopher, constantly traveling around the world.

LYOTARD
There are no gurus in our society. You can only have the opportunity to be fashionable for reasons that I don't understand.

HOSTESS
But you are famous for your charm in public.

LYOTARD
I am here just to say what I have already written. I am not especially charming. I don't have much confidence in this question and answer game! It is a media ritual, to preserve the idea of participation, communication, democracy. But reflection works diffrently. A text requires time to be contested. This show enables the viewer to enjoy talking about Lyotard without having taken the time to read him. These are signs of development and complexification.

HOSTESS
In your book Perigrinations you mentioned that you had wanted to become a monk.

LYOTARD
Ah..., that story. Someone had asked me to write something. I could have said I had wanted to become a gardener, but the brain seems to enjoy monk. Biography is the most fake genre that people read. They have this appetite for biography, autobiography, the show of life. It is impossible to write or film the so called biography. There is only an agreement to invent stories, some are better some are worse.
What does it mean, that in the so called life we sign an event? We sign it and later we take it as our event. In this way we build up and destroy our life. The questions is - which event we sign, where do we have the opportunity to sign? That is how we become the person we are supposed to be. Here I sign with my name and body, because the hand you sign with is part of your body. We sign: yes , no, no,... and you write and rewrite your life as radically as the soviet encyclopedia.

HOSTESS
We cannot not write if I understand correctly?

LYOTARD
It is impossible to live and that is our honor.

HOSTESS
Thank you for coming Professor Lyotard. Thank you for watching and we hope you'll tune in again to our next series.

GROUPIE
So, in the next Century there will be no more books. It takes too long to read when success comes through gaining time. What will be a book will be a printed object, whose message name and title will be broadcasted by the media. This book will be distributed at a premium yielding financial success for the publisher and a symbolic one for the reader. Reflection will not be thrust aside because it is dangerous or upsetting but simply because it is a waste of time. It is good for nothig. Success comes through gaining time.

STORY TIME

LYOTARD
In fact I am a very bad story teller except sometimes.
As to what the Human and his brain might look like, or rather the brain and his human, when leaving the planet forever prior to its destruction, that is what the story did not say.
The sun is going to explode. The entire solar system, including the little planet earth turns into an immense nova. Is this really a fable? The life-span of a star is scientifically determined.
One can visualize the vast construction site that the earth will be during the thousands of years prior to the death of the sun. What will be called humanity at that time will be preparing the spaceship destined for the exodus.
The fable tells the story of two processes which modify energy in the Milky Way. The first is called entropy, it leads energy to the so called death, a cold chaos.
The second is called development, not progress, it escapes entropy through complexification. On the surface of the so called planet earth one can observe development in many ways: Discovery, invention, revolution, war, creativity etc. are works of complexification.
This development has no goal in itself. The so called humans aren't the motor of development, they are the products, vehicles and witnesses of it. But the development requires to be bearable by mankind, that is to say, if something appears that is too hard to be beared, some adjustments are necessary.
These adjustment make humans more and more different from what they were. Even when you compare the present mankind to what it was 200 years ago.., I mean in physical aspects, capacity, the changes are enormous.
What makes us wonder about the story is not that the earth and the sun are disappearing, but that something has to escape. And that the fable hesitates to name the thing which must survive: is it the human and his brain or the brain and its human? And how will the brain nourish itself without the earth? After all this fable doesn't need to be, doesn¥t ask to be believed - only considered.

WOMAN
But what is real?

LYOTARD
You know...realism is the art of making reality and this art is going to develop more and more in time to come.

THE THING

EXPERT
Lyotard doesn't mind to sound old fashioned or modern. He embodies a philosophical independence which is very rare in today's academia. He questions uncompromisingly and follows the direction of his thinking.

EXPERT
I believe that Lyotard¥s work is as rigorous as were Kant¥s Critiques in their time. Lyotard is trying to make distinctions by identifying "language games", as we say nowadays. It has an affinity to what Kant did with his means.

LYOTARD
It is not easy to describe this writing. It is not a literary writing. It is a reflexive writing or inscription. It keeps a reflexive structure. We are not trying to convince, we are not arguing and we are not demonstrating.

EXPERT
Declaring that current political theory isn't viable anymore and that political action does¥t get you anywhere - that drives people wild.

EXPERT
When I first read the Postmodern Condition I felt it hit a nerve. Until than I had been disappointed by philosophy at the university. Somehow, nobody really said how it is.

EXPERT
Lyotard belongs to the tradition of the Greek Sophists, or Montaigne and similar authors. Writers who have always maintained a skeptical viewpoint but running beside the dominant philosophical schools.

EXPERT
Lyotard explains very well that Postmodernity is only a transitional period before the next modernity. All worlds views have had their modernity. They have all been new, advanced and insightful, whether Christian, Greek, Buddhist. And later they went through their Postmodernity.

EXPERT
It is not a problem that the absolute isn't anything. The absolute is the one without reference. God is a name of nothing, the without name. Yet there is a relation to the thing which represents nothing.

EXPERT
The sublime is the name which reminds us that the Other and that ruptures exist. Therefore it has a certain theological connotation. And if you want to think along those lines, his theory of the sublime is perhaps related to negative theology. It suggests that the differences are bigger than the similarities, that misunderstanding and lack are greater than having or gaining.

LYOTARD
The difference between the computers and us is that the computers were not born. We experience those strange first years, were we are exposed to everything but we are unable to answer. In terms of language and everything else. We all have contradictions which continuously protest against our own discourse: aggressions, passions. Perhaps this is related to our childhood, those energies the system was unable to co-opt, "rest". Respecting this "rest" is justice.

GROUPIE

In French the paragraph is a divisions within something written. It separates what it unites.

LIBIDINAL ECONOMY

LYOTARD
Who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love.
Open the so called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars with its great velvet planes, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent callis skin under the heel, and the light frills of the eyelids, - but also open and expose the virgina lips then the small lips, with their blue network bathed in mucus, dialate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dressmaker's scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines' alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the appendix, or at the other end, undo the mouth and its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the palate at its damp basements like bats' wings of the, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the brain; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of the nerve tissue which surround the watery liquids and the carnivorous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you're sunbathing or taking grass.
Excuse me but I am not finished...
Connected onto these lips, a second mouth is necessary, a third, a great number of other mouths, many vulvae , many nipples. On the one hand, a more or less important proportion of these libidinal quantities are compensated for a return, the daksina - payment for the prostitute, the analyst session, or for words themselves when they concern the small change of language,: on the other hand, this process dissipates, an irreversible and unusable quantity of pulsions as heat, as smoke, as jouissance, in any cycle of this type. These are on the circle, then the effects of transmutation, barely interrupted by expenditure as pure loss, for example as extravagant desire.
I am sorry but I am still not at the end.

GROUPIE

He can tell the truth in way he would tell it to a child.

THE BODY

JOSHUA NEUSTEIN
If I get a chance I want to ask him a question about a text he wrote the Jewish Oedipus. Did you ever see this text?

DAVID PETER
I think I¥d rather not ask him a question, I think I¥d rather observe him doing something. I think I¥d rather observe him mowing his lawn.

FRAUKE HAMAN
The aura is somehow important. I enjoy seeing people whose books I know. It has been disappointing sometimes.

BETTINA BLOHM
I was curious to see a living philosopher. What does he look like? How does he move? What sort of person is he? Rather primitive motives.

JULIA ERLER
I am fascinated by Lyotard - his sensibility, empathy and humor. I like to see the whole person not only his thinking side. It is rather voyeuristic.

MARTIN PORTER
The incarnation. The movement of body with text and sound. But also I have got nothing better to do.

PAUL TRENT
You know, you hear your own voice when you are reading. And when you hear the writers voice when he is actually a live it is kind of a different thing.

BARRY SALMON
I love hearing these people life and also I love just being in their aura or space, physical space, you are sharing a space together is part of your experience too.

JOSHUA NEUSTEIN
Because when you hear you are not distanced from your subject, hearing is a bringing together and also when you hear someone linguistically it means that you except,"I hear you", I accept what you are saying, there is a continuity.

KLAUS OTTMAN
For me there is no separation between an author and his work. And just like I like to go to the artist studio rather than looking at slides or reproductions, or paintings in museums, because I like to see an artist in his own natural creative environment.

KIM GUTSCHOW
Theoretically all these people try to deconstruct the connection of like who the author is, whether they wear back boots or day glow, lycra, from the text like it doesn¥t matter but it does.

MARTIN HIELSCHER
I like to go to readings because I want to know what kind of person it is. But as a "good" intellectual you are supposed to differentiate between the author and the text. Otherwise you are seen as a Neanderthal. But I never did that.

DAVID PETER
I try and think back I can't remember his clothes very clearly. He carries himself again in a very modest way in a dark manner of dress but one never senses that he is a person who has been institutionalized by his career.

KIM GITSCHOW
You know, we re connected to our stomachs and to our hearts, the brain is not floating out there, somewhere, in the middle of nowhere.

MARTIN HIELSCHER
It never happened that because of disappointment with the person I completely dismissed the work. But I probably became more circumspect.

KLAUS OTTMAN
It has something to do with credibility.

BETTINA BLOHM
I am not so sure. I am very interested to see these people. Yet, the work remains separate, just as a piece of art stands for itself. And if the philosopher is some grumbling, little, creature that doesn't mean anything - I think.

PAUL TRENT
Well, I know a lot of the woman in my class thought he was very sexy. But I never thought much about it.

JÖRG HERRMANN
He appears extremely warm-hearted. I was surprised. I would imagine - or I would like a wise psychoanalyst to be like that.

BARRY SALMON
He is really a nice guy. He is really funny. Very sweet.

GROUPIE

I am unable to tell from beginning to end. Just sort of fragments.

REAL EVENT

VOICE OVER
"The stream of cultural capital?" That is me, notes Marie, while she is waiting for her luggage at Narita airport. Only a small stream. But definitely cultural. They are buying culture from me. Capital as well. I am neither the owner nor the manager. I am only a little work force for cultural affairs that is being exploited. But legally, with a contract to be precise, and I have signed it. You wanted it. You are running across Europe, across the continents, airplane, fax, phone, reports from all corners of the world. And on top of that one has to work. One cannot keep selling the same product. You have to be inventive, to read and imagine something new. Otherwise they are not satisfied. But you know, Marie has nothing more to say. It is all garbage! A hostess picks you up from the airport. You get half an hour's break in the hotel. Then a cocktail, dinner, the talk and afterwards you go for drinks. It is the same everywhere, in all cities of the world. Keep smiling Marie. If you stay cheerful you can tell gloomy stories in your talk. I can sell fear, people are interested in that, but you have to be charming.Finally all streams end up in the museum. They want something unique to enrich the museum. Which museum? The contemporary \cultural world. Cultural capital means all culture, which the bank of culture can turn into capital. It is the memory of humankind. Most of it has already been completed. Lascaux, the pyramids on the Nile and even the Maginot Line has been saved and preserved. Not to mention the tombs of Xi'an, Spinoza and Agatha Christie. Now one has to archive the contemporaries. It is funny this story about the stream of culture and the stream of capital. It is pure metaphysics. They aren't just metaphors. Metaphysics consists of metaphors which have become real.

JOURNALIST
I am very sorry that I don¥t speak French so it will be a bit complicated.

LYOTARD
It is not a problem.
The question is how to make this development bearable for mankind. Because the system has less and less use for humans, hence unemployment. The system needs brains but no humans.

JOURNALIST
Two more ... please.

TRANSLATER
Question number 14.

LYOTARD
We have contradicting forces in us - drives that go back to our childhood. They are hidden energies which were not immediately useful or we didn't know what to do with them. Every education leaves a "rest", energies which aren't useful for the development of the system. This is the source of our passions, errors, crimes, literature and art. It is the testimony of the thing which has no name, which has no use but which occupies us.
That is a little difficult.

HOSTESS
Welcome to our 9th evening in our series Perspectives On Metropolitan Culture. Who would have imagined that a philosopher can motivate so many Hamburgers to come.

LYOTARD
We will never know what knowing means. You can ignore this question and forget about it in the perfectly organized megapole. And yet the forgetting of the forgetting leaves traces: art, literature, philosophy together - can bear witness to the "rest".

MAN IN BLACK
It is hard to see whether there are any questions.
Excellent question. A computer has no childhood. It is calculating and has no relation to the absolute. Which means that this "rest" is somehow connected to the body and our childhood. We are beasts condemned to language. Capable of speaking but not immediately, that is terrifying.

NSCH

LYOTARD
I try to wake up early in the morning and I try first of all to have some exercise, some physical exercise, the Swedish exercise - gymnastic, or I try to go around the block for 15 minutes not more. After that I take my coffee and my orange juice and go directly to the table in order to work: to write, to read or something, as long as possible. That is to say from seven in the morning up to what - two or three in the afternoon. No break, no food, but cigarettes... I need... In fact this was my traditional time of working, I need these long lapses of time in order to have the impression that I am progressing. That is pure illusion, but sort of solitude, trying to struggle with language. Not so easy, ok. Than, when I am just out of order, out of service, that is the moment of a break to have some salads and so on you know. And the shower, which is a sort of recompense. Because my body is very horrible by that time. And after that if I have no obligation outside I start again. I start again to work until seven o'clock. And at that time that is the second and definite break for the day. It happens that I spend twelve hours a day ...and that is my rhythm, natural rhythm with no merit at all, and I am like an old Pferd, not a horse but a Pferd. That is my only way.

THE OTHER LYOTARD
It is sort of... I am like an old Pferd, not a horse but a Pferd. Yes, that is the word. I try to wake up early in the morning... and I try first of all to have some exercise, physical exercise, some push ups, the so called Swedish gymnastic, at home, and maybe a very small jogging around ...

LYOTARD
At seven is the hour of the whisky, that is the second recompense - the first is the shower. I take time to go to the market or so. But after that the day is finished. Than I go to bed as soon as possible in order to be fresh for tomorrow morning. THE OTHER LYOTARD I take my coffee and my orange juice and I go directly to my table in order to work: to write, to read etc. as long as possible.

LYOTARD
You know there is nothing special to say about my way. Except that I am shaving very late in the day. I need not to go to the shower before working but after, or in the middle.

THE OTHER LYOTARD
In fact ... I need ... that was my old way, traditional way of working, I need these long lapses of time in order to have the impression to progress. That is pure illusion, sort of solitude, trying to struggle with language. It is not so easy, ok.

LYOTARD
I wish to survive to finish one more book, to write a sort of "Post Different" book...

THE OTHER LYOTARD
You know there is nothing to say about my way except that I am shaving very late in the day. I need not to go to the shower before working but after, or in the middle. I don't know why? I need a real, I need water.

LYOTARD
But I don¥t know whether I am able to survive until than... I have a lot of things to do before in order to make my family in a state of survival until than...to get money and so on. I have a sort of vocation to poverty, that's all, that is very simple, so what. Certainly there is something about that in my life, which I don't know. But I can observe like everybody, that it is that way from beginning to end.