Is there such a thing as a generation? What would its characteristics be? The current generation of those in their late twenties and early thirties is described as relatively bourgeois, very professional, purist, without rough edges and very strongly structured. Bregje van Woensel (35) converses with sociologist and contemporary Willem Schinkel (33) about the sense and nonsense of generational thinking.
Willem Schinkel is a theoretical sociologist, monitoring from a distance. He observes and assesses how we talk about social themes, and does so in a cheeky, repetitive tone – hoping to intervene in our thinking. In Denken in een tijd van sociale hypochondrie, aanzet tot een theorie voorbij de maatschappij (Thinking in a Time of Social Hypochondria: The Beginnings of a Theory Beyond Society), first published in 2007 and reprinted in 2008 in a simplified, shorter version, entitled De gedroomde samenleving (The Dreamed Society), Schinkel demonstrates the performative, reality-creating nature of words. He shows how invented, politically strategic terms end up in stubborn, real-life situations and tries to dislodge the everyday use of words in order to eradicate the foundations they take for granted.
The fact that Schinkel does not take the word ‘generation’ seriously is therefore no surprise. Always curious about the next generation, we seek out, in the promise of social progress, the standard-bearers of optimism. It is now 2009, and the ‘Obama generation’ has arrived. ‘By way of Obama, a new generation of American young people have made the 21st century their own, with new élan, optimism, harmony and engagement,’ according to VPRO’s Tegenlicht programme about Obama’s very young speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Here in the Netherlands, we hum along: ‘Hooray, the new generation seems to be engaged!’ We talk about it, so it must be true. How does Willem Schinkel perceive this thinking in terms of generations?
‘Generational thinking suggests that values and concepts cannot change during the “course” of that generation. People silently presume that an idea of a contemporary young person in his or her forties, part of Generation X, is consistent with the ideas that he or she had when finishing college. That is, of course, not the case. Even if you can detect differences between different generations, you have still not proven much. The real question is whether the current young generation differs from previous young generations.
You have to perceive generation as something literal. There is, as it were, “something generated”. This can be a creative principle, used by the generation itself. But if it is used by someone else, in the form of a determination, then what you have is a given generation being identified by certain characteristics. When you reach a certain age, your life is seen simply and exclusively in that light. It becomes a disciplining principle, instead of a creative principle. It is to some degree analogous to the way Hegel formulated the distinction between awareness an sich and awareness für sich. In this case, für sich is the perception after the fact. This is often the view of others, and in time – when a generation of the mind is in a certain sense exhausted and is no longer generative – a fixed identity of this kind is also adopted by the people themselves. They can then recognize themselves as, for example, the “1968 generation”. Anyone who says this is implicitly admitting that the ’68 generation is no longer generating anything today. It is no longer a creative principle, if it ever was one.
What a generation of the mind does is readjust the canon, the canon of art, for example. A generation overturns, changes, paves new roads and establishes new names. Afterwards, that becomes institutionalized. This fixation makes such a generation very rigid. It takes the creative moment out of it. At the same time, it has given a generation an identity. People can recognize themselves in it and begin to behave according to that formulated determination. Points of recognition are determined after the fact: “Oh, yes, that’s my generation.” So, what had previously been uncertain and is subsequently carved out by the generation of the mind is what has become the generation of the body.’
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