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‘The generation concept is extremely difficult. It presumes a certain determination of behaviour, while the challenge is to allow a so-called generation to describe itself. I distinguish two ideas in the concept of generation: the generation of the body and the generation of the mind. The generation of the body is a retrospective indication of a generation of people around a certain age. But it is the generation of the mind or spirit that actually generates. The word already says it – being young at heart. I can form a generation of the mind with all kinds of people who physically make up a cross-section of the population. I find that a much more interesting idea of a generation.’

‘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.’

‘In one of his short stories, Der Kreisel (The Top), Kafka wrote about a philosopher who spies on children while they play with a top. Time and again, the philosopher waits for the moment when the top begins to spin in order to grab it. What he believes is that understanding any little detail, a spinning top, for example, is enough to understand everything in general. So this man picks up the top, but the magic is gone. He tries again and again. Giving a generation a name means that a generation of the body, a physical generation, is permanently pinned down in the path that it traversed as a generation of the mind. It means recognizing its productiveness and creativity, but at the same time, it is an acknowledgement of its one-sidedness and limitations. That is the tragic thing about a generation. It can generate, but it is always limited. Not all of the generative potential that is initially present can actually be realized.

The useful idea that it is not good to stick with what is already there, that it is my duty to say that things have to be different, this is something that is also typical of art. In art, that prevailing attitude is even an ideology. There is no other discipline where youthfulness is considered to be so important, or at least, the suggestion of youthfulness. In the art world, people try to be younger than they are, because being young is an advantage. It is the promise of the generation in the literal sense: the creation. Art is the ultimate discipline in which continuous creation is a prerequisite. In the sciences, newness and talent are very strictly kept within bounds. In those institutions, you cannot really do things in a radically different way. You have to have a given style in order to change something. Style is the unit of the difference between form and content. What is crucial is how this relationship is achieved, how people are able to play with accepted styles.

The problem is that different influences from different generations of the body are not taken into consideration, while in fact, they make me what I am. Another factor is that only a handful of people in a given generation are successful. In a symbolic way, these “victors” force their contemporaries to see themselves in terms of the winners and define themselves in terms of their success. Even if you were not there in 1968 and did not really take part in it, you are seen in relationship to the characteristics and qualities of that generation. It is in a certain sense always just appearance that the next generation does something new. Ultimately, in the sociological sense, they do things exactly the same way, because everybody tries to be creative. It is a circle. It always has to be different. There is an avant-garde, it becomes institutionalized and canonized and the innovation is gone. The generation that follows very strategically proclaims that the previous generation is old, establishment, and so on. On the one hand, it is consequently an internal conflict. The generation shuts down a large part of itself because it is perceived in the light of its tiny group of winners. On the other hand, a generation reproduces the conflict mechanism in relation to the preceding generations.

Consequently, a generation sets itself against another generation and in so doing, it generates a certain image of itself. But what is much more important is that what it primarily generates is an image of the generation that preceded it. For the image that any generation sketches of itself, that generation is ultimately completely dependent on recognition and acknowledgment by other generations. You can sketch a picture image of yourself, but it ultimately has to be others who validate your identity. Is it Generation X, Nix, Y, Z or $? I have no idea, and it is that kind of question that is uninteresting to me.’

‘I would phrase it differently. It is undoubtedly the spirit of the times to want to know what motivates the new generation, as well as to want to localize and allocate responsibilities. But it is not possible to know what a generation wants. A generation generates, and there is the risk that a generation has an image of itself that is forced on it by others and subsequently comes to believe in it. That is what we should be concerned about. What in fact happens is that people try to anticipate what the new trends are going to be. What people therefore want to hear is: the new generation is engaged, but conservative; leftist, but also rightist; active, but only when it is to their advantage; united, but individualistic. That kind of characterization is empty. Generation Nix makes this abundantly clear, namely that a generation of the body has scarcely been able to develop itself into a generation of the mind, because the context for doing so was apparently unfavourable. Part of that context is the spirit of the times. As part of this, I would define a chrono-ideology that structures the possibilities for creativity in the present time. A generation is limited, but it is also positively guided by the possibilities that the spirit of the times organizes and arranges in advance. A generation therefore always has to go along with the spirit of the times in order to generate changes in that spirit.’

‘According to the generation after us, we are guilty of being in the generation we are in. We only feel that shame after the fact. What generations do with one another is project their own shame. For example, if the generation that preceded us worked so hard at demonstrating and was so engaged, and our generation is apparently not doing that, how can we have originated from them? Are we really the ones who are guilty of the generative process that produced us? Demonstrating in public, physical space in the streets is no longer the form. Demonstrations now take place on the Internet. Pamphleteering takes place in the space of the media, activism sitting at the computer. What you are now seeing is in fact a very strategic engagement: blogs, the news with ongoing applause. GeenStijl presumes as much in its name: they have no style, and pay no attention to whatever rules might be out there. That is of course always paradoxical. Having no style itself becomes a style, but now it is a style without rules and mores. Those are the rules. Repressing them is a strategic move, in the same sense that Rancière, the philosopher, recently spoke about repressing, pushing the political aside in politics. GeenStijl is actually a manifesto without a manifesto. It is manifest in the literal sense: manifest an sich, it is there. It is moreover an extremely conservative manifesto, namely the wish to preserve society as is. Manifestoes used to be progressive in nature. They were applied in order to change things. The question now is, who is your market, who is your readership? A manifesto that still has to be read after it has been written is today not enough of a manifesto. That is why GeenStijl is such a success. It is happening in real time, while at the same time, people are striving for a common idea.

We are post-political, post-ideological, and we are suspended in a populist principle. This not only applies to the extreme right or left. It is regular politics that, according to the populist principle, operate post-politically. It is the Dutch VVD party, which on a poster for the European union election campaign, no less, declared: “From now on, for everyone who deserves punishment: punishment.” There is no prevailing vision, no creation. The tone is purely regressive. If that really succeeds in speaking to a new generation, then the generations stop generating. Then they turn a generation into a generation of regression.

I see it as my duty, in contrast, to mobilize my own generative potential. We are tired of “having to”, tired of having to be different, tired of criticism and rebellion. As an antidote, I would like to claim with all my energy and all that of my generation of the mind – whoever makes up part of this is something we will only see after the fact – that we have not even begun to put alternatives into effect. We have not yet begun to apply our creative potential on a course towards the frontier they call politics.’