Between, and child actors

Everyone lives between times, and is the intersection of past and future. Everyone is always already taught, and always anticipating or actually teaching and ruling. Rosenstock-Huessy writes, “‘He’ never exists, but is always between two times, two ages, as son and father, layman and expert, the end of one era and the beginning of another.” Modern psychology is fundamentally ill-founded because it ignores this reality and attempts to isolate the thought of the individual.

At the heart of the psychological heresy, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is the notion that the child is father of the man. This notion “destroyed the continuity between generations; and as a substituted condemned the poor children to carry a burden which rightly their elders should bear.” He mentions the “child prodigy of the nineteenth century” as a “ghastly result” of this error. And it’s hardly a thing of the past: Child actors, child models, child performers proliferate, all testimony to the continuing ghastliness of generational relations.