Fede’s Reviews > Extreme Metaphors > Status Update

Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase - everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood.

Oh, I found her wonderfully attractive. I always had a thing for Margaret Thatcher. Until I grew too old for her.

You're getting a whole new sort of language that doesn't depend on storyline in the old sense, but on ascending scales of sensation, a sort of total abstraction. Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. The home is going to be a TV studio. We're all going to be starring in our own sitcoms, and they'll be very strange sitcoms, too, like the inside of our heads.

If you ask me for a visual picture of the future, I think it'll be increasingly lunar. The psychological landscape is going to be somewhat like the physical landscape of the moon. It's going to be a matter of sharp edges, of a very sharp and angular geometry. Individual actions and individual pieces of behaviour and individual thoughts will sit in isolation, like pieces of sculpture embedded in a dune.

We take in our stride a high degree of ruthlessness in ourselves, in our private lives. We take for granted a wide range of options that we exercise without any second thoughts, without any self-doubts. It's only at the fringes of our lives that we question this or that. I think that people are getting very tough minded. I think that is why the future is going to be a very electric and aggressive place.

A whole new kind of psychopathology, the book of a new Krafft-Ebing, is being written by such things as car crashes, televised violence, the new awareness of our own bodies transmitted by magazine accounts of popular medicine, by reports of the Barnard heart transplants, and so on (...)These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies.