Time & Perspective Quote by Angela Carter

Carter is picking a fight with the museum model of art: art as tasteful record-keeping, safely sealed in frames like pressed flowers. “Account of past sensations” is a jab at nostalgia and at realism’s implied modesty, the idea that art’s highest duty is to describe what has already been felt, already happened, already been approved. She doesn’t just want new content; she wants a new nervous system. “Direct organization” makes art sound like engineering, not confession. Sensation isn’t something the artist reports; it’s something the artist designs, arranges, intensifies.

The phrase “more highly evolved sensations” carries a deliberately provocative whiff of progress - not in the Silicon Valley sense of efficiency, but in the bodily sense: expanding what we can perceive, desire, and tolerate. That’s Carter at full strength: suspicious of inherited scripts, especially the ones that pass as “natural” (gender roles, romance myths, class etiquette). If art can reorganize sensation, it can also reorganize the social order that trains sensation in the first place.

Then the turn: “producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.” It’s a line aimed at commodities, at ideology, at the seductive objects - narratives included - that end up owning their makers. Carter’s subtext is feminist and anti-fetishistic: stop making icons that freeze women into symbols; stop making stories that reproduce the same old power. In the late-20th-century context of postmodern play and second-wave feminism, she’s arguing that art’s real radicalism isn’t representation. It’s self-production: remaking the subject who has been told, for too long, to be made.