Introduction

This book explores the relations between aesthetic creation and capitalist forces of material production in reference to elements of Romantic and modernist cultures, politics, and economics, in a theoretical framework derived from Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, in order to find out how the relation between the human and the nonhuman was constituted at the intersection of subjective and the objective material worlds, and how the constitution of this relation may be said to determine choreographies of social performance. This exploration is based on a number of representative literary texts by William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce; William Lane’s intriguing utopian social experiment in Paraguay, the New Australia colony; theories of modern dance; and, of course, elements of Latour’s sociology of science. In its philosophical dimension, this study offers a detailed discussion of a particular point in Latour’s work, namely, his discussion of the dichotomy nature vs. culture and its underlying dichotomy, work of translation vs. work of purification of nature. Using this philosophical framework to explore the political value of performative aspects of literary texts, the arguments developed here may be seen as a digression from the discourse of mainstream critical literature on the texts chosen for analysis, a digression that I hope will be found both useful and entertaining.