ABSTRACT
A fundamental question addressed in this book concerns our ability to socialise nature-culture hybridity in progressive ways that have value for practical politics, beyond individual aesthetic experience. William Lane seems to have sought to develop such an ability. But this also required the effort of overcoming the colonial attitudes that Lane himself displayed. Nevertheless, in terms of practical politics, Lane’s social experiments in New Australia and Cosme suggest that living with nature as opposed to living at the expense of nature is a possible solution to that question. The community forms a social space that might be likened to a stage and develops its own choreography of social performance. But for that to happen, the members of the social community must experience themselves as, in some ways, artists, labouring in the manner of the artisan or craftsman. The community itself becomes a total art text, rather than being merely another social formation. Its members experience themselves, their relation to the material world, and the relations among themselves, as unique events, in the same way an object crafted by an artisan is unique and irreproducible. This contrast between serially reproducible social units and unique and irreproducible social communities is one that illuminates the contrast between an exploitative subordination of nature to culture and a progressive socialisation of the interpenetration of nature and culture.
