Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 149Baudrillard (1929–) – a philosopher, cultural critic and media theorist –has famously argued that we increasingly live in a world of simulation.Asthe English sociologist Mark Smith (2002: 287) puts it:Baudrillard argues that it is no longer possible to distinguish betweenrepresentation and reality in a conventional way, one which assumesthat representation refers to something which really exists. ForBaudrillard, all kinds of representations are just ‘simulations’ of themeanings which have been produced before. This condition, whichhe describes as hyper-reality, involves the blurring of the distinctionbetween . . . ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. In hyper-reality meaning is notproduced but reproduced through simulations, and simulations ofsimulations and so on.In Baudrillard’s work, then, the term discourse refers to that complex arrayof images, words, texts and sounds through which people communicatewith one another about the world in which they live. It is, if you like,a generic term not just for language but for any organised sets of signs andsymbols which shape our understanding of reality. In the modern world,Baudrillard argues, people’s experience of reality is increasingly indirectand mediated. Television, video games, movies, theme parks and thelike are, for Baudrillard, the ‘reality’ that more and more people inhabiton a daily basis. In his later writings, Baudrillard has been preoccupiedwith how gatekeepers of knowledge (like CNN and the BBC) mediate theexperience of the world for society as a whole. For instance, his ironicallytitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) argued that the Gulf War experiencedby citizens of the allied-forces countries was a media construct.This media war, Baudrillard argued, drew upon a well-established repertoireof representations of Arabs which meant that ‘representations of reality...precede[d] that reality [and thus] cease[d] to be representations andbec[ame] . . . simulations instead’ (McGuigan 1999: 61).The British geographers Rob Bartram and Sarah Shobrook (2000) havedrawn upon Baudrillard’s ideas and applied them to the experience ofnature in Western societies.Taking the case of the Eden Project, they insistthat what we often think of as ‘first nature’ – that is, nature untouched byhuman hand – is really a simulated nature that is anything but real. LikeCronon’s intervention, the context for their argument is the heightenedanxiety about the ‘end of nature’ in Western societies (refer back to the