Nature - autonomous learning

152 de-naturalisationsee this not simply as a practical necessity but as a cultural metaphorwherein order, purity and innocence is valued more highly than disorder,disease and degradation. Visitors to the Eden Project thus arrive havingalready internalised a set of cultural beliefs about ‘first nature’ that the Projectmerely confirms and reproduces with its seemingly ‘realistic’ recreation of naturalbiomes.It’s important to note that Bartram and Shobrook are not arguing thatthe nature recreated in the Eden Project is a ‘fake’. Rather, they are suggestingthat the very distinction between the fake and the real, the representationand the reality has disappeared. For them, what we call ‘reality’ isan effect of discourse; it is a distinction internal to discourse even thoughit appears to be a distinction between discourse and a world external to it.Sceptical readers might object that Bartram and Shobrook are wrong,because it is possible to check the authenticity of the project biomes bycomparing them with the real biomes they mimic. However, the counterargumentis that one would view the supposed ‘real biomes’ with theself-same cultural beliefs that, Bartram and Shobrok argue, make the EdenProject a simulation.This argument has been made powerfully in another context by thehistorian and cultural theorist Timothy Mitchell. Influenced by Baudrillard(as well as Derrida and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger),Mitchell’s (1988) Colonising Egypt examines how the French and Britishviewed Egypt during the late nineteenth century. He recounts how, at theWorld Exhibition of 1889 in Paris, a ‘faithful’ recreation of an area of oldCairo was built for the edification of the middle-class public. Comparedwith British and French streetscapes, the Cairo one was dirty, rather chaoticand traditional in appearance. It comprised winding, irregular alleywaysand overhanging façades. For those exhibition visitors who had been toEgypt before, the artificial Cairo street appeared authentic, while for thosevisitors who hadn’t it seemed equally realistic because it was built to scaleand was so obviously different from the typical British or French streetscape.What’sstartling about Mitchell’s analysis is his claim that even thosewho had (or would in future) visit Cairo never stepped outside a set of culturalrepresentations of Egypt.These representations traded on a set of binary oppositionsbetween West and East, light and dark, order and chaos, cleanlinessand filth, civilisation and barbarism, that structured how Western Europeanssaw not only Egypt but the developing world at this time.Thus, the ‘reality’that the artificial Cairo street at the exhibition stood for was not, in fact, a