Baudrillard on the Parks.....

Forward:  It just may be the way my mind works, but understand abstract theoretical concepts like those of Baudrillard are not my favorite thing to do- however I do find it very useful in clarifying how Baudrillard actually is existing within our world today.  This helps clarify his thoughts on simulation and simulacrum. I hope you get a chance to read this if you were having issues understanding some of the reading.  It doesn't address the reading directly, but applies the concepts to natural space, in particularly the parks idea/nature preserve idea.  And through that avenue you may be able to understand Baudrillard better in the context of your areas of research and interest. 

How would Baudrillard view our national parks systems?

Baudrillard establishes for us an understanding that our perceived lives are an ever changing, exchanging swirl of real, realish, and outright not real experiences and objects. How would a Baudrillardian lens frame up the natural spaces that we have created in America in the form of the National Park and other federally and state held lands? This type of evaluation begins with the role the wilderness myth has played in defining what natural space is, or rather supposed to be, the execution of those mythological ideals within the preserved space of the park system and how each results in an ever-increasing multi-layered cake of simulacra.

The beginnings of the national parks system reaches back into the nineteenth century. The rise of existentialism, the nation's expansion westward, and the pictoral depictions of natural space created by the popular artists of the Hudson River School all contributed to the elevation of natural space beyond our material interactions. No longer was wild, or non-urban, space a bowl of resources for the new industrializing nation to pillage for profit. It was revered and described as being sublimely beautiful, divinely inspired and greater than all man made things because of its natural aesthetic qualities and purity of space. These sentiments and ideals are communicated in the writings and visual works of the era.

Other sources for romanticizing and elevating natural space is found in the westward expansion of the nineteenth century and the birth of the dime store novel. This popular form of cheap literature told, retold, and embellished many stories from the American frontier. This tradition of aggrandizing human-frontier interactions continues today in cinema within the western genre.

In telling and retelling these western themed narratives and in the way natural space was written about and depicted by existentialists and the Hudson River School artists a pattern of expectations and assumptions are created when man interacts with nature. This is established over time and with repetition of exposure. Both repetition and persistence over time are in abundant supply for the genre of literature, film, and visual media even today. Western tropes, such as the moral cowboy who survives all the both man and nature can dish out, have obscured a more “realistic” view of out role within natural space and how interactions between the individual and the natural world traditionally occur. This obfuscated, but actual relationship we have with natural space is replaced, in a very Baudrillardian sense, by the representation and ideas that the western/wilderness has come to represent.

This is a method of replacement and changing of the real into a simulacra an hyper-real space occurs that Baudrillard describes in Simulation and Simulacra. This simulacra is created through a process of exposure and acceptance over time so that the new simulacra is now intertwined within the everyday and indiscernible from the original. Another example of this process in can be made with commodity objects. The drink coffee represents, or is intimately connected with, its botanical origins. Coffee is a drink made from a bean, grown on a tree, then made into a drink. With the numerous outlets for caffinating one's self, retailers, like the international brand Starbucks, now are the origins of your morning pick-me-up. How often has the phrase “Want to get some Starbucks” being said in conversation? The object desired is coffee, but because of prolonged exposure to the brand and mediated existence of the object, it is no longer identified as coffee, with its associated organic origins, but with a white cup with green logo you get from the peppy barista at the corner Starbucks.

Human-nature interactions are no longer based on our physical interactions performed, but the expectation established by persistent and prolonged exposure to the wilderness myth contrived within an idyllic space – fiction.

This simulated identity for natural space is presented in our National and State Parks,and federally held and protected lands. In their untouched state all these natural spaces are found to be lacking a specific attribute, it would not be far off to call that attribute supernatural, even. It cannot attained by urban space, and can only exist outside of it, and requires human influence to fully bring it to fruition. These areas must be constructed and changed by man to be more natural than they were originally found to be. Meandering trails, walkways, streams, paths, visitors centers, restrooms and campsites are all added to these spaces to enhance our experience. This is an attempt to reshape the landscape in the image of the bucolic descriptions of the existential poets and the renditions of natural space found in media. Man's influence introduces urban elements within the found landscape; then abandons the found landscape for a manipulated one. One with better views, clear paths, safer walkways, and a less likelihood a visitor, heaven forbid, interact with the space in a non-designated way. The found views from atop a mountain range do not live up the mythological views we would have seen in the past according to the poets, painters and photographers of the idealized bygone era. The solution: reshape the space to better embody that nostalgic description that has been used for comparison.

The process of nostalgia replacing the “real” is also outlined by Baudrillard. “When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes full meaning.” The auto-touring phenomena of The Great Smokey Mountains National Park is an example of where this type of modification occurs. The scenic roads and pathways that crisscross the smoky mountains of the Appalachians do not allow for such grand vista as historically described. The perfect view is obscured by nature. Trees block the sunset view and forests blur the rolling majesty of the fog covered mountains. To surmount these inconveniences designated pull-off and observation points are created along the auto-touring routes. In front of these observation points the forest has been clear-cut and tamed for the needs of the park-goer so that they may see the best embodiment of the natural that the wilderness myth provides for us.

As these spaces are engineered the ways in which these spaces are manipulated draw attention to the simulacral quality of the space itself. The way these spaces are created and performed establishes a necessary conflicting relationship between natural and urban. The largest of the manipulations are derived from how society has named and identified these places of natural wonder. Dino Felluge, of Purdue university, summarizes the phenomena Baudrillard uses to distinguish between the “real” and the simulacra. One of these phenomena is “urbanization” according to Felluge. Urbanization is the result of man's domination and near complete control over space. In direct opposition to this control are non-human processes found outside of urban and populated areas. Because we deem them important they must not become merely “natural,” but also “protected” spaces. This according to Felluge “defines the space in direct contradistinction to an urban 'reality'.”

An escape from the urban industrialized space is a long standing tenant of the wilderness myth. The woes of urban life drain the essence of man, he must, then, return to nature to seek his remedy. The confusion between the real and the simulacra experienced by today's society as a result of proliferation of simulations and their ability to fool society through intertwining themselves in intimate proximity with the “real” results in an inability to distinguish, at times, their difference, according to Baudrillard. The corrective measures for this undiscernability is to label and point out the natural, or the more natural, according to the park or institution. These are the steps and processes the precipitate the aforementioned auto-touring vistas, areas of the park set aside and marked with signage indicating its naturalness and beauty, it realness in opposition to the urban.