Borges - On Exactitude in Science

Borges never stops to fascinate me. I just read this ten line story called “On Exactitude in Science” and one can not stop thinking the imagery and the ideas that this story opens up to. Here Borges revisits his favorite theme of real and unreal that is all too frequent in his works. Below is the full text of the story.

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Incumbencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography...

This is such a small piece of work, yet the idea that a map so big that it covers the real. There is no point of reference now if you think of it. All of real is same as all of simulation. The Map is the real and the real is the map. The relationship has been let loose to such an extent that whatever we perceive or sense can easily be from our experiences of our interactions with the model or simulation of the real. The unreal and real lose context, If the unreal is as good as real, then unreal mirrors reality (it can replace reality totally). It is no more unreal. It is the real. In a sense, Map is just a construct. The idea of reality being mirrored to such perfectness that it is no longer a mirror. Then how do you define real? Do you even need real? Maybe it is the real whose tattered ruins lie all around!

Jean Baudrillard describes this in this book "Simulacra and Simulations". Quoted from this book are the two paragraph below..

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) — as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.