RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY - THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA.
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If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the
Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so
detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the
decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a
few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty
of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an Imperial pride and
rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather
as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing) — then
this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the
discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Abstraction today 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 substance. It is the generation of models of a
real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer
precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that
precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that
engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it
would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.
It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there,
in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra" |
