Baudrillard, a disciple of Debord’s who got some cool cachet when his work was featured in The Matrix, opens his Simulacra and Simulation (the book appearing in the film) by quoting Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph tale “On Exactitude in Science.”
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 Inclemencies 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.
In attributing this parable to one Suarez Miranda, who allegedly published the work in 1658, Borges emphasizes the difference between representation and the real. Whether the author goes by Borges or Miranda, the name remains separate from the man, an arbitrary marker pointing to a complicated, ever-shifting being that it can never fully describe or accurately locate. Likewise, a map, no matter how precise, even if it is so precise that it is exactly the same size as the terrain it aspires to chart, can never be perfectly in sync with the geography it graphs. If the map becomes one with the land, it isn’t a map any longer, since the distinction between map and territory disappears. As long as the map remains distinct from the land, it continues to be, indeed, a map, but one that is necessarily inaccurate, in the same way that a menu entry “hamburger” doesn’t come close to conveying the full meaning of the beef between the buns or that a paper bill lacks the weight and gleam of actual gold bullion. For those generations following the great cartographers, the territory-size “map” is useless, since it isn’t, properly speaking, a map at all, but simply the territory. These children with no respect for their elders let the chart fall into desuetude.
Baudrillard claims that Borges’s fable, a “beautiful allegory of simulation,” has “now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.” For Baudrillard “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 the 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”—Baudrillard continues—“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.” (Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus turgidly renders this last, of course, in The Matrix. That Fishburne’s Morpheus is now hawking Kia cars is either perfectly apt or perfectly ironic.)