The Cartographic Foundation of Territory

Abstract

Much has been written on the relationship between the map and what it supposedly represents. In On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote about an empire where 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 occupied the entirety of a province. Over time these maps were no longer satisfactory and the cartographers’ guilds created a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire and which coincided point for point with it (Borges 1998: 325). This story questions the relationship of representation and the quest for accuracy of the scientific map. Such questions further raise questions about the relationship between the map and the territory. More than 50 years ago, Alfred C. Korzybski stated that a ‘map is not the territory’ (Korzybski 1948: 58), while half a century later David Turnbull’s Maps are Territories (1993) sent the opposite message; and emphasizing the constitutive power of maps, Jacques Revel has suggested that ‘knowledge of the territory is a production of the territory itself’ (1991: 134). Suggesting a temporal diagnosis to this issue of representation, Baudrillard stated that the ‘territory no longer precedes the map […]. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory’ (1983: 2).