A Relic of the Disciplines of Geography

A parable about the logical consequences of scale precision can be found in Borges.  This is about construction of map so precise that it duplicate of everything that is supposed to represent.  In geoscience, this describes a cartographic scale of 1:1 where every foot corresponds to every “ground-truth” foot.  Every topographic detail, at least, must be reproduced.

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 coincide 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.  (Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” Collected Fictions, trans by Andrew Hurley, 325)

At the heart of understanding geographic precision is evidence of the scale that a map represents.  Borges creates this parable of a passionate pursuit of exacting precision in cartography.  Three events happen here. First, a perfect rendering of cartography in a single map of the province is commanded. Second, these renderings turned out to be “Unconscionable Maps, so the Cartographers’ Guild went back to work. The map is inscribable but it was not precise enough for the administrative purposes of the Empire. Third, following their mandate to the letter, they produced a map of the entire empire at a scale of 1:1. However, the size of the map rendered it useless, if not redundant to the actual territory.  Following generations did not revere the discipline of cartography and cast it into a desert only to become the “Tattered Ruins of that Map.”

Every desiccated piece is still at a scale of 1:1 because it is identical to where it was once located.  However, when blown by the wind, dried by the heat, eaten by animals, etc, the proper location of each piece is unknown. The precision is inescapable no matter how useless it became. The map became more useless the greater its reproduction of the land increased.  The pieces became the ruins of cartographic expertise.  Cartographic perfection was preserved in each fragment, but what the map represented could not be discerned.   No matter how much the Guild of Cartographers (read the disciplines comprising geoscience itself until the present, when cartography alone is no longer the sine qua none of the geographic profession) was respected, subsequent generations found it worse than anachronistic.  The utility of cartography is measured by its geographic and historical scale.

The ruins of the geographic profession rendered it irrelevant.  A reader of Borges’ parable, who is sympathetic with if not a member of the Cartographers’ Guild is likely to wonder what replaced geoscience.