Henceforth the past is as certain as the present, what we see on paper is as certain as what we touch: In a landscape we always get to one place from another place; each location is determined only by its relation to the neighboring place within the circle of visibility. But geographical space is closed, and is therefore in its entire structure transparent. Every place in such a space is determined by its position with respect to the whole and ultimately by its relation to the null point of the coordinate system by which this space obtains its order. Geographical space is systemized. Completely mediated, one�s understanding of space from a map confounds, indeed contradicts, the experience of the body in time and place.

Standard time was imposed by law, but standard space was imposed by maps: abstract and uniform languages that could, indeed, be used to describe any terrain and any culture, no matter where. The cartographers of the Empire drew up a map so detailed that it ends up covering exactly the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes 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).

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Anything about which one knows that one soon will not have it around becomes an image. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose/position, the photograph/map tells me death in the future.

I shudder over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject/territory is already dead, every photograph/map is this catastrophe. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory- it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable of the cartographers today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, 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.