"We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. [...] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum." (Gregory Bateson, "Form, Substance and Difference," Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 429).

In an often cited passage by Jorge Luis Borges, itself purporting to be a quotation from the philosopher Josiah Royce, a fictional cartographer hypothesises on the task of producing a 1:1 map of England, and finishes by speculating (in the manner of Lewis Carroll) that the completed map should also contain an image of itself, en abyme ("Partial Magic in the Quixote"). Like Bateson's cartography of infinite regression, Borges's story points to a détournement within the structure of verisimilitude itself. The map within the map opens a space of infinite substitutability or what might better be called metonymic recursion, in which, as Bateson says, the map-territory relation obtains at every step. This strange topology has numerous analogues, from Cantor's set-theory paradoxes and Russell's theory of types (a set cannot be a member of itself), to information theory and hypertext. Between topography, topology and tropology, there emerge relations which are more than merely figurative, organised, as in Borges's story, around concepts of non-equivalence and unintegrated difference: a map-territory relation which propagates a type of translational feedback which is itself an engine of information. Moreover, as Maurice Blanchot demonstrates in "Literary Infinity: The Aleph," Borges's preoccupation with the simulacral ties verisimilitude itself to a form of metaleptic reversion:

this memorable absurdity is no more than what takes place in the case of translation. A translation gives us two works in two languages. In Borges's story we have two works in the same language and, in this sameness which is not the same, a tantalising mirage of the duplicity of possibilities. However, when perfect reduplication is achieved the original, even the origin, is cancelled out. (The Sirens' Song, 224)

In his essay "Simulacra and Simulations," Jean Baudrillard similarly explicates Borges's text, but in terms closer to Guy Debord's Situationist axiom that "the map precedes the territory." For Baudrillard: "the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic. [...] Genetic miniaturisation is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models -- and with these it can reproduce an infinite number of times" (Selected Writings, 167). While the infinity of production necessarily contributes to the longstanding crises in empirical notions of representability and verisimilitude, it is rather a question of the structural semantics of representation which determines the verisimile as an axis of infinite regress. One of the outcomes of this has been a reappraisal of the notion of "landscapes of fact" in terms of what cyberneticists have long conceived as "landscapes of information."

The landscape of information describes, through a form of cartographic reflexivity, its own semantic contours, its own syntax and grammar, its own cartographies. Through the feedback loop of infinite regression, the informatic landscape circulates on a spiral track of endless scenarios at whose terminus it already stands, in advance of itself, as a figure of entropy. Between topos and tropos, the generative-degenerative axis of information describes a signifying movement which can be said to be structured as a language, but one whose complexions are inconsistent with any straightforward concept of communication or utility. The landscape of information is rather a figure of the incommunicable and the non-utilisable, a détournement which erodes the verisimile from within. This, then, is one way of approaching the effect of metonymic recursion in Borges's story of co-extensivity between the map and the territory. The fictionality of this project, as Bateson suggests, is not so much located in the failure of verisimilitude, as in its tropological defilement (between metaphor and metonymy). In an essay on James Joyce, Jacques Derrida has compared this effect to the structure of the cybernetic programme:

Paradoxical logic of this relationship between two texts, two programmes or two [...] "softwares": whatever the difference between them, even if [...] it is immense and incommensurable, the '"second" text, the one which, fatally, refers to the other, quotes it, exploits it, parasites it and deciphers it, is no doubt the minute parcel detached from the other, the metonymic dwarf, the jester of the great anterior text [...] and yet it is also another set, quite other, bigger, and more powerful than the all-powerful which it drags off and reinscribes elsewhere in order to defy its ascendancy. Each writing is at once the detached fragment of a software more powerful than the other, a part larger than the whole of which it is a part. ("Two Words for Joyce," Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, 148)