I remember using in my lecture a short story by J. L. Borges, where the attempt to draw a comprehensive map of the world had to include the map-maker drawing himself drawing the map, and therefore the reader had to consider the impossibility of a fully comprehensive correspondence between the map and the natural reality it attempted to depict. ... The plight of the cartographer in Borges's story can mislead us into the idea that a man or a group could have access to reality in its naked form and that although he (or it) could recognize the problems involved in the actual drawing of the map, he (or it) would nevertheless be able to look at reality from a vantage point.  This is, unfortunately, a misreading of the story.  The cartographer is never outside the map.  His problem is not just how to produce a map that would include himself in the process of drawing 'reality'; his predicament is how to survive the realization that he is himself already in the map, a drawn figure drawing himself.