Borges’s map and Magritte’s images cannot serve as figures for anything in postmodern theory

Evidence

Baudrillard quite properly reminds us — but he has used it so often that the reminder has something of the same effect as kicking the ladder out from under himself — that in the postmodern such essentially transcoded objects or symbiotic constructions as the famous Borges map (that always springs to mind on such occasions) or the images of Magritte cannot be used as figures or allegories for anything; and in the high theory of the postmodern they have all the vulgarity and lack of “distinction” of Escher prints on the walls of middlebrow college students. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 1076

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s essay ‘Grafting & Growth’ in that both concern how representation/image relates to territory/materiality, though from opposite directions. — connects to: The Borges map fable now expresses only second-order simulacra — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 5
• DEFINE: Clarifies how Jameson treats transcoded objects and the ban on allegorizing them in high postmodern theory.