Goethe, Cartography, and Planetary Representation

Abstract: I will be examining a specific representational tradition—cartography—with the aim of showing how the age of Goethe struggled with the tensions between aesthetics and instrumental reason, and how Goethe himself conceived of a mutually enriching dialogue between aesthetics and science. Goethe's awareness of the dangers of the economic instrumentalization of knowledge are firmly grounded in his views on nature, which, from his earliest poetry to his later scientific and literary writings, emphasized the function of aesthetic processes and representational form in the mediation of subject and object. To illustrate this centrality of aesthetic processes, I will show how cartography in the age of Goethe displays the various discursive, political and aesthetic tensions involved in imagining life on earth. Cartography, I contend, is a discursive form that, in its attempts to project specific forms of knowledge onto the earth's surface, highlights the interferences between the formal dictates of the map, the imaginative perspective on the planet, political power dynamics, and the interests of scientific knowledge. Cartography intersected with other burgeoning discursive forms to force questions about how the aesthetics of representation related to the claims of knowledge production.