This image clashes with Kehlmann's representation of an emotionless Prussian who merely measures the world with tedious determination. While Goethe depicts Humboldt reconnoitering a new world that is a mirror image of the old, Simon portrays him as a passionate educator and revolutionary.

Looking at three imagined depictions of Humboldt's Chimborazo climb-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drawing “Höhen der alten und neuen Welt bildlich verglichen” (1807), Rainer Simon's DEFA film Die Besteigung des Chimborazo (1989), and Daniel Kehlmann's bestseller Die Vermessung der Welt (2005)-my essay compares these fictional representations with Humboldt's own narratives to examine the imaginative and ideological bent of each interpretation. These examples raise questions about the multiple scales of geosociality, which intertwine biography and Earth ' itself. One concerns the inscription of human activities in volcanic rock, the second the embodiment of isotopes in living beings.

We develop our argument through engagement with two sites. At the same time, it opens up a down-to-earth form of geopolitics that exceeds classic notions of the term, attending to different geologic scales to living bodies, human and nonhuman to solid rock and to the planet. Such a move seems timely, keeping in mind the popular claim that in the Anthropocene, humans have become a geologic force. While geosocialities overlap with nature-cultures and ' biosocialities, ' they are ' harder ' in the sense of drawing attention to geology and its relation to social life.

Drawing upon these developments, we use the notion of ' geosocialities ' (the commingling of the geologic and the social and the sensibilities involved) to facilitate appreciation of the mineral and the alignment between geology and social cultural theory. Several scholars and artists, many of whom would advocate new materialisms, have attempted to recapture this liveliness. Such a division suppressed the liveliness that humans have often attributed to material things. ' Nature ' and ' social life ' tended to be separated by Enlightenment thinkers, setting the stage for a long-standing tension between geology and social-cultural theory.

The invention of nature humboldt