The arche-lithic; or, possibility spaces in math, anthropology, and literature

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I think one of the most important concepts out there is what Tim Morton’s Dark Ecology (philosopher and activist, check them out) calls the arche-lithic. It describes an always-present possibility space for how humans can relate to the things swirling around us, like birds and rocks and ice cube trays and other humans. And as I’m reading The Dawn of Everything, it’s becoming clear to me how critical ‘thinking the arche-lithic’ is to addressing the planetary crisis we’re in.

So we have the Paleolithic (‘old rock’ living, like hunting and foraging) and the Neolithic (‘new rock’ living, aka grain-based agriculture), which extends into the modern era (whatever that means). The Dawn of Everything upends these simple categories, asking 1) why are we so focused on classifying ancient modes of subsistence rather than, say, modes of social organization? And 2) if many possible modes of fluid social organization have existed across human history (and the ethnographic and archeological records strongly indicate that this is the case), “how did we get stuck” in a very constricting mode of social-environmental organization?

The arche-lithic is a “shimmering” realm of possibility. Shall we revisit calculus to make this point? Continuous functions follow this rule:

If a curve is continuous and smooth between two points, then at some point between them, the slope of the curve is equal to the slope of the line connecting both points.

Let us invert and whittle down this idea.

If there is a space marked out by two points, this space is filled with infinite possible curves.

Choosing two points, I plotted twenty possible parabolas. This is an infinitesimally small fraction of the number of possible curves intersecting these two points; even “all parabolas” (an infinite amount) is nothing compared to the number of possible curves. Choose three points, or a thousand points, and there are still infinite curves going through them, even before you chose those points.

The arche-lithic works like that. Before you even choose to look for possible arrangements of political structures, they exist. The Dawn of Everything holds many examples drawn from human history… which complicates notions of Paleolithic, Neolithic, and modern. Claiming that current forms of human society have somehow ‘advanced’ from bands of hunter gatherers (a myth unto itself) is silly when those previous societies employed checks and balances on leadership and personal freedoms that are pushed far to the back of the possibility space today. 

The arche-lithic “haunts the twelve-thousand-year present” – a beautiful idea. Not only connecting environmental and anthropological theory, it also helps frame the process of re-imagining the logic of agrologistics. Coupled with the imperatives in Dark Ecology, it offers something like joy and hope. It is the space marked out for free will in Dante’s cosmos: “On a greater power and a better nature / you, who are free, depend; that Force engenders / the mind in you, outside the heavens’ sway. / Thus, if the present world has gone astray / in you is the cause, in you it’s to be sought” (Purg. XVI, 79-81).

With the arche-lithic space in mind:

• Let’s help indigenous people get their lands and waters back
• Let’s practice restorative justice and stop mass incarceration
• Let’s practice society-scale gun safety
• Let’s adopt modes of mutual aid
• And let’s do much more