If possibility is not stored in minds or hidden in the future, then it must be sought where it is actively shaped. The most obvious candidate is also the most routinely misunderstood: the social.
Social systems are often described as constraints on individual freedom — rules, norms, institutions, and expectations that limit what people can do. From a relational ontology perspective, this picture is precisely backwards.
Social coordination does not restrict possibility. It creates it.
Coordination Before Choice
The standard individualist picture imagines agents first, relations second. Individuals are said to possess capacities, intentions, and freedoms, which are then channelled or obstructed by social arrangements.
But coordination is prior.
Before there can be intention, deliberation, or action, there must already be a structured field in which actions make sense, intentions are intelligible, and consequences are recognisable. That field is social.
Possibility is not what remains once social constraints are removed. It is what emerges when coordination stabilises.
What Coordination Actually Is
Coordination is not agreement, conformity, or harmony. It is the ongoing alignment of expectations across participants.
It includes:
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shared routines
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institutional roles
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normative expectations
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patterned responses
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recognisable sequences of action
Most coordination is invisible precisely because it works. We only notice it when it fails.
From a relational perspective, coordination is the engine of possibility: it determines what actions are available, intelligible, contestable, or reparable at any given moment.
Institutions as Possibility Engines
Institutions are often framed as rigid, conservative structures that limit human action. But institutions are better understood as frozen coordination: stabilised patterns that allow complex forms of action to be repeated, scaled, and distributed.
None of these possibilities exist prior to the coordination that sustains them.
Institutions do not merely regulate behaviour. They actualise new forms of life.
Norms and the Weighting of Possibility
Not all possibilities are equal. Some are encouraged, others discouraged, still others rendered unthinkable.
This weighting is not imposed by individual preference. It is produced by norms — the often implicit standards that govern what counts as appropriate, acceptable, or intelligible.
Norms do not tell individuals what to choose. They shape the field in which choices can appear at all.
From this perspective, ethical, professional, and cultural norms are not constraints on freedom. They are conditions for meaningful action.
Why Social Change Feels Like Loss
Because coordination stabilises possibility, change often feels like restriction rather than expansion.
When familiar norms erode, previously reliable actions lose their footing. Possibilities that once felt obvious become risky or unintelligible. This is experienced as loss of freedom — even when new possibilities are emerging.
Social change is not the removal of constraint. It is the reconfiguration of the field of possibility.
Power as Control of Coordination
Power, in this framework, is not primarily about coercion or domination. It is about shaping coordination.
Those with power influence:
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which distinctions matter
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which actions are recognised
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which outcomes are rewarded
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which failures are tolerated
Power operates by structuring possibility — not by issuing commands to free agents, but by shaping the relational field in which action unfolds.
This is why power is often invisible to those who benefit from it, and why resistance so often takes the form of re-coordination rather than direct opposition.
Individuals Revisited
None of this denies individuality, agency, or responsibility. It re-locates them.
Individuals are not origin points of possibility. They are participants in coordinated systems who can, under certain conditions, contribute to reshaping those systems.
Agency is not freedom from coordination. It is competent participation within it — and sometimes, its deliberate disruption.
The Cut Ahead
If social coordination shapes possibility, then language must play a central role — not as representation, but as a technology for stabilising, differentiating, and extending coordination itself.
The next step, then, is unavoidable.
Language and the Differentiation of Possibility.
That is where we go next.
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