Nothing happens without difference.
At first, this seems obvious.
For something to change, it must become different.
For something to move, its position must change.
For something to grow, something must be added, transformed or rearranged.
For something to happen, the world must not remain exactly as it was.
But the more closely we look, the stranger the idea becomes.
The world is full of differences.
Temperatures differ.
Surfaces differ.
Sounds differ.
Organisms differ.
One moment differs from another.
Yet most differences appear to make no difference at all.
A grain of sand shifts on a distant beach.
A molecule changes direction.
A star brightens beyond the reach of any observer.
The difference is real.
But to what does it matter?
This question introduces an important distinction.
A difference can exist without making a difference.
The temperature may change by one thousandth of a degree without altering anything relevant to a particular system.
A sound may occur without being heard.
A colour may change without being seen.
A chemical reaction may take place without affecting anything beyond itself.
So perhaps the interesting question is not whether differences exist.
It is:
When does a difference become consequential?
Something must encounter it.
Or perhaps something must be organised in such a way that the difference can alter what happens next.
A difference in temperature becomes consequential to a thermostat.
A difference in light becomes consequential to a plant.
A difference in movement becomes consequential to a prey animal.
The same physical difference can therefore be irrelevant in one relation and decisive in another.
The difference alone is not enough.
But neither is the receiving system enough.
Something happens between them.
We have encountered this structure before.
A branch does not simply contain the affordance of perching.
It affords perching in relation to a particular kind of organism.
Likewise, a physical difference does not simply carry significance within itself.
It becomes consequential within a relation.
This does not mean that the difference is invented by the organism.
The temperature really changes.
The light really varies.
The predator really moves.
But whether those differences alter what happens depends upon the organisation of whatever encounters them.
This gives us a useful way of avoiding two familiar mistakes.
The first is to imagine that the world is already divided into significant and insignificant differences.
The second is to imagine that significance is simply projected onto an otherwise indifferent world.
Perhaps neither is quite right.
The world contains differences.
Organised systems make some differences consequential.
And once a difference becomes consequential, something new has happened.
The future is no longer exactly what it would have been without it.
A different pathway has opened.
Or closed.
A process has changed direction.
A response has become possible.
A new constraint has appeared.
This may be the most elementary form of history.
For history begins wherever a difference changes what can happen next.
And that suggests a curious possibility.
Perhaps a difference does not make a difference merely because it is noticed.
Perhaps noticing is itself one particular way in which a difference can become consequential.
Long before anything notices anything, differences can alter processes.
Long before anything matters, differences can constrain.
Long before anything means, differences can change what is possible.
We are therefore not beginning with meaning.
Nor even with mattering.
We are beginning further back.
With a world in which differences occur.
And with the strange fact that some of them change everything.
The question is why.
What is it that allows one difference to disappear into the world without consequence, while another becomes the beginning of a new process?
What must be present for a difference to make a difference?
That is the puzzle we will follow.
And perhaps the answer will turn out to be more complicated than the phrase suggests.
For once a difference has made a difference, the world itself is no longer the same.
And that altered world may now make further differences possible.
Perhaps this is how becoming begins.
Not with things.
But with differences that change what can happen next.
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