The Potential of Possibility: I. Possibility and Potential

We have been using two words that seem, at first, to say much the same thing.

Possibility.

Potential.

Both seem to concern what might happen.

But perhaps they do not concern the same thing at all.

Consider a door.

An open door makes passage possible. A person standing before it may be able to walk through. These seem like closely related facts, and ordinarily we might describe both simply by saying that going through the door is possible.

But something important has been lost.

The door establishes a possibility.

The person has a potential.

The distinction becomes clearer if we change the situation.

Suppose the door is locked.

The person may still be perfectly capable of walking. Nothing about their physical ability has changed. Yet passage is no longer available.

The potential remains.

The possibility has disappeared.

This suggests that possibility and potential belong to different sides of a relation.

Possibility concerns what a situation leaves open.

Potential concerns what a participant is ready or able to do within that situation.

And this distinction has an intriguing parallel in Halliday's account of modality.

Within the system of modality, modalisation concerns probability and usuality, while modulation concerns degrees of obligation and readiness. Readiness includes such notions as inclination and ability.

This gives us an unexpected linguistic alignment:

modalisation → probability → possibility

modulation → readiness → potential

The two concepts therefore approach the future from different directions.

Probability asks about the likelihood of an occurrence.

Readiness asks about the capacity or inclination of a participant with respect to an occurrence.

And that seems remarkably close to the distinction we have been developing.

We have been treating possibility not as an inventory of things that might happen, but as something generated by relations.

A relational configuration establishes differences.

Differences establish constraints.

Constraints distinguish among possible futures.

Possibility is therefore not something hidden behind the present, waiting to emerge.

It is what the present leaves open.

Potential seems different.

Potential concerns the position of a participant within that field of possibility. It concerns what that participant is able or inclined to take up, given the relations in which it participates.

The open door affords passage.

But the possibility of passage does not tell us whether a particular participant can pass through it.

A wheelchair user encountering stairs and a person encountering a ramp may occupy very different fields of potential, even though both are situated in the same building.

The possibility belongs to the organisation of the situation.

The potential belongs to the participant's relation to that organisation.

This also means that possibility and potential can come apart.

There can be a possibility without a participant having the potential to actualise it.

And there can be potential without the relevant possibility being available.

A person may be able to swim, but there need not be water in which to swim.

A language may make a distinction possible, but a particular speaker may not yet have the resources to use it.

An organism may possess a capacity that its environment never affords an opportunity to exercise.

Potential, then, does not create possibility.

Nor does possibility guarantee potential.

Something else is required.

A relation between them.

Perhaps this is why the distinction matters for our account of becoming.

We have said:

relation → difference → constraint → possibility → becoming → new relation

Potential does not simply need to be inserted into this sequence as another step.

Rather, it appears at the point where a possibility becomes relevant to a participant.

Possibility tells us:

What can happen here?

Potential tells us:

What can this participant do or become here?

And becoming begins when a possibility is taken up and actualised.

This suggests a preliminary formulation:

Possibility concerns the openness of becoming.

Potential concerns the readiness or ability to participate in becoming.

The distinction is small.

But perhaps it is not trivial.

For if possibility belongs to the relational field, while potential belongs to the participant's situated relation to that field, then potential cannot simply be understood as a hidden property waiting inside a thing.

It must itself be relational.

And that gives us a rather different way of thinking about what something has the potential to become.

Perhaps the question is not simply:

What potential does this thing possess?

Perhaps the better question is:

What does this participant stand ready or able to become, given the possibilities its relations make available?

That takes us one step closer to becoming itself.

For possibility may tell us what the world leaves open.

Potential may tell us what a participant can take up.

But what happens when the two meet?

That may be where becoming begins.