We often speak of possibility as though it were a place.
There is what is actual, here and now. Beyond it lies a space of possibilities: things that might happen, states that might be reached, forms that might emerge. Some of these possibilities will eventually be realised; others will remain unrealised. We imagine the future as lying somewhere inside this space, waiting to be selected.
The metaphor is convenient.
It may also be misleading.
For if possibility is a space, we immediately have a difficult question: who made the space?
Where did all these possible futures come from? What determines its boundaries? Why are some things possible while others are not?
We can try to answer by defining a set of constraints. Given the laws of physics, the available materials, the biological organisation of an organism, or the grammar of a language, certain states are possible and others are not.
But notice what has happened.
We have stopped treating possibility as a space that simply exists and started talking about relations.
A possibility is possible because of the way things are related.
A bridge makes some journeys possible and others unnecessary. A particular ecological environment makes some forms of life viable and others impossible. A language makes some distinctions readily expressible and others difficult or unavailable. A mathematical formalism opens some operations while excluding others.
The possibilities are not simply sitting somewhere in the background.
They arise from the structure of the situation.
The world does not contain possibilities
This is an important distinction.
If possibilities were objects in a space, then the world would already have to contain them in some sense. Becoming would then be a matter of moving through a pre-existing landscape, selecting one route rather than another.
But relations do not merely locate things within a landscape.
They constitute what can happen between them.
A seed does not carry within itself a complete catalogue of possible futures. Its possibilities depend upon soil, water, temperature, other organisms, and the organisation of the seed itself. Change one of those relations and the possibilities change.
The same is true at every scale.
A chemical system has possibilities determined not simply by the molecules that happen to be present, but by the relations among them and by their environment. An organism's possibilities depend upon its physiological organisation and ecological relations. A speaker's possibilities depend upon the resources of the language and the situation in which the language is being used.
And once something happens, those relations may change.
Which means that possibility can change too.
This is where the image of possibility as a fixed space begins to fail.
The space can move
Suppose a new relation comes into existence.
Perhaps two species begin interacting in a way they did not previously do. Perhaps a chemical pathway emerges. Perhaps a new grammatical construction enters a language. Perhaps a new concept allows distinctions that could not previously be made.
The new relation does not simply occupy one of the possibilities that were already available.
It may change what is possible thereafter.
This gives becoming a rather different structure from the familiar picture of selection from a menu:
possibilities → selection → actuality.
Instead, we get something more recursive:
relations → possibilities → actualisation → changed relations → new possibilities
The important event is therefore not merely that one possibility becomes actual.
It is that actualisation can alter the conditions from which subsequent possibilities arise.
The future is not simply a region of the present that we have not yet visited.
It is partly constituted by what the present makes possible.
And what the present makes possible can itself be transformed by what happens.
Possibility is relational
This does not mean that anything can become anything.
Quite the contrary.
Relations generate possibilities precisely because they also generate constraints.
A particular arrangement of relations closes some paths while opening others. Constraint is therefore not the enemy of possibility. It is one of the conditions under which possibility becomes differentiated.
A completely unconstrained world would not necessarily be a world overflowing with possibilities. It might be a world in which nothing had enough structure to make one possibility distinguishable from another.
Possibility requires difference.
And difference requires relations.
This is why an affordance is so instructive. A chair affords sitting, but sitting is not an intrinsic property of the chair considered in isolation. The possibility arises from a relation among the chair, a body, an activity and a situation.
Change the participant, and the affordance may change.
Change the activity, and it may change again.
Change the environment, and something that was once possible may cease to be so.
Possibility therefore belongs neither simply to the object nor simply to the subject.
It belongs to the relation.
But there is a further question
If this is right, then we have solved one problem only by creating another.
We can now say why possibility is not a pre-existing space.
Possibilities arise from relations.
But then we must ask:
How do new relations arise?
And that question takes us somewhere more interesting.
For if new relations can arise, then the world is capable of generating not merely new actualities but new conditions of possibility.
A new form of life can alter an ecosystem.
A new technology can alter a social field.
A new grammatical construction can alter what speakers can readily say.
A new concept can alter what thinkers can readily think.
In each case, something that becomes actual changes the relations within which further becoming takes place.
The world is therefore not merely a space of possibilities.
It is a generator of possibilities.
And perhaps this is the point at which we need to rethink what we mean by evolution.
Evolution is often imagined as movement through a space of possible forms: variation produces alternatives, selection differentiates them, and some become established.
But what if the deeper process is not movement through a fixed space at all?
What if the history of becoming continually changes the field through which becoming proceeds?
Then the most interesting question is no longer:
Which possibility will be realised?
It becomes:
What makes a new possibility possible?
That is the question with which we will begin.
Because once possibility ceases to be a space, becoming acquires a rather different task.
It does not merely travel through the possible.
It helps to make the possible.
And that means that the future may be stranger than a space waiting to be explored.
It may be something the world is continually learning how to make possible.
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