If possibility is not a pre-existing space, then becoming cannot simply be movement through that space.
Something rather more interesting can happen.
The possibilities themselves can change.
At first this may seem obvious. The future changes as time passes. Things happen, circumstances alter, and consequently different things become possible.
But that formulation conceals the question we are interested in.
What exactly does it mean for a possibility to change?
It cannot simply mean that one possibility disappears and another takes its place. That would still leave us with a fixed space containing a catalogue of alternatives.
Something deeper is happening.
The relations that generate possibility are changing.
A new possibility is not merely a new actuality
Imagine a path through a forest.
One route is possible because there is an opening between the trees. If someone clears another path, a new journey becomes possible. The new possibility is not merely another journey waiting to be taken. The landscape itself has been altered.
And the alteration matters for what happens next.
Other paths may now become accessible. Different people may use the clearing. Animals may follow the new route. Further paths may be created.
The actualisation of one possibility has changed the relations from which subsequent possibilities arise.
This is why becoming is not simply a succession of states.
A state becomes part of the conditions for what can happen next.
The world acquires a history.
History is not merely what happened
We often think of history as a record of actual events.
But history has another significance.
What has happened changes the conditions under which further events can happen.
A species enters an ecosystem and alters the relations among other species. A new technology changes what people can do with one another. A new word enters a language and makes a distinction easier to express. A scientific concept changes what counts as an intelligible question.
In each case, something actual changes the field of possibility.
History is therefore not merely a sequence of actualities.
It is the accumulation of transformations in the conditions of becoming.
This is why the past matters to the future without the future having to be understood as something already waiting in the past.
The past changes what the present can make possible.
Consider language
Language provides an especially revealing example because we can watch possibilities being generated in real time.
A new expression may initially be awkward or even unintelligible. Someone uses it in a particular context. Others understand it. They use it again. Eventually it becomes familiar.
Nothing supernatural has happened.
But something important has changed.
A possibility of expression that was previously marginal has become more readily available. Once conventionalised, it can participate in further constructions. Other distinctions become easier to make. New expressions become possible.
The language has not merely acquired another item.
Its potential has changed.
This is close to Halliday's observation that instances alter the probabilities of the potential from which further instances arise. An instance is not simply an event that disappears into the past. Its occurrence changes the probabilistic organisation of what can subsequently be instantiated.
That gives us a particularly useful formulation:
Actualisation does not merely realise potential. It can transform potential.
And if potential is understood as the organised readiness of a system for further actualisation, then transforming potential changes the possibilities available to its participants.
The history of a language is therefore not simply a history of expressions.
It is a history of changing possibilities of expression.
Evolution does something similar
This also gives us a different way of looking at biological evolution.
It is tempting to imagine evolution as exploration of a pre-existing possibility space. Variations arise, selection occurs, and some forms become established.
But the establishment of a new form can itself transform the field.
A new organism changes its environment.
It may become food for another organism, competitor for an existing resource, host for a parasite, pollinator for a plant, or participant in a new symbiotic relation.
The new organism therefore does not simply occupy a previously available position.
It changes the relations among the participants.
And those altered relations change what can subsequently evolve.
The evolutionary landscape is not merely explored.
It is continually transformed by the explorers.
This is why evolution cannot always be adequately described as movement through a fixed space of possibilities.
The movement can change the space.
Constraint can generate possibility
There is a further consequence.
If relations constitute possibility, and relations also impose constraints, then increasing constraint does not necessarily reduce possibility in any simple sense.
Sometimes a new constraint creates new possibilities.
A rule in a game limits what players may do. But without the rule there may be no game to play.
A grammatical constraint limits the forms available to a speaker, but those constraints also make complex patterns of expression possible.
A musical scale restricts the available pitches, while simultaneously creating a field in which melody, harmony and expectation can emerge.
Constraint does not merely close doors.
It can make doors recognisable.
This is why possibility should not be equated with freedom from constraint.
A world with no structure would not necessarily contain more meaningful possibilities. It might contain fewer differentiated possibilities because nothing would provide the relations through which one possibility could be distinguished from another.
Possibility is generated through structured difference.
And sometimes the relation is the innovation
This leads to an even more interesting possibility.
Perhaps what changes the field is not always a new thing.
Sometimes it is a new relation among existing things.
The ingredients may already be present. What changes is how they participate in one another.
A chemical system acquires a new reaction pathway.
Two organisms enter into a novel ecological relation.
A word acquires a new use.
Two concepts are placed into a new relation and suddenly a question becomes thinkable that neither concept could generate on its own.
Nothing necessarily had to be added to the inventory.
The configuration changed.
And with the configuration, the possibilities changed.
This is why a relational ontology can be more revealing than an ontology of things.
If we begin with things, we naturally ask:
What new thing appeared?
If we begin with relations, we can ask the more interesting question:
What changed in the field of participation?
Sometimes the answer is: a new thing.
Sometimes it is: a new relation.
And sometimes the distinction itself becomes difficult to maintain.
The future is therefore not merely waiting
We can now see why the familiar image of the future as a region of possibility is inadequate.
The future is not simply a set of already constituted alternatives from which actuality will eventually select.
What happens now can alter the relations that constitute what will be possible later.
So the future is partly historically generated.
Not determined.
Not predicted.
Generated.
This distinction matters.
To say that the future is generated does not mean that it is inevitable. It means that the conditions under which future possibilities arise are continually transformed by what has already become actual.
There remains openness.
But it is an openness with a history.
Possibility has a memory
Perhaps, then, possibility has something like a memory.
Not memory in the psychological sense.
Rather, the present carries traces of previous actualisations in the form of altered relations, altered constraints, altered capacities and altered probabilities.
What has happened does not merely belong to the past.
It has become part of the structure of what can happen next.
This gives us the recursive pattern we encountered in the first post:
relation → possibility → actualisation → transformed relation → new possibility
The crucial point is now visible.
The arrow does not simply run from possibility to actuality.
It loops back.
Actuality returns to the relational field from which possibility emerged and changes it.
Becoming therefore does not merely fill the world with more actual things.
It changes the conditions under which the world can become something else.
And this raises a question that is more difficult still.
If actualisation can transform possibility, then perhaps the history of becoming is not simply a history of what happened.
It is a history of what became possible because something happened.
That is a rather different conception of history.
And it may be the key to understanding how genuinely new forms arise.
For if a new possibility can emerge from transformed relations, then there are moments when the future is not merely one of the things the present could already have become.
Something can happen that changes what becoming itself can mean.
That is where we shall go next.
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