We often speak of possibility as though it were a place.
Some things are possible.
Others are impossible.
And somewhere between them, perhaps, lies an enormous warehouse containing everything that could ever happen.
Our task, then, would simply be to discover what is already there.
But perhaps possibility does not work that way.
A possibility is not necessarily something waiting in advance to be selected.
Sometimes a possibility comes into existence with the conditions that make it possible.
Consider a new distinction.
Before it becomes available, certain relations cannot be recognised in the way that distinction permits. Once the distinction emerges, new relations become possible. Those relations can support further distinctions, which open further possibilities.
Nothing has been taken out of a warehouse.
A new space of becoming has opened.
This matters because it changes how we think about novelty.
If every possibility already existed in some completed space of alternatives, then nothing genuinely new could ever become possible. There would only be the discovery of what was already waiting.
But the world we encounter does not seem to require such a picture.
An organism can enter into a relation that did not previously exist.
A new form of organisation can emerge.
A new conceptual distinction can make a previously unavailable question possible.
A new relation can create possibilities for further relations.
The possibility belongs, in part, to the structure that has emerged.
This does not mean that anything can become possible.
The world still pushes back.
A possibility must be supported by conditions capable of sustaining it. A seed can become a tree because of the organisation of the organism and its environment. A scientific concept can become productive because it enters into relations with observations, instruments, practices and other concepts.
Possibility is therefore neither arbitrary nor predetermined.
It is relational.
Something becomes possible because a new configuration of relations makes it possible.
This also changes how we should think about the horizon.
The horizon does not separate a region of known possibilities from a region containing unknown ones.
It separates what our present construal can make possible from what might become possible through a different organisation of distinctions and relations.
Beyond the horizon, then, there need not be a warehouse of hidden alternatives.
There may instead be possibilities that do not yet exist as possibilities for this world of construal.
And that is perhaps the more interesting form of novelty.
The future need not be waiting for us.
It may be waiting for the relations that will make it possible.
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