If possibility is what the present leaves open, then possibility is always possibility for something.
A branch affords support for a bird.
A doorway affords passage for a person.
A path affords movement through a landscape.
The possibility is not simply a property of the branch, the doorway or the path. Nor is it simply a property of the creature that encounters them.
It arises from a relation.
This is the insight contained in the idea of affordance.
An affordance is a possibility made available by an organisation of relations.
The same object can therefore afford different possibilities to different participants.
A wall may afford shelter to one creature and obstruction to another. A gap may afford passage to a mouse but not to a human. A particular sound may afford one response in one situation and something quite different in another.
Possibility is not floating free.
It is situated.
And this helps us understand something that has been easy to miss.
A world is not merely a collection of things with properties.
It is a field of affordances.
What matters about a world is not only what exists within it, but what the relations among its participants make possible.
This is true far beyond the physical.
A language affords certain distinctions and not others. A social institution affords certain actions and constrains others. A conceptual framework makes some questions visible while making other possibilities difficult even to formulate.
In each case, the possibilities arise from relations.
The world does not first contain a complete inventory of possibilities, to which organisms, societies or thinkers subsequently respond.
Rather, possibilities emerge from the way participants are situated within an organised world.
This also explains why changing a relation can transform a world without transforming all the things within it.
Move a chair across a room and the room has changed affordances.
Open a door and a passage appears.
Change a rule and an action that was previously impossible may become permissible.
Change a concept and something previously unnoticed may become thinkable.
The things may remain.
The possibilities have changed.
This gives affordance a deeper significance than a theory of perception or action.
It provides a way of understanding how relational structure becomes a field of becoming.
Relations establish differences.
Differences establish constraints.
Constraints open some futures and close others.
Affordances are those possibilities as they become available within a world of participants.
The world, then, is not simply what is there.
It is what its relations make possible.
And once possibilities are understood in this way, another question follows.
If relations can change the affordances of a world, then what happens when the relations themselves evolve?
For when possibilities change, what can become changes with them.
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