When Possibility Becomes Available

In the previous post, we left the Museum of All Shells in a slightly altered condition.

We had begun with Richard Dawkins's beautiful image of a museum containing the possible forms of shells. Evolution could be imagined as a journey through this vast space, following some paths and leaving others unexplored.

But then we noticed something strange.

The museum itself could change.

A new form could alter the relations among organisms and environments. Those altered relations could make new forms possible. History, in other words, could change the architecture within which subsequent history unfolds.

But there is another question.

Even if something is possible, is it available?

The distinction sounds small.

It isn't.

Imagine a doorway.

There is a sense in which passing through the doorway is possible. The opening exists. The space beyond it exists. Nothing in the structure of the situation makes passage impossible.

But that does not mean that the doorway is available to everyone.

A person on the other side cannot walk through it without first reaching it. A creature too large to pass through it cannot use it in the same way as a smaller creature. Someone who cannot see it may never encounter it as an opening at all.

The possibility is one thing.

Its availability is another.

This gives us a useful distinction between two questions that are easily confused.

What could happen?

And:

What is available to this participant here and now?

The first concerns possibility.

The second concerns accessibility.

That difference becomes especially important once we think about participation.

A possibility belongs to a field of relations. It describes what those relations leave open.

But a participant enters the field with its own history, capacities and dispositions. What is available to that participant depends partly upon the way its potential meets the structure of the field.

And potential, in turn, is not simply ability.

A participant may be able to do something without being inclined to do it. It may be inclined to do something without being able to do it. Readiness has more than one dimension.

So we begin to see three distinct questions.

What is possible?

What is available?

What is this participant ready to take up?

Perhaps the distinctions can be put simply:

Possibility is openness.

Availability is accessibility.

Potential is readiness.

None of these can quite replace the others.

A possibility does not need to be available to every participant.

Availability does not imply that a participant has the potential to take advantage of it.

And potential does not guarantee that the relevant possibility will be available.

Something interesting happens when they come together.

A branch may be structured in such a way that perching is available to a bird. The bird may possess the ability to perch. It may even be inclined to do so.

Here we have something more than an abstract possibility.

We have an affordance.

The branch does not simply contain the property “perchability”. Nor does the bird carry “perching” around as an isolated capacity. The affordance arises from the relation between the structure of the environment and the potential of the participant.

Affordance therefore need not be treated as an additional ingredient added to possibility and potential.

It can be understood as what emerges when possibility becomes available to a participant capable and disposed to take it up.

This also explains why affordances are relational.

The same feature of an environment can afford one thing to one participant and something quite different—or nothing at all—to another.

A tree can afford climbing to a human, nesting to a bird, shelter to an insect and almost nothing relevant to a passing stone.

The possibilities of the environment have not necessarily changed.

Their availability has.

And this gives us a rather different way of thinking about the world.

The world does not simply present a fixed collection of possibilities.

It presents a changing field in which possibilities become more or less available to different participants.

History matters because relations change.

And when relations change, availability changes with them.

A new organism can transform an ecological relation and thereby make something available that was previously inaccessible.

A new tool can make an action available that was previously difficult or impossible.

A new word can make a distinction available in language.

A new concept can make a pattern available to thought.

In each case, something that was previously difficult to take up becomes accessible within a new relational configuration.

This is where the Museum of All Shells begins to acquire doors.

The museum still represents a space of possibility. But now we have to ask which galleries are accessible from where, and to whom.

And the doors themselves are not fixed.

They can move.

New passages can open.

Others can close.

A participant can change its own capacities and thereby gain access to possibilities that were previously unavailable.

The field can change and thereby make new possibilities accessible.

And participation can change the field again.

The result is not a simple movement from possibility to actuality.

It is a continual adjustment among possibility, availability and potential.

Something is possible.

It becomes available.

A participant is ready to take it up.

An affordance emerges.

Something happens.

And what happens changes the relations that determine what will subsequently be possible and available.

So perhaps the more useful sequence is:

relation → possibility → availability ↔ potential → affordance → actualisation → transformed relation

The arrows should not be read as a rigid sequence. Availability and potential continually condition one another, while actualisation feeds back into the relational field.

What matters is that the concepts remain distinct.

Possibility tells us about openness.

Potential tells us about readiness.

Availability tells us about accessibility.

Affordance tells us about their relational encounter.

And actualisation is what happens when that encounter becomes consequential.

This may also help us understand why some possibilities remain strangely absent from history.

The question is not always:

Why didn't evolution discover this?

Sometimes the better question is:

Was it ever available?

A possibility can exist within a model without being accessible within the relations of an actual world.

And when those relations change, something previously inaccessible may suddenly become available.

Nothing has been conjured from nothing.

The world has changed its configuration.

A door has appeared.

Perhaps, then, the most interesting thing about becoming is not simply that the world contains possibilities.

It is that the availability of possibilities has a history.

And if that is so, the Museum of All Shells is not merely a museum of forms.

It is a museum whose doors are continually being rearranged.

Some visitors discover that they can enter rooms they could never reach before.

Some discover that their own capacities have changed.

And occasionally, somewhere deep in the building, a wall comes down and an entirely new passage opens.

We might still call that a new possibility.

But perhaps what is really new is something slightly different:

a possibility has become available.