II. The History of Potential: III. When Possibility Emerged Through Relations

We often speak of possibilities as though they already exist, waiting to be discovered or actualised. A seed can become a tree; a word can acquire a new meaning; a system can develop capacities it did not previously exercise. In each case, we may say that the outcome was possible before it occurred.

But what does that claim mean?

Some conditions precede an outcome. A seed has biological capacities, and its environment supplies conditions for their development. Yet the tree that grows depends on relations among the seed, its surroundings and the history of their interaction. The outcome is neither independent of those conditions nor simply contained in the seed as a finished future.

Meaning-making presents a related problem. The resources of a system constrain what can be meant, but they do not determine every meaning that may emerge. A familiar expression entering an unfamiliar relation may make a new meaning possible. That possibility may not have been available within the system before the relation was established.

We should distinguish, then, between conditions that permit something to happen and a possibility that becomes available through their interaction. The former may precede the latter. To describe an outcome as possible in retrospect does not establish that it was already a possibility the system could recognise or enact.

Nor does this mean that relations create possibilities from nothing. Relations themselves have histories; the resources they bring together have their own conditions of development. What emerges depends on what already exists, but need not be reducible to any one of its parts.

Perhaps possibility is neither a stock of ready-made futures nor merely a name we give to outcomes after they occur. Perhaps it concerns what becomes possible through the changing organisation of relations—and what those relations, in turn, make possible.

If so, a further question arises: when a new possibility emerges, has the system discovered something that was already possible, or has it become a system for which something new is possible?