What an Affordance Adds

We have recently been trying to disentangle three things that are easily run together.

A world can leave something possible.

A situation can make that possibility available.

And a participant can be ready to take it up.

We have called the first possibility, the second availability, and the third potential.

The distinctions seem clear enough.

But then there is affordance.

And now we have to ask an awkward question.

Does affordance actually add anything?

Perhaps it is merely a fancy name for the relation between availability and potential.

Or perhaps something more happens when a possibility becomes available to a participant that is ready to take it up.

Consider the familiar example of a chair.

The chair makes sitting available to a human-sized participant.

The participant has the ability to sit.

Perhaps the participant is also inclined to sit.

We could therefore say that sitting is possible, available and within the participant's potential.

What, then, is left for affordance to do?

One answer would be: nothing.

Affordance could simply be the name we give to the relation between availability and potential.

There is something attractive about this. It keeps the conceptual furniture to a minimum.

But I think something is missing.

The missing element is directedness.

The chair is not merely available in the abstract. Its structure makes a particular kind of participation possible.

It offers itself, so to speak, in a particular way.

The participant does not merely encounter a physical object and then independently decide what to do with it. The structure of the chair and the potential of the participant come together in a situation in which sitting becomes a way of participating.

That is more than accessibility.

Availability tells us that something can be taken up.

Potential tells us that the participant is ready to take it up.

Affordance tells us what the participant can do with what is available.

This may sound like a very small difference.

It is not.

Imagine that a chair is available to someone who can sit but who is carrying a large box.

The possibility remains.

The chair remains physically accessible.

The participant still possesses the general ability to sit.

But the particular situation may not afford sitting in the same way.

The relevant relation has changed.

Affordance therefore seems to concern not merely whether a possibility is accessible, but the mode of participation that the configuration invites or supports.

This gives us a useful refinement.

Availability is accessibility.

Potential is readiness.

Affordance is organised participation.

The word “organised” matters.

An affordance is not simply the meeting point of two inventories: possibilities on one side and capacities on the other.

It is a relation structured so that one kind of participation becomes possible as a way of acting within the situation.

This is why affordances can be discovered.

A child encountering a staircase does not need to possess an explicit concept of “staircase” before discovering that it can be climbed.

The staircase does not merely contain the possibility of climbing.

Its structure participates in making climbing available as a mode of engagement for a participant with the relevant potential.

And the participant's engagement can change the relation again.

The child climbs.

The staircase is now part of the child's history.

The child's balance, confidence and bodily capacities may change.

The next staircase is encountered differently.

What was once difficult may become easy.

What was once unavailable may become available.

Affordance is therefore dynamic.

It belongs neither simply to the object nor simply to the participant.

It belongs to a relation in which both are changed by participation.

This helps explain why affordance is particularly useful for thinking about development and evolution.

A new structure can make a new mode of participation available.

But once participants begin using that possibility, their own potential can change.

And their activity can alter the environment.

So we have a feedback loop:

field → availability → potential → affordance → participation → transformed participant and field

The affordance is not the final step before action.

It is the point at which the relational configuration becomes actionally significant.

This also gives us a way to distinguish affordance from mere opportunity.

An opportunity can be described from the outside.

An affordance is something that exists for a participant.

The difference becomes obvious when we consider an environment containing possibilities that are available to one organism but not another.

A branch affords perching to a bird.

It does not therefore afford perching to a stone.

A gap may afford passage to an insect but not to an elephant.

A sound may afford communication to one species and merely stimulation to another.

The physical situation has not necessarily changed.

The relation has.

And yet there is still something more.

The participant itself need not remain unchanged.

An organism can acquire a new capacity and thereby encounter an old environment differently.

A tool can alter the affordances of an environment without changing the environment in any simple physical sense.

A language can make distinctions available that change what speakers can do with one another.

A concept can make a previously unnoticed relation available to thought.

In each case, affordances are not merely waiting in the world.

They emerge from a history of participation.

This suggests that we should resist two tempting mistakes.

The first is to make affordances properties of objects.

The chair does not simply have the affordance of sitting.

The second is to make affordances subjective projections.

The participant does not simply invent sitting.

The affordance lies in the relation between the structure of the situation and the participant's potential.

But perhaps even this is not quite enough.

For the relation is not static.

When the affordance is taken up, something happens.

And what happens can transform the very relation that constituted the affordance.

This brings us back to our earlier question about becoming.

A participant does not merely move through a world of pre-existing affordances.

Participation can generate new affordances.

A tool can be used in an unexpected way.

A new musical technique can make new musical relations possible.

A new word can make a new kind of linguistic action available.

A new scientific concept can make a previously invisible pattern available to investigation.

The history of participation therefore becomes part of the history of affordance.

And now the distinction between possibility, availability, potential and affordance begins to look less like a taxonomy and more like a process.

Possibility is what the field leaves open.

Availability is what the field makes accessible.

Potential is what the participant is ready to take up.

Affordance is the structured relation in which that readiness can engage what is accessible.

Participation is what happens when the affordance is taken up.

And becoming is what follows when participation changes the relations from which further possibilities arise.

Perhaps, then, affordance does add something.

But it does not add another object to our conceptual museum.

It adds a verb.

It tells us that the relation between possibility and potential is not merely something that exists.

It is something that can happen.

A possibility becomes available.

A participant becomes ready.

The two enter into a relation.

Something can then be done.

And in doing it, the participant and the world may both become different.

That may be what an affordance really adds.

Not another thing.

A way for possibility and potential to become consequential to one another.

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.

The Museum That Changes

There is a beautiful image in Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable.

Imagine a museum containing every possible shell.

Not every shell that has ever existed. Not merely every shell that evolution might one day produce. Every form of shell that can be generated within the dimensions of variation we have chosen to describe.

The museum extends in all directions. Each dimension corresponds to some feature of form: curvature, aperture, coiling, thickness, ornamentation. Walk in one direction and the shells become longer; in another, more tightly coiled; somewhere else, the aperture changes shape. There are galleries upon galleries of forms.

And most of them are empty.

Dawkins’s point is not simply that nature has produced many extraordinary forms. It is that the forms we actually encounter occupy only a tiny region of a much larger space of conceivable forms.

Evolution, in this picture, is a journey through the museum.

It does not visit every gallery. It follows particular paths, constrained by developmental possibilities, inherited structures, environmental conditions and the contingencies of history. The shells we find are not scattered randomly throughout the museum. They form trajectories.

It is a wonderful image.

It also connects to two even more wonderful images.

Borges imagined a Library containing every possible book that could be constructed from a finite alphabet. Dennett, extending the idea into biology, imagined a Library of Mendel containing the possible genomes. Dawkins gives the abstraction a visible form: instead of all possible books or genomes, we can walk among all possible shells.

There is something intoxicating about such a place.

For a moment, possibility seems almost tangible.

One can imagine wandering through the galleries and seeing forms that no organism has ever inhabited, alongside forms that have appeared repeatedly in the history of life. Evolution becomes a kind of exploration: a movement through a pre-existing abundance of possibilities.

And yet there is a small difficulty.

It is not really a difficulty with the museum.

It is a difficulty with the walls.

For what determines the shape of the museum?

We have specified dimensions of variation. We have specified what counts as a shell. We have specified the rules by which one form can differ from another. Given those specifications, we can construct a space of possible forms.

That is perfectly legitimate.

Indeed, it is extraordinarily useful.

But perhaps we have quietly moved from saying:

Here is a space of possibilities generated by these rules

to imagining:

Here is the space of everything that could possibly exist.

Those are not quite the same thing.

A space of possibilities is always a space relative to something.

The Museum of All Shells is generated by a particular way of describing shells. The Library of Mendel is generated by a particular conception of genomes and their possible combinations. Borges’s library depends upon its alphabet, its format and its rules of combination.

Change the rules, and the museum changes.

This becomes more interesting when we return to evolution.

Perhaps evolution is not simply a matter of organisms wandering through a museum whose architecture was already there.

Perhaps, occasionally, something happens that changes the relations from which the museum itself is constructed.

A new developmental pathway can alter what forms are accessible. A new organism can transform an ecological relation. A new ecological relation can make other forms viable. A change in one participant can alter the conditions under which another participant can exist.

The history of becoming can therefore change the conditions of further becoming.

And now the museum begins to look rather different.

Instead of one enormous building containing every possible form, perhaps there is a succession of museums.

A possibility becomes actual.

The actualisation changes the relations among things.

Those changed relations make some possibilities more available and others less so.

And so a new museum begins to take shape.

Museum₁ → becoming → transformed relations → Museum₂ → becoming → transformed relations → Museum₃

The point is not that the old museum disappears. Much of its architecture may remain. Existing possibilities can persist. Old forms can continue to recur. But the structure of what can happen next is no longer exactly what it was.

The museum has acquired a history.

This also changes how we should think about the empty galleries.

An empty gallery need not represent something that nature has simply failed to discover.

Perhaps the form is unavailable under the relations that currently obtain.

Perhaps another relation would make it accessible.

And perhaps some possibilities that once existed can disappear when the relations that sustained them disappear.

Possibility, then, is not merely a matter of how many forms can be imagined.

It is also a matter of what the world currently makes possible.

That distinction is subtle, because a model can still be enormously valuable. We can still draw the museum. We can still map its dimensions. We can still ask why evolution has occupied one region rather than another.

Indeed, those questions become more interesting once we recognise what the map is doing.

The map gives us a space of model-relative possibility.

History gives us something else.

History changes the relations within which possibilities become available.

And this means that becoming is not merely a movement through possibility.

Sometimes, becoming changes possibility itself.

The shell that appears on the museum floor is not simply a destination reached by a wandering evolutionary process. Its appearance may alter the relations that determine where the next corridors can lead.

The traveller has become part of the architecture.

Perhaps that is why the Museum of All Shells is such a beautiful image after all.

We need not abandon it.

We only need to imagine that, somewhere behind the curator’s desk, there is a rather mysterious workman carrying a hammer.

He is not adding new shells to the collection.

He is knocking through walls.

And when we return tomorrow, there may be a corridor where yesterday there was none.

The museum does not merely contain the history.

The history changes the museum.

The Generation of Possibility: IV. The Possibility That Wasn't There

We have arrived at a peculiar question.

If actualisation can change the relations from which possibilities arise, then something rather strange can happen.

A possibility can become available that was not previously available.

But what could that mean?

Surely, if something is now possible, it must have been possible all along. The event itself existed as a possibility before it occurred. We simply did not know about it.

This is certainly true of some kinds of possibility.

But perhaps not all.

The distinction matters.

Discovery is not generation

Suppose there is a chemical reaction we have never observed.

The reaction may nevertheless have been possible under the conditions that existed before we discovered it. Our ignorance did not make it impossible.

In that case, we have discovered a possibility.

Nothing about the field of possibilities has changed.

But suppose the conditions themselves change.

A new catalyst appears. A new compound forms. A new temperature range becomes available. A new relation among existing components makes a reaction pathway possible that was not previously available under the relevant conditions.

Now something different has happened.

The possibility has not merely been discovered.

The conditions that made it possible have come into existence.

This is the distinction we need.

A possibility can be unknown without being new.

But a possibility can also be new because the relations that constitute it are new.

The new relation changes the possible

Consider two species that have never interacted.

Perhaps one species begins to consume the other.

At first this looks like a new event: one organism has acquired a new food source.

But the consequences may be much larger.

The predator now exerts a new pressure on the prey. The prey population changes. Other organisms respond. Resources are redistributed. New ecological relationships emerge.

The original interaction has transformed the field.

What was possible for the participants has changed.

And this is not because some previously existing possibility has been selected from a cosmic catalogue.

The catalogue itself was never there.

There was simply a set of relations within which certain things could happen.

Then the relations changed.

And with them, the possibilities changed.

This is emergence without magic

The phrase “new possibility” can make the process sound mysterious.

It need not be.

Nothing has appeared from nowhere.

The new possibility is generated by a new configuration of relations.

A molecule does not need to contain a future chemical reaction inside itself.

An organism does not need to contain its future ecological niche.

A language does not need to contain every future use of every word.

A conceptual system does not need to contain every distinction that might someday be made.

What is required is that the relations among the participants can change in ways that make new forms of participation possible.

The novelty lies in the configuration.

This is why a relational account of becoming can accommodate emergence without treating emergence as the appearance of something from nothing.

What is new is not necessarily a new substance.

It can be a new way in which things can matter to one another.

Language gives us the clearest example

Consider a word acquiring a new meaning.

The word itself may already exist. The sounds may already exist. The grammatical resources may already exist.

Yet a new use can transform what speakers can do with the word.

Once that use becomes established, it can enter into further relations. It can support new expressions, distinctions and arguments. Other words may acquire related meanings. A new conceptual field can emerge around it.

The new possibility was not simply hiding inside the word.

Nor did it come from nowhere.

It arose through a transformation of the relations in which the word participated.

This is conceptual evolution in miniature.

A new way of using a linguistic resource can alter the potential of the language, which can make further distinctions available, which can support further innovations.

The system generates possibilities through its own history.

Biology does the same thing

Biological evolution provides a more familiar example.

A new form does not merely appear within an ecosystem and then occupy a vacant slot.

Its existence changes the relations among organisms.

A new predator creates new possibilities for prey behaviour. A new pollinator changes the reproductive possibilities of a plant. A symbiotic relationship makes possible forms of organisation that neither participant could sustain in isolation.

And here the notion of a fixed possibility space becomes particularly awkward.

Before the relation existed, should we say that the new form of participation was possible?

In one sense, perhaps.

But in the more important relational sense, it was not yet available.

The relation that would constitute that possibility did not yet exist.

Once it does, the field has changed.

The possibility becomes real as a possibility.

This helps clarify the problem with “selection”

We can now return briefly to the evolutionary language that led us here.

Variation and selection are often described as though evolution were a process of choosing among alternatives already present in a possibility space.

But the history of evolution suggests something more complicated.

The alternatives themselves can change.

A new form changes the environment in which subsequent forms arise. A new ecological relation creates new selective pressures. A new developmental pathway opens further possibilities for variation.

Selection therefore operates within a field that is itself historically transformed.

There is no permanent menu from which evolution chooses.

There is an evolving relationship between what can occur and what has occurred.

That may be why attempts to generalise biological evolution to chemistry, geology or other systems can be both illuminating and misleading.

The illuminating part is the recognition that systems can generate variation, differentiate possibilities and preserve some outcomes rather than others.

The misleading part is the assumption that the biological mechanism itself is the fundamental pattern.

Perhaps the deeper pattern is simpler:

what becomes can change what can become.

Possibility is therefore historical

We can now give a more precise meaning to the idea that possibility has a history.

At any moment, a relational field makes some forms of becoming available and others unavailable.

What happens can transform that field.

The transformed field makes different possibilities available.

So possibility at one moment is not necessarily identical to possibility at another.

The difference is not merely epistemic.

We may know more about the later possibilities.

Rather, there may actually be more—or different—things that can happen because the relations have changed.

This is what makes history generative.

History does not simply record the passage from one actuality to another.

It records the transformation of the conditions under which actualisation can occur.

But is the new possibility really new?

We should still be careful.

There is a danger here of confusing a genuinely new possibility with a new description of an old one.

If a previously unknown species is discovered, the species was presumably possible before anyone found it.

If a new mathematical theorem is proved, we may reasonably say that the theorem was true before its proof was written.

If a new arrangement of familiar objects becomes possible merely because someone notices it, nothing ontologically new has necessarily occurred.

So the claim that possibilities can be generated should not become a licence for saying that every novelty creates a new possibility.

The stronger claim requires a change in the relations that constitute the relevant field.

The new possibility must depend upon something having become different.

That difference may be physical, biological, social, or semiotic.

But it must be a difference in the conditions of participation.

This gives us a useful distinction

We can therefore distinguish three things.

Discovery:

A possibility already available becomes known.

Actualisation:

An available possibility becomes actual.

Generation:

A transformation of relations makes a previously unavailable possibility available.

These processes can overlap.

The actualisation of one possibility may generate another. The discovery of a possibility may lead us to actualise it. The actualisation may then transform the field again.

But they are not the same process.

And once we see this, becoming becomes more interesting.

Becoming is not simply the passage from possibility to actuality.

It can be part of the production of the conditions for further possibility.

The future is therefore not waiting for us

We began this series with the image of possibility as a space.

We can now see why that image was inadequate.

If the future were simply a space of possibilities, then becoming would amount to travelling through a landscape that already existed.

But if relations generate possibilities, and actualisations transform relations, then the landscape itself changes.

The future is not simply waiting.

Nor is it completely undetermined.

It is historically generated.

What can happen next depends partly upon what has already happened, because what has already happened may have changed the relations that constitute the field.

This gives us neither a predetermined future nor an arbitrary one.

It gives us a future whose openness has a history.

And perhaps this is the deepest sense of becoming

We can now return to the simple formula that has accompanied us throughout:

relation → possibility → potential → actualisation → transformed relation → new possibility

It is not a mechanical sequence.

It is a recursive pattern.

Relations make possibilities available.

Participants take some possibilities up.

Actualisations occur.

Some actualisations transform the relations.

The transformed relations make new possibilities available.

And those possibilities provide the conditions for further becoming.

The world does not merely contain things that change.

It contains relations through which what can change can itself change.

That is why the generation of possibility matters.

It means that novelty does not require the world to create something from nothing.

Novelty can arise when existing participants enter into relations that alter what participation can mean.

A new possibility is therefore not necessarily a new object waiting to be found.

It can be a new way for something to become.

And perhaps that is the most interesting thing we have discovered.

The world does not merely become.

Through becoming, the world changes what becoming can be.

The Generation of Possibility: III. Becoming Makes a Difference

We have been following a deceptively simple idea.

Possibility is not a space waiting to be explored. It arises from relations. And when something becomes actual, it may alter those relations, thereby changing what can subsequently become possible.

But this leaves an important question.

What is it about becoming that makes a difference?

After all, things happen all the time without transforming anything of significance. A stone falls, a leaf moves, a molecule collides with another molecule. Events occur and disappear.

So we should not say simply that every actualisation changes possibility.

The more interesting claim is that some actualisations alter the conditions of subsequent becoming.

When they do, becoming becomes historical.

An actuality can become a condition

Consider a new organism entering an ecosystem.

Its appearance is an actuality. But its significance does not end with its appearance.

The organism may eat another species, provide food for another, compete for resources, alter the chemistry of its environment, or enter into a symbiotic relationship. Through these relations, its existence changes what other participants can do.

The new organism has become part of the conditions under which further events can occur.

This is more than causal influence in the ordinary sense.

Causation tells us that one event produces another.

Our question is different.

We are asking whether an actuality can reconfigure the field of possibilities within which subsequent events take place.

When it does, the consequence is not merely another event.

It is a changed world of becoming.

Halliday gives us a useful clue

There is a striking parallel here in Halliday's distinction between potential and instance.

A potential is not a hidden collection of future instances waiting somewhere behind the actual. It is a system of possibilities from which instances can arise.

But the relation is not one-way.

An instance can alter the probabilities of the potential.

That is a remarkably important idea.

It means that actualisation does not simply consume potential.

The occurrence of an instance can change the organisation of the potential from which further instances arise.

We therefore have:

potential → instance → altered potential

The system carries its history forward.

What has happened changes the probabilistic organisation of what can happen next.

This is not quite the same as our broader distinction between possibility and potential. Possibility concerns what a relational field leaves open; potential concerns the organised readiness of a participant or system to take up possibilities.

But the two can meet.

A transformed potential can alter what a participant is able to take up. And when participants actualise possibilities, they can transform the relations that constitute the field itself.

We therefore obtain a larger recursion:

relation → possibility → potential → actualisation → transformed relation → new possibility

The system does not simply proceed through this sequence.

It continually re-enters its own conditions.

This is where evolution becomes interesting

This may help explain why the evolutionary model has seemed so tempting to extend beyond biology.

Darwinian evolution contains a remarkably general pattern.

There is variation.

Some variations persist while others disappear.

The surviving forms participate in further processes of reproduction and interaction.

And the resulting population changes the conditions under which subsequent variation and selection occur.

Evolution therefore does not merely select among possibilities.

It changes the population that generates subsequent possibilities.

And the changed population changes its environment.

And the changed environment changes what can subsequently survive.

There is a recursive relationship between actuality and possibility.

But this does not necessarily mean that evolution itself is the fundamental principle.

Perhaps evolution is one particularly elaborate form of a more general relational pattern:

what becomes can change what can become.

That principle can operate without genes, without organisms and perhaps even without anything resembling biological selection.

Chemical systems provide a useful boundary case

This is why the idea of chemical selection, which has appeared in various forms in discussions of the origins of life, is so interesting.

A chemical system can contain many possible reactions. Under particular conditions, some pathways become favoured. Products can alter the environment in which subsequent reactions occur. Catalytic relations can make previously unlikely reactions easier to sustain.

The important point is not whether we should call this “evolution” in the biological sense.

The more interesting question is whether we can recognise the same underlying architecture:

a field of possibilities is differentiated; an actuality emerges; the actuality changes the relations; the altered relations change subsequent possibilities.

If so, biological evolution may not be the template from which chemistry must borrow.

Biological evolution may instead be one especially powerful realisation of a more general architecture of becoming.

That is a much more modest claim.

And perhaps a more interesting one.

Semiotic systems make the recursion unmistakable

Language makes the same structure easier to see.

Suppose a new expression appears.

At first it may be unusual. Then speakers begin using it. Others understand it. Its use becomes familiar. Eventually it may become conventional.

What has happened?

Not merely that a new string of sounds has entered the language.

The potential of the language has changed.

The expression is now more readily available to speakers. It may enter into new constructions. It may acquire grammatical functions. It may allow distinctions that were previously difficult to express.

The instance has changed the potential.

And the changed potential makes further instances possible.

This is becoming with a particularly visible memory.

The history of the language is present in the possibilities it now affords.

Becoming is therefore selective—but not necessarily selectionist

This brings us back to Hazen and Wong's proposal (here).

They identify three conditions for increasing order:

• a range of possible configurations;

• a capacity to generate new configurations;

• a means of selecting among them.

There is something important here.

A system cannot become something unless alternatives are available in some sense. Nor can anything become different unless there is some capacity for difference to emerge. And persistence requires some differentiation among the alternatives that arise.

But perhaps we don't need to turn these conditions into a new law of nature.

The word selection may be doing too much work.

Selection sounds as though a mechanism stands outside the alternatives and chooses among them.

But in many systems, what we call selection is simply what happens when relations make some possibilities more viable, persistent, accessible or reproducible than others.

There need be no selector.

The environment does not have to sit outside the organism making decisions.

The organism and its environment participate in a relation that differentiates what can continue.

Selection may therefore be a description of an outcome of relational constraint rather than an additional ontological principle.

Constraint does not merely eliminate

This is also why constraint deserves more attention.

A constraint can prevent a possibility from being actualised.

But a sufficiently structured constraint can also make other possibilities available.

A musical scale excludes most possible frequencies while making melody possible.

A grammar excludes many arrangements of words while making complex patterns of meaning available.

An ecological niche restricts the conditions under which an organism can survive while simultaneously providing a field in which particular forms of life can flourish.

Constraint therefore does not simply reduce possibility.

It differentiates possibility.

And differentiation is what allows becoming to acquire a direction.

Not the direction of an arrow through time.

A direction produced by the changing structure of the relations themselves.

The past therefore changes the future without determining it

This gives us a useful way of understanding historical dependence.

The past matters because actualisations can become conditions for subsequent possibilities.

But this does not mean that the future was contained in the past.

The fact that a new grammatical construction emerged does not determine what speakers will do with it.

The emergence of a species does not determine the future of an ecosystem.

The appearance of a chemical pathway does not determine every subsequent reaction.

What history does is alter the field of what can happen.

It changes the starting conditions for further becoming.

This is neither determinism nor randomness.

It is historically conditioned openness.

The future remains open, but it is no longer open in exactly the same way.

And this may be what we mean by evolution

Perhaps the deepest lesson is that evolution should not be defined simply as change through time, or even as variation plus selection.

Those formulations describe important biological mechanisms.

But underneath them lies something more general:

becoming changes the conditions of becoming.

Once this happens, history acquires a special kind of structure.

The present is not merely the latest point in a sequence.

It is the result of previous actualisations that have altered the relations within which new possibilities arise.

And the future is not merely what has not yet happened.

It is what can happen given the relations that have now been transformed.

This is why becoming makes a difference.

It does not merely add another actuality to the world.

Sometimes it changes the world in such a way that the next possibility could not have been exactly the same possibility before.

And here we encounter the most intriguing question of all.

If becoming can transform the conditions of possibility, then perhaps genuinely new possibilities can arise.

Not merely new instances of old possibilities.

Not merely new combinations of existing forms.

But possibilities that were not previously available in the same relational field at all.

If that is possible, then the history of the world is not simply a history of what has happened.

It is also a history of what has become possible.

And that is where our final question takes us:

What would it mean for a possibility to exist only because something else had already become?

The Generation of Possibility: II. When Possibility Changes

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.

The Generation of Possibility: I. Possibility Is Not a Space

We often speak of possibility as though it were a place.

There is what is actual, here and now. Beyond it lies a space of possibilities: things that might happen, states that might be reached, forms that might emerge. Some of these possibilities will eventually be realised; others will remain unrealised. We imagine the future as lying somewhere inside this space, waiting to be selected.

The metaphor is convenient.

It may also be misleading.

For if possibility is a space, we immediately have a difficult question: who made the space?

Where did all these possible futures come from? What determines its boundaries? Why are some things possible while others are not?

We can try to answer by defining a set of constraints. Given the laws of physics, the available materials, the biological organisation of an organism, or the grammar of a language, certain states are possible and others are not.

But notice what has happened.

We have stopped treating possibility as a space that simply exists and started talking about relations.

A possibility is possible because of the way things are related.

A bridge makes some journeys possible and others unnecessary. A particular ecological environment makes some forms of life viable and others impossible. A language makes some distinctions readily expressible and others difficult or unavailable. A mathematical formalism opens some operations while excluding others.

The possibilities are not simply sitting somewhere in the background.

They arise from the structure of the situation.

The world does not contain possibilities

This is an important distinction.

If possibilities were objects in a space, then the world would already have to contain them in some sense. Becoming would then be a matter of moving through a pre-existing landscape, selecting one route rather than another.

But relations do not merely locate things within a landscape.

They constitute what can happen between them.

A seed does not carry within itself a complete catalogue of possible futures. Its possibilities depend upon soil, water, temperature, other organisms, and the organisation of the seed itself. Change one of those relations and the possibilities change.

The same is true at every scale.

A chemical system has possibilities determined not simply by the molecules that happen to be present, but by the relations among them and by their environment. An organism's possibilities depend upon its physiological organisation and ecological relations. A speaker's possibilities depend upon the resources of the language and the situation in which the language is being used.

And once something happens, those relations may change.

Which means that possibility can change too.

This is where the image of possibility as a fixed space begins to fail.

The space can move

Suppose a new relation comes into existence.

Perhaps two species begin interacting in a way they did not previously do. Perhaps a chemical pathway emerges. Perhaps a new grammatical construction enters a language. Perhaps a new concept allows distinctions that could not previously be made.

The new relation does not simply occupy one of the possibilities that were already available.

It may change what is possible thereafter.

This gives becoming a rather different structure from the familiar picture of selection from a menu:

possibilities → selection → actuality.

Instead, we get something more recursive:

relations → possibilities → actualisation → changed relations → new possibilities

The important event is therefore not merely that one possibility becomes actual.

It is that actualisation can alter the conditions from which subsequent possibilities arise.

The future is not simply a region of the present that we have not yet visited.

It is partly constituted by what the present makes possible.

And what the present makes possible can itself be transformed by what happens.

Possibility is relational

This does not mean that anything can become anything.

Quite the contrary.

Relations generate possibilities precisely because they also generate constraints.

A particular arrangement of relations closes some paths while opening others. Constraint is therefore not the enemy of possibility. It is one of the conditions under which possibility becomes differentiated.

A completely unconstrained world would not necessarily be a world overflowing with possibilities. It might be a world in which nothing had enough structure to make one possibility distinguishable from another.

Possibility requires difference.

And difference requires relations.

This is why an affordance is so instructive. A chair affords sitting, but sitting is not an intrinsic property of the chair considered in isolation. The possibility arises from a relation among the chair, a body, an activity and a situation.

Change the participant, and the affordance may change.

Change the activity, and it may change again.

Change the environment, and something that was once possible may cease to be so.

Possibility therefore belongs neither simply to the object nor simply to the subject.

It belongs to the relation.

But there is a further question

If this is right, then we have solved one problem only by creating another.

We can now say why possibility is not a pre-existing space.

Possibilities arise from relations.

But then we must ask:

How do new relations arise?

And that question takes us somewhere more interesting.

For if new relations can arise, then the world is capable of generating not merely new actualities but new conditions of possibility.

A new form of life can alter an ecosystem.

A new technology can alter a social field.

A new grammatical construction can alter what speakers can readily say.

A new concept can alter what thinkers can readily think.

In each case, something that becomes actual changes the relations within which further becoming takes place.

The world is therefore not merely a space of possibilities.

It is a generator of possibilities.

And perhaps this is the point at which we need to rethink what we mean by evolution.

Evolution is often imagined as movement through a space of possible forms: variation produces alternatives, selection differentiates them, and some become established.

But what if the deeper process is not movement through a fixed space at all?

What if the history of becoming continually changes the field through which becoming proceeds?

Then the most interesting question is no longer:

Which possibility will be realised?

It becomes:

What makes a new possibility possible?

That is the question with which we will begin.

Because once possibility ceases to be a space, becoming acquires a rather different task.

It does not merely travel through the possible.

It helps to make the possible.

And that means that the future may be stranger than a space waiting to be explored.

It may be something the world is continually learning how to make possible.

The Potential of Possibility: III. When Potential Meets Possibility

We have separated two concepts that are easily confused.

Possibility concerns what a relational situation leaves open.

Potential concerns what a participant is ready or able to take up within that situation.

But separation is not the end of the story.

For something to become actual, the two must somehow meet.

Consider the open door once again.

The open door makes passage possible.

A person who can walk possesses the relevant potential.

But neither possibility nor potential is itself a passage.

The passage occurs when the person moves through the door.

Something has happened.

The possibility has been taken up.

The potential has been exercised.

And the relation has changed.

The person is no longer on one side of the doorway.

The doorway is now behind them.

What was previously a possibility has become an actuality, and that actuality has altered the relational situation from which further possibilities arise.

This gives us a different way of thinking about becoming.

Becoming is not simply the realisation of something that was already contained within a participant.

Nor is it simply the arrival of something that was waiting in a field of possibilities.

It occurs when a participant's potential enters into a relation with a possibility.

But even this needs a little care.

Potential does not cause possibility.

Possibility does not cause potential.

The two are mutually situated.

A field makes certain forms of participation possible.

A participant's capacities and inclinations make some of those possibilities available to that participant.

When the relations permit it, a possibility can be taken up.

And when it is taken up, the relations may change.

This is why actualisation is more than the disappearance of uncertainty.

Something new has happened to the world.

The person who walks through the doorway has changed their relation to the rooms.

The seed that grows has changed its relation to its environment.

The musician who learns a new technique changes what can be done with the instrument.

The thinker who acquires a new concept changes what distinctions can be made within a field of thought.

In each case, actualisation does not merely fill a vacant place in a pre-existing inventory of possibilities.

It transforms the relations that generated those possibilities in the first place.

This gives us a recursive picture.

Relation → difference → constraint → possibility → potential → actualisation → new relation.

But the arrow between possibility and potential should not be read as a mechanical sequence.

Potential does not sit between possibility and becoming like a component in a machine.

Rather, it describes the participant's readiness to take up something that the relational field makes possible.

And when that possibility is taken up, becoming occurs.

The result is a new relational configuration.

Which means that the process does not end with actualisation.

The new relation generates new differences.

Those differences establish new constraints.

Those constraints open some possibilities and close others.

And participants encounter the changed field with changed potentials.

The cycle begins again.

This may also explain why novelty is possible without being arbitrary.

The future is not predetermined because the present does not contain a single necessary continuation.

But neither is the future unconstrained.

The present establishes a field of possibilities.

Participants occupy different positions within that field.

Their potentials make some possibilities available to them.

What they take up changes the relations.

And those changed relations alter what can happen next.

Novelty therefore emerges neither from nowhere nor from a hidden future waiting to be revealed.

It emerges from the transformation of relations through actualisation.

This has an interesting consequence for our understanding of potential.

Potential is not simply what could happen.

That would make it indistinguishable from possibility.

Potential is what a participant is positioned to make of what could happen.

The distinction is small, but consequential.

A possibility belongs to the field.

A potential belongs to participation.

Actualisation belongs to becoming.

And becoming transforms the field.

Perhaps we can now see why the Hallidayan distinction that started us on this path was so suggestive.

Modalisation gives us probability: an assessment of how likely an occurrence is.

Modulation gives us readiness: an assessment of a participant's inclination or ability.

Our conceptual distinction has taken these linguistic resources in a different direction.

Possibility asks about the openness of the future.

Potential asks about readiness for participation in that future.

Neither tells us what will actually happen.

That requires becoming.

And becoming is not simply the movement from possible to actual.

It is the process through which actualisation transforms the relations that determine what can become possible next.

So perhaps our three concepts can now be put very simply:

Possibility is what a world leaves open.

Potential is what a participant can take up.

Becoming is what happens when the two enter into a transformative relation.

And then something rather beautiful follows.

The participant does not simply enter an already existing world of possibilities.

By taking up a possibility, the participant helps change the world of possibilities itself.

The swimmer enters the water.

The musician plays the note.

The organism responds to its environment.

The thinker makes a new distinction.

The action is not merely an event within the world.

It can become a difference to the world.

And so the circle continues:

possibility → participation → becoming → new possibility.

Perhaps, then, potential is not a reservoir of unrealised futures.

It is the readiness through which a participant can participate in the becoming of a world.

And possibility is not a collection of futures waiting to be selected.

It is the openness generated by the relations already in play.

When potential meets possibility, neither simply becomes the other.

Something happens between them.

And what happens may change what is possible next.

That, perhaps, is where becoming truly begins.

The Potential of Possibility: II. Possibility Is Not Potential

We began with a simple distinction.

Possibility concerns what a situation leaves open.

Potential concerns what a participant is ready or able to do within that situation.

It is tempting, however, to collapse the two.

After all, if something is possible, doesn't someone or something have the potential to make it happen?

Not necessarily.

A possibility can exist without being available to any particular participant.

And a participant can have a capacity without the situation providing any opportunity for its exercise.

This is easiest to see with something ordinary.

A door is open.

Passage is possible.

But whether a particular person can pass through depends upon other relations: their physical capacities, the width of the doorway, what they are carrying, where they are trying to go, whether something obstructs the path.

The possibility belongs to the arrangement.

The potential belongs to the participant's relation to the arrangement.

Change the arrangement, and the possibilities change.

Change the participant's circumstances, and their potential may change.

Neither is simply reducible to the other.

This matters because we often speak of potential as though it were a hidden substance inside things.

A seed has the potential to become a tree.

A child has the potential to become a musician.

A machine has the potential to perform a particular task.

A theory has the potential to explain something.

There is a natural picture behind such statements.

The potential is imagined as something already present, waiting to be released.

Becoming then appears as the unfolding of what was already there.

But our relational account gives us reason to be cautious.

The seed does not contain "tree" as a miniature future object.

Its potential depends upon its relations with soil, water, temperature, light, other organisms and time.

Change those relations and what the seed can become changes.

The potential was never simply inside the seed.

It belonged to the seed in a world.

This gives us a useful way of distinguishing potential from possibility.

Possibility is generated by the organisation of relations in a field.

Potential concerns the way a participant is positioned within that field.

The field may make something possible without making it possible for this participant.

And the participant may be capable of something that the field does not currently make possible.

A swimmer without water still has the capacity to swim.

But there is no swimming to be done.

The potential remains while the possibility is absent.

Conversely, a body of water may make swimming possible without every participant being capable of swimming.

The possibility remains while the relevant potential is absent.

So neither possibility nor potential is sufficient for becoming.

Something must bring them into relation.

This is perhaps why the distinction between them is more than linguistic.

It tells us something about how becoming occurs.

A possibility is not yet an achievement.

A potential is not yet an achievement either.

Both concern what has not happened.

But they do so from different positions.

Possibility looks outward towards the field:

What does this configuration leave open?

Potential looks from the participant into that field:

What can this participant take up?

The difference becomes particularly important when we think about change.

Suppose a new technology makes an action possible that was previously unavailable.

The possibility has changed.

But the potential of individual participants to make use of it may vary enormously.

Some may already possess the relevant skills.

Some may be able to acquire them.

Some may be excluded by other relations.

The emergence of a possibility therefore does not automatically produce its actualisation.

It changes the field within which potential can operate.

And the converse is equally important.

A participant may acquire a new capacity without the surrounding world changing in a way that allows that capacity to be exercised.

A new potential does not automatically create a new possibility.

It may instead alter the participant's relation to existing possibilities.

This gives us a more relational conception of potential.

Potential is not a stock of unrealised possibilities hidden inside an entity.

It is a readiness for particular forms of becoming, constituted through relations.

That last phrase matters.

For if potential is relational, then it can change without the participant itself undergoing an intrinsic transformation.

The locked door did not make the person less capable of walking.

The person remained the same.

What changed was the relation through which their capacity could be exercised.

Likewise, opening the door does not give the person a new capacity to walk.

It changes the conditions under which an existing capacity can participate.

Potential and possibility therefore form neither a hierarchy nor a simple causal sequence.

They are two perspectives on the conditions of becoming.

Possibility is what the field leaves open.

Potential is what a participant can take up within that openness.

And this also helps us see why neither concept should be confused with probability.

Something can be possible without being probable.

Something can be highly probable without being possible for a particular participant.

And something can be within a participant's potential without being likely to occur.

The distinctions are beginning to multiply.

Perhaps that is not a problem.

Perhaps it is what happens when concepts that looked interchangeable are allowed to retain their differences.

Possibility tells us about the openness of a world.

Potential tells us about the readiness of a participant.

Probability tells us about how an occurrence is assessed.

They answer different questions because they arise from different relations.

And now we can return to the question with which we began.

If possibility is what the world leaves open, and potential is what a participant is ready or able to take up, then becoming cannot be located entirely in either one.

It must occur in the relation between them.

A possibility becomes something different when a participant takes it up.

A participant becomes something different when it does.

And when that happens, the relations of the world may change as well.

Perhaps, then, potential is not what lies before becoming.

Perhaps it is what becomes visible when a participant encounters a possibility.

Which leaves us with the question for the next step:

What happens when potential meets possibility?