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?

The Potential of Possibility: I. Possibility and Potential

We have been using two words that seem, at first, to say much the same thing.

Possibility.

Potential.

Both seem to concern what might happen.

But perhaps they do not concern the same thing at all.

Consider a door.

An open door makes passage possible. A person standing before it may be able to walk through. These seem like closely related facts, and ordinarily we might describe both simply by saying that going through the door is possible.

But something important has been lost.

The door establishes a possibility.

The person has a potential.

The distinction becomes clearer if we change the situation.

Suppose the door is locked.

The person may still be perfectly capable of walking. Nothing about their physical ability has changed. Yet passage is no longer available.

The potential remains.

The possibility has disappeared.

This suggests that possibility and potential belong to different sides of a relation.

Possibility concerns what a situation leaves open.

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

And this distinction has an intriguing parallel in Halliday's account of modality.

Within the system of modality, modalisation concerns probability and usuality, while modulation concerns degrees of obligation and readiness. Readiness includes such notions as inclination and ability.

This gives us an unexpected linguistic alignment:

modalisation → probability → possibility

modulation → readiness → potential

The two concepts therefore approach the future from different directions.

Probability asks about the likelihood of an occurrence.

Readiness asks about the capacity or inclination of a participant with respect to an occurrence.

And that seems remarkably close to the distinction we have been developing.

We have been treating possibility not as an inventory of things that might happen, but as something generated by relations.

A relational configuration establishes differences.

Differences establish constraints.

Constraints distinguish among possible futures.

Possibility is therefore not something hidden behind the present, waiting to emerge.

It is what the present leaves open.

Potential seems different.

Potential concerns the position of a participant within that field of possibility. It concerns what that participant is able or inclined to take up, given the relations in which it participates.

The open door affords passage.

But the possibility of passage does not tell us whether a particular participant can pass through it.

A wheelchair user encountering stairs and a person encountering a ramp may occupy very different fields of potential, even though both are situated in the same building.

The possibility belongs to the organisation of the situation.

The potential belongs to the participant's relation to that organisation.

This also means that possibility and potential can come apart.

There can be a possibility without a participant having the potential to actualise it.

And there can be potential without the relevant possibility being available.

A person may be able to swim, but there need not be water in which to swim.

A language may make a distinction possible, but a particular speaker may not yet have the resources to use it.

An organism may possess a capacity that its environment never affords an opportunity to exercise.

Potential, then, does not create possibility.

Nor does possibility guarantee potential.

Something else is required.

A relation between them.

Perhaps this is why the distinction matters for our account of becoming.

We have said:

relation → difference → constraint → possibility → becoming → new relation

Potential does not simply need to be inserted into this sequence as another step.

Rather, it appears at the point where a possibility becomes relevant to a participant.

Possibility tells us:

What can happen here?

Potential tells us:

What can this participant do or become here?

And becoming begins when a possibility is taken up and actualised.

This suggests a preliminary formulation:

Possibility concerns the openness of becoming.

Potential concerns the readiness or ability to participate in becoming.

The distinction is small.

But perhaps it is not trivial.

For if possibility belongs to the relational field, while potential belongs to the participant's situated relation to that field, then potential cannot simply be understood as a hidden property waiting inside a thing.

It must itself be relational.

And that gives us a rather different way of thinking about what something has the potential to become.

Perhaps the question is not simply:

What potential does this thing possess?

Perhaps the better question is:

What does this participant stand ready or able to become, given the possibilities its relations make available?

That takes us one step closer to becoming itself.

For possibility may tell us what the world leaves open.

Potential may tell us what a participant can take up.

But what happens when the two meet?

That may be where becoming begins.