I like to think about an ecology of possibility as a ‘case of the social’. I once misread an article by John Pløger as stating that Foucault considered his concept of ‘dispositif’ (an apparatus of discourses, norms, technologies, objects etc. comprising some element of strategic organisational concern, e.g. ‘Transport’) as pertaining to any given ‘case of the episteme’ (at the time I interpreted episteme as something like ‘what humans currently know’). For a long while I went around entertaining the idea: a dispositif is a case of the episteme; it’s a case selected from all the things we know. It turns out that Foucault was trying to distinguish between his idea of episteme, which for him had a purely discursive constitution, and dispositif, which for him was comprised of discursive and non-discursive elements. It wasn’t that the one was a little segment of the other. In the time I was unaware of my mistake, I really came to enjoy thinking about what a ‘case of the episteme’ might be. It brought to mind a file in a noir-fiction detectives office, a file in which there would be various scraps of information – receipts, fieldnotes, photographs, reports, perhaps even scraps of fabric or other relevant small objects. All would tell us something about the ‘case’ that was under investigation. I enjoyed the idea that ‘a case of the episteme’ seemed to be applicable to virtually anything, but that with the concept ‘dispositif’ came the sense of something multifaceted, deriving its status as a knowable thing from various aspects of social activity operating within various interlapping reservoirs of social power. The concept (as I misinterpreted it) reminded us to think about the multifaceted, polyvalent, relational nature of any particular ‘case’ we sought to investigate and the webs of power in which it was enmeshed.
With ecologies of possibility, I’m hoping to bring a similar promiscuous applicability – it could relate to pretty much any ‘case of the social’ – with a similar built-in reminder about what any case of the social necessarily entails: multifaceted, polyvalent, relational phenomena in which various possibilities exist under greater or lesser degrees of constraint. I think that possibility without constraint is probably not something that can be enjoyed in anything that could be called a ‘society’, but I think that much of the constraint that people encounter in ecologies of possibility is less about making society possible and liveable, than it is about ordering society so that it works to dominate, control and oppress most people in it.
So let’s have a quick look at some ecologies of possibility. One that immediately springs to mind and which I think is a very useful one to consider is a local pub. Another could be the news department of a broadcaster like the BBC. It could be a wall near a university where Deliveroo drivers tend to congregate and talk. It could be a support group for survivors of domestic abuse. It could be the building in which their meetings take place. It could be the 1970s in Latin America. It could be NASA. It could be Weibo. It could be a tired-looking bandstand in a UK Victorian park. It could be a small-scale fishing community in South Africa. It could be an ‘education system’.
My own thinking on ecologies of possibility has in large part been determined through encountering and considering various such ecologies, and trying to understand and articulate what it was that I thought was happening to them and why. Having been born in North West UK in the mid-70s I got to witness the effect on certain ecologies of possibility that I now know are traceable to things like de-industrialisation and Thatcherism (and neoliberalism more broadly) which shaped the 80s I grew up in. Then in the 90s and beyond I shared my first decades of adulthood with the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, accelerated Globalisation, the rise of the Internet, the War on Terror, the Financial Crisis and Austerity – with the first-faint-and-then-increasingly-urgent awareness of unfolding climate catastrophe being constant through the whole lot. All of these big-picture historical events and processes had more or less detectable (and more or less devastating) effects upon the ecologies of possibility I was enmeshed in. They altered the scope of possibility within them, including, for some, the possibility of their continued existence.
I’ve brought this way of seeing things into what I now know, as a budding social scientist, is my ‘approach’ to understanding the social world: starting with my immediate surroundings and thinking about the wider determinants of what’s taking place there. In trying to grasp these wider determinants, it becomes clear that any immediate ecology of possibility is nested within – and more or less contributing to – various others, ultimately extending out and back through space and history, far beyond what’s immediately witnessable. The micro, the parochial, the local, the situational are always moving with, channelling and contributing something to ‘the times’ they occur in, and ‘the times’ and the forces that shape them are present in, and more or less readable in, the content of quotidian interactions and encounters.
Of course, ‘the times’ doesn’t exist as something describable from a some intellectual/cultural mountaintop from which all occurrences can be confidently read. ‘The times’ might be something more like people’s positionality and agency – and their sense of these – relative to the ongoing workings of various interlapping systems of power, their material bases, and the various culturally-shaped conversations playing out within and about them. The times as such are sensed, understood, misread, ignored, challenged or conformed-to in the ways people go about their various routines. The times, however consciously engaged-with, are consequential for what people do or don’t do. The times are what we have to live in; they determine what’s possible for us.
This doesn’t mean that people, as they go about their everyday business, are effectively puppets yanked about on strings emanating from place and past. Far from it: people have agency, but the risks, costs and barriers associated with enacting such agency are subject to enormous variation, depending on the way space and history are materially and culturally constituted in any particular location and moment.
One aspect of this agency is the ability to alter the structures that determine the character of these interplays of power and culture. This might include the ability to change a council, a mayor or a government through voting in an election, it could be via the ripples through capitalism that emanate from a choice made as a consumer; it might involve the ability to engage in social activism at various scales, with greater or lesser numbers of comrades, or it might involve trying to alter the cultural conversations regarding these structures through writing a novel, through owning a media empire, through being a social media influencer or through academic writing. A key aspect of these sorts of agency is the sense people have of how efficacious and worthwhile they are – how likely they seem to be able to produce results that matter to them and bring improvements to the people and things they care about. This will again be significantly determined by people’s biographical shaping in the space and history they’ve passed through and the ways bodies and minds are given meaning in that matrix of time, place, culture and power.
At the level of a society (which is of course its own ecology of possibility, and which like most of them has blurry, overlapping boundaries with, and is interdependently connected to, others) certain conditions exist for pretty much everyone within its (blurry) boundaries, and certain conditions apply for some and not to others. Those that do apply for most people will apply with a varying intensity. For example, a law may, on paper, apply to everyone currently within the (less-blurry) boundaries of a specific country. But the likelihood that breaking that law will be punished or will have serious consequences for the person who broke it will vary depending on various factors including wealth, class, occupation, gender, racialisation, sexuality, etc. If there are serious consequences, then the severity of these will of course vary depending on these same factors.
Also, there will be certain expectations about behaviour which apply to pretty much everyone and will be shared by pretty much everyone in that society. For example, pretty much everyone will know what sort of things can be generally expected to take place on a public street, and will have some sense of what people’s reactions would be if they did something that obviously clashed with those expectations. They may care more or less about those reactions, but they will still have a sense of what they would be. There will also be cultural conversations that most people will be aware of, which some will feel it’s important to be aware of and some will be more indifferent to. Some sense of celebrity culture, current affairs, political discourse, fashion, sport, etc. that is felt to be ‘mainstream’ will be part of people’s social understanding. They may relate this to less-well-known pockets of cultural understanding to which they have affinities or involvement, and their engagement with these might be pursued in a happy dialogue with their sense of what is mainstream. For some it could come to the point where they shun aspects of mainstream culture altogether. Nevertheless, even someone who vigilantly isolates themselves from what’s normal, usual, and prevalent in culture, will still struggle to lose all sense of what it is that they are isolating themselves from.
So when considering agency, society and ecologies of possibility, this ‘mainstream’ of normality, usualness – of what’s prevalent and expectable – seems like it will probably be particularly consequential. A change in this mainstream would mean something qualitatively different, a difference which more or less everyone had some sense of and disposition regarding, had occurred. One aspect of this mainstream that I’m particularly concerned about and which I’m interested in ideas about ways of changing, is the way that the material conditions underlying it – the things people have to do to survive, to eat, have shelter, be healthy and live with basic dignity and the deeply problematic ways in which these things are organised – often become viewed as effectively natural and inevitable. There are obvious pragmatic reasons for people to be in a broad concurrence with the ‘mainstream’ view about what’s right and wrong about how economies work, how resources are distributed, what bosses are like, what success means, what failure means, what the consequences for not paying rent, not paying off debts, ought to be, etc. Being against the grain on these things can cause a certain social and psychic friction, which can add unnecessary drag on the necessary effort it takes to make life anything like comfortable.
One prevalent way in which people seem to resolve some of the difficulties of living in a society in which great material inequality accompanies a very limited set of possibilities for how to achieve a comfortable life, is to absorb these facts as a kind of discipline. I mean discipline in the way that parents ‘discipline’ their children and I think society does pretty much the same thing to us. As soon as we first gain an inkling that there are other powers in the world than our parents and that our parents act in specific ways because of these other powers – the work they have to go to, for example, or the laws and conventions they adhere to when conducting daily social life – as soon as we sense this, we begin to act in response to our understanding of this broader social disciplinary force. And like kids aping their parents by telling off a sibling or a classmate for doing something out of order, we can tend to want to see the discipline that we are subject to enforced upon others. This is visible in the viciousness with which those identified as undisciplinedly-different can be persecuted at school or on the street; it can be seen in the eruptions of resentment and rage that occur in traffic; it roils in the gut of people witnessing ‘antisocial behaviour’; it patrols the edges of any ‘clique’ or ‘scene’; and it presides vigilantly over the sensed centres of mainstream power and good sense, over the sensed anti-centres of these and over various orbiting nodes of allied, rival or unaligned alternatives.
This kind of discipline and the urge to reproduce it might be said to be a signature of a restrictive ecology of possibility. Whether the discipline involved is excessive, justifiable, malicious, constructive or masochistic, it’s present because there are sensed limits on what’s possible in this ecology and there are sensed proper repertoires of disciplined response to these limitations. And ‘the times’ and the mainstream as ecologies of possibility with their own sensed limitations, come with their own associated disciplines. People are admonished for not acting, looking, speaking, sounding in accordance with ‘the times’ and those who are in some way against the grain with what’s felt to be mainstream will experience varying degrees of social friction and opprobrium as a consequence.
So everyday life in a society plays out in sets of ecologies of possibility that are more or less conditioned by ‘the times’, by what’s mainstream within them, and the disciplined and disciplining responses people have to the restrictions that come with these things – including the scope of their sensed and actual agency. Underlying all this are the material conditions of living, which ‘the times’ arise from and which the mainstream helps to naturalise.
By using these concepts as tools for investigating any specific ‘case of the social’, I think it should be fairly easy to keep to the foreground the relationship any such case has to the broad set of social determinants it is situated within, without losing sight of its internal logics and meanings. I’ll aim to scatter various examples of how this might be done across this site over time. But if you want to dive right in, I’ve made a first stab at such an analysis here.
Ecologies of Possibility 
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