Stabs at a definition

I’ve had a couple of goes of constructing a formal definition of ecologies of possibility, but as yet I think it’s a little early to offer something really nailed-down. It’s an ongoing process and I’ll check in here to refine, polish, deconstruct and reconstruct definitions as they occur to me.

Stab #1

An ecology of possibility is a set of conditions – political-economic, material, social, and imaginative – within which certain thoughts, feelings, behaviours, actions and social formations are more or less possible and from which certain futures might be (or might have been) more or less likely to arise. This simultaneous consideration of the factual and the counterfactual is not a melancholic or nostalgic wishing-away of realities, but an acknowledgement that reality, as undetermined but with significant structure-borne likeliness-es (political-economic, material, social, and imaginative), is also comprised of that which may yet, or may not yet happen.

Stab #2 (also features on the welcome page of this blog)

Ecologies of possibility refers to the ways history and space  combine in given locations and moments to condition what’s likely or unlikely to take place there. It’s also a means of thinking about how these locations and moments are layered, interwoven and nested; how they interact, irritate or resonate with each other. These locations and moments range from micro to macro-levels of the social. The phrase is intended to emphasise and hold in attention the dimension of possibility in the social, and to encourage tracing relationships between what’s possible at the micro scale to what’s possible at the macro scale. Hopefully this will aid the process of identifying what could and should be changed at these different scales in order to produce better ecologies of possibility.

This one feels more precise, but I miss the bit about counterfactuals and that which may yet or may not yet happen. These really are things I feel that should be in there, but I don’t want the concept to get too unwieldly and risk bits of it breaking off and becoming autonomous…