Enacting chance and the space of possibilities

Abstract

The phrase enacting chance denotes the generation of possibilities, that is, to make something possible. —Lambros Malafouris, this issue. Possibilities studies is concerned with understanding what it means to have a sense of the multiple and open-ended nature of our presents, futures, and pasts (Glăveanu, 2023)— what Baumeister calls the matrix of maybes (Baumeister & Alquist, 2023). From the perspective of chance and serendipity scholars, this uncertainty comes from the dynamic interaction of people and things that arise naturally from living in a world in flux and reflect the dynamic nature of environmental change (Rietveld, 2022). Indeed, one of the consequences of a world in flux is that chance arises all around us and is part of our everyday. Take a commute to work in a typical Western metropolis. Chance operates on a series of mundane levels from the socio-political scale of whether last-minute talks have been successful, and so the train driver’s union has called off their industrial action, to whether you crossed paths with the chatty neighbor who would delay you. Despite bestlaid plans, arrival times are not determined. Even on the micro-level, walking involves the negotiation of random variations in people flow around the walker and the pavement surface, so each placement of a foot requires the navigation of uncertainty. However, these forms of chance do not violate expectations—they are within an easily visualized space of possible occurrences and constitute predictable components of the matrix of possibilities. However, when we write about enacting chance in relation to possibilities, we are interested in how people use chance events to expand the existing possibility space in unpredictable and unanticipated ways. We are not interested in expected chance variations but in the sort of chance-inspired change which elicits unexpected effects. The nature of these effects may be on a personal or historical level (cf Boden, 2004) and may have effects on longer or shorter timescales (Ross, 2022). Still, they have in common that they open up the Possible in ways that cannot be currently envisaged (Hanchett Hanson, 2023). This is why the study of engagement with chance and the complex relationship between