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The term “constraint” has been a critical term in the sciences (especially ecology and evolutionary biology) since the 1930’s. It has slowly emerged as one alternative to the classical ways of discussing (linear) causality. Recently, the complexity sciences, with their focus on non-linear causality, have picked up this term to great effect.
What is a Constraint? First, it is important not to think of it as an object—a straight jacket or a prison cell, for example. Rather, it is an emergent relational property of a system that moves it towards a unique, particular, limited statistical pattern of organized possibilities. Because the outcomes are creatively limited, the term “constraint” is considered appropriate. One example is the flushing of a toilet bowl: the situation both “enables” a unique collective behavior (the whirlpool phenomenon) and “constrains” the individual water molecules statistically to this pattern.
Given this, what is the problem with the terms “constraint” and “enabling constraint”?
What is most importantly missing in the term constraint and even with the term “enabling constraint” is the fundamental creativity of the disposition of the configuration. Let’s consider our flushing toilet: the water molecules involved in the flushing of the toilet are not being merely “enabled” to take on a universal, pre-established ideal form. Nor are they being “constrained” in the sense that this is imposed upon them from the outside, as if they were ever separate from some relational configuration. Not at all; they are a fundamental creative player in a fundamentally creative situation; they are creatively agential in a situation of immanent co-construction.
The concept of constraint, despite how it is defined, continues to suggest a causal and non-creative condition (e.g., act as a “lure”...). “Constraint” does not suggest creativity—rather that the water molecules are subject to an outside causal force—the constraint. It makes it seem that some “thing” is acting upon something else. But this is not the case. All the aspects are part of a configurational dynamic that is creative.
"Constraint," as a term, makes sense if you are approaching things from the perspective that creativity is both rare and a disruption to order. But neither is true—creativity is an unexceptional ubiquitous quality of reality, and it spontaneously generates order on an ongoing, continuously constructing basis via the creative enabling configurational agency of the context. It is always a question of the creative potentials of the situation that we are in and of.
When we shift our sensibility to focus on reality from a creative, dynamic, configurational, emergent, and inherently relational perspective where creative agency is always only of and in the configuration, then “constraint” seems like a less than useful holdover from another sensibility and world.
