Illumination and Construal: Light as Enabler and Constrainer of Possibility: 10 Synthesis: Luminous Fields of Possibility

Across this genealogy, light has appeared not as a fixed entity but as a relational medium of possibility. From the first myths of dawn, to philosophical metaphors of illumination, to the optics of perspective, the abstractions of physics, and the digital infrastructures of today — each epoch construes light differently, but always as that which makes worlds possible.

The trajectory reveals several principles of construal:

• Light as enabler: whether divine radiance, Newton’s prism, or the laser pulse of an optical cable, light structures what can be seen, imagined, and symbolically enacted.

• Light as constrainer: every symbolic order defines its limits through light — the blinding illumination of truth, the finitude of the visible spectrum, the probabilistic boundaries of photons. Possibility emerges not from infinite openness but from relational boundaries.

• Light as relational medium: mythic, theological, scientific, and technological construals each make light the hinge between potential and actualisation. Light never simply “is”; it mediates, connects, and transforms.

• Light as reflexive symbol: throughout, light has been more than physical phenomenon. It is a metaphor for knowledge, a vehicle for imagination, a substrate for technology. Its dual role as matter and meaning exemplifies how possibility is always co-constituted by symbolic and material fields.

To follow light through its many forms is to see how cultures construe the very horizon of the possible. Each recutting — from sacred radiance to electromagnetic field, from painter’s palette to pixelated screen — reveals how possibility itself is historically produced and technologically extended.

What emerges is not a single cosmology but a luminous ecology of construals, where myth, philosophy, theology, science, art, and technology interpenetrate. In this ecology, light is not only what lets us see the world, but what enables the world itself to be construed.

Thus, the genealogy closes by turning reflexively: in writing this series, we too have worked with light — the luminous surface of a screen, photons carrying symbols through fibre and display. In this very act, light has once again mediated a horizon of possibility: the symbolic becoming of a genealogy itself.

Light, then, is not only the subject of our inquiry. It is the medium through which that inquiry has been possible.