Impossible Horizons: 1 Opening the Horizon: Possibility Beyond Actualisation

Possibility is often treated as the shadow of actuality—a mere waiting room for what will eventually occur. In this series, we take the opposite stance: possibility is primary, irreducible, and endlessly dynamic. It is not “what is not yet actual”; it is a relational field in which instantiation, construal, and perspective co-define one another.

Relational Possibility

To begin, we must distinguish between three concepts too often conflated:

1. Potentiality – the latent structures or configurations a system could, in principle, instantiate.

2. Actualisation – the event of a potentiality taking shape within a given perspectival cut.

3. Construal – the perspectival lens that determines which potentials are noticed, prioritised, or rendered meaningful.

In relational terms, possibility exists not as a set of objective facts but as a field of potential perspectives. Every cut into that field—every act of construal—reshapes what can be actualised, just as every actualisation reshapes the field of remaining possibilities. Possibility and actualisation are therefore not sequential stages but co-constitutive.

Beyond the Limits of Instantiation

Consider a horizon: it is never a fixed point, never a boundary you can reach. It shifts as you move, revealing new contours, new potentials. Possibility behaves the same way. What cannot be actualised from one perspective may reveal entirely new potentialities from another. Impossible, improbable, and uninstantiated forms of meaning exist not as errors or failures, but as relationally potent provocations—signals of the rich structure of possibility itself.

The Generative Function of Impossibility

At the edge of what can be instantiated, we encounter paradoxes, contradictions, and conceptual limits. Rather than obstacles, these are productive—they are the scaffolding on which new forms of meaning emerge. A relational perspective treats “impossible” as generative, not null. By attending to the unactualised, we gain insight into the shape of possibility itself: the contours, tensions, and folds that will guide future actualisations.

The Horizon as Method

To engage with possibility is to cultivate a stance of openness and attentiveness. Each act of construal is an experiment, a cut into the relational field that reveals some potentials while shadowing others. The horizon is therefore both subject and method: the landscape in which we think, and the lens through which that thinking occurs.

In this series, we will follow these shifting horizons, exploring how potentialities are actualised, constrained, or rendered unthinkable. We will trace the subtle interplay between perspective and possibility, investigating paradoxes and “impossible worlds” that illuminate the architecture of meaning itself.

The first step is simple: look to the horizon, not as a destination, but as a generative space where possibility itself unfolds.