The Becoming of Human Possibility: A Life-Scale Perspective — 10 Technological Mediation

Human possibility is never abstract; it is always mediated by the material and symbolic infrastructures through which life unfolds. In the contemporary moment, digital systems, artificial intelligence, and biotechnologies do not merely extend human capacities but reshape the very conditions of becoming.

Technological mediation is not neutral. Each device, platform, or technique imposes a structuring logic, privileging some forms of relation and foreclosing others. To live online is to inhabit algorithmic curation; to engage biotechnology is to reconstrue the body as manipulable material; to work with AI is to negotiate with non-human agents of pattern and prediction.

These mediations alter the scope of actualisation. They accelerate access, open novel possibilities, and generate new identities, but they also delimit: narrowing horizons to what can be computed, stored, or optimised. Human possibility becomes entangled with technical systems whose architectures preconfigure the fields of action and perception.

To study technological mediation is therefore to study how possibility is infrastructured. It reveals that becoming is always scaffolded by artefacts and systems, and that shifts in technology recalibrate the horizons of what can be imagined, enacted, and sustained.

The Becoming of Human Possibility: A Life-Scale Perspective — 9 Reflexive Becoming

Possibility is not only lived but also reflected upon. Reflexivity names the feedback loop in which awareness of one’s own becoming alters its trajectory. To see oneself as a subject of possibility is already to shift the field of actualisation.

This reflexive moment does not provide mastery. Awareness does not secure control; it reconfigures relation. Reflection may expand horizons, opening futures previously unseen, or it may constrain, closing off avenues through doubt, fear, or overdetermination. Reflexivity is ambivalent: it both liberates and burdens.

Through reflexive becoming, the self folds back upon its own multiplicity, narrating, judging, and projecting. This recursive operation produces coherence but also destabilisation, for each act of reflection reshapes the very ground on which the self stands. The self is not merely lived; it is also interpreted, staged, and revised in real time.

The capacity for reflexivity is thus central to human becoming. It is the hinge where perception and actualisation meet, where possibility is not only enacted but also reimagined. To study reflexive becoming is to study the recursive loops through which life transforms its own conditions of unfolding.

The Becoming of Human Possibility: A Life-Scale Perspective — 8 Identity and Multiplicity

To speak of identity is to name the coherence of a life. Yet coherence is never singular. A self is not a fixed essence but a constellation of roles, voices, and perspectives held together in tension.

Multiplicity is not an accident to be resolved; it is the condition of possibility for personhood. Each relation — family, community, institution, symbolic order — inscribes a perspective. Each perspective offers a potential self, a way of being actualised within the field of life. Identity is not the elimination of this plurality but its ongoing orchestration.

At times, multiplicity sharpens into conflict: incompatible expectations, diverging commitments, contradictory desires. At other times, it becomes a resource, enabling one to shift, adapt, and inhabit new alignments. The apparent unity of identity is thus an effect of process: a provisional integration across shifting perspectives rather than a substance that precedes them.

This means that identity is inseparable from time. The self is always in transit, weaving coherence from fragments, retrospectively narrating continuity while prospectively projecting possibility. Multiplicity is not dissolved but held, balanced, sometimes precariously, sometimes fruitfully.

A human life, therefore, is not a single identity unfolding but a multiplicity in motion — a field of selves negotiating coherence through relation. To study identity is to study the multiplicity that sustains it.

The Becoming of Human Possibility: A Life-Scale Perspective — 7 Agency and Constraint

Possibility is never a matter of sheer freedom. To be human is to act within constraints: biological, social, historical, and situational. Yet those very constraints are not merely limits; they are the structures that make agency intelligible.

Agency can be thought of as the capacity to actualise among alternatives. But the alternatives are not given in advance: they emerge from the relational field in which a life is situated. A choice exists only insofar as a constellation of relations brings it into view. Thus, agency is not the exercise of will over a passive world but the navigation of a field of potentials already patterned by forces beyond the individual.

Constraint, then, does not stand opposed to agency; it is the other side of possibility. A world without limits would be one without meaning, without direction, without the tensions that allow choice to matter. Constraints shape the very space in which action can occur, delimiting but also structuring the possibilities available.

In this sense, every act is double: it affirms what is possible and acknowledges what is not. To live is to dwell in the gap between desire and determination, between aspiration and circumstance. Agency emerges not as the pure expression of freedom but as the relational art of working with constraints, bending them, sometimes breaking them, but always moving through the field they define.

The anatomy of a life, therefore, cannot be understood without this dialectic. Agency is never absolute; constraint is never total. What unfolds between them is the ongoing negotiation of possibility — the signature pattern of a life in becoming.

The Becoming of Human Possibility: A Life-Scale Perspective — 6 Secular and Scientific Horizons

Modernity reconfigures possibility by displacing religious cosmoi with secular and scientific frames. Where earlier orders grounded human becoming in divine narrative, science and rational inquiry propose universes without transcendent anchors, shifting the horizon of meaning toward explanation, prediction, and technological intervention.

These horizons open immense new fields of possibility. Medicine, engineering, and information systems enable forms of life unimaginable in earlier epochs. Yet the secular-scientific cosmos is not neutral: it privileges certain ways of construing reality—measurement, abstraction, generalisation—while marginalising or delegitimising others, especially symbolic, ritual, or spiritual construals.

The effect is double-edged. Scientific rationality expands the scope of agency while narrowing the symbolic vocabularies through which becoming can be articulated. Possibility is reconceived as innovation, progress, and control, yet often at the cost of relational or cosmogenic orientations. Thus, the secular-scientific horizon is not simply liberating; it is a restructuring of constraint and potential, reshaping the very terms on which human possibility is lived.