The Becoming of Possibility: 7 The Future as an Open Relational Horizon

What does it mean to act, to hope, or to plan when the future is not pre-given?

Most everyday thinking treats the future as a destination: a place we are heading toward, a state we will eventually reach, a set of outcomes waiting to be selected. From this perspective, agency is about choosing correctly, ethics is about making the right decisions, and politics is about steering toward preferred endpoints.

A relational ontology dissolves this picture.

The future is not a destination.

It is an open relational horizon.

The Future Is Not There Yet

The future does not exist in advance, even as a set of possibilities waiting to be realised. Possibilities themselves are structured, weighted, differentiated, and accelerated in the present.

What we call “the future” is the evolving configuration of these relations as they extend forward.

This is why prediction is always partial, and why surprise is not a failure of knowledge but a feature of reality.

Futures as Projected Possibility

When we imagine futures, we are not peering ahead. We are projecting current relational patterns forward and asking how they might stabilise, transform, or collapse.

A future, in this sense, is:

• a projected configuration of possibility

• grounded in existing constraints

• shaped by current value systems

• accelerated or dampened by technology

• open to creative recombination

There is no single future — only multiple futures in formation, unevenly weighted and unevenly accessible.

Planning Without Destinations

Planning is often misunderstood as a way of fixing the future in advance. In practice, effective planning does something else entirely.

Good planning:

• increases adaptability

• keeps options viable

• builds resilience into coordination

• avoids premature lock-in

Planning is not about predicting outcomes. It is about shaping conditions so that future reconfiguration remains possible.

Plans fail when they treat the future as a point to be reached rather than a field to be navigated.

Ethics as Horizon Maintenance

Once the future is understood relationally, ethics must be reframed.

Ethics is not primarily about choosing correctly between predefined options. It is about responsibility for how possibility is weighted, restricted, or opened over time.

An ethical practice:

• avoids collapsing futures too early

• resists irreversible closure without necessity

• attends to who bears the cost of constraint

• protects the capacity for revision

Responsibility lies not in being right, but in keeping the field livable.

Politics as Possibility-Shaping

Politics, on this view, is not fundamentally about ideology or belief. It is about the large-scale structuring of relational horizons.

Political systems:

• allocate risk and opportunity

• accelerate some trajectories and slow others

• institutionalise value systems

• harden or soften constraints

Political disagreement often appears semantic, but its real stakes are practical: whose futures remain open, and whose are foreclosed.

Hope Without Guarantees

Hope is often mistaken for optimism — the belief that things will turn out well. Relationally understood, hope is something else entirely.

Hope is a commitment to the openness of possibility under uncertainty.

It does not require confidence in outcomes. It requires confidence that the field has not yet collapsed.

This is why hope can coexist with clear-eyed realism, and why despair arises not from difficulty, but from perceived inevitability.

Acting Without Mastery

If the future is an open relational horizon, then action cannot be about control.

Action becomes:

• intervention without mastery

• participation without ownership

• influence without final authority

To act is to contribute to the shaping of possibility, knowing that outcomes will exceed intention.

This is not a loss of agency. It is agency properly understood.

The Becoming of Possibility

Across this series, we have followed a single thread:

• Coordination shapes what can happen

• Language differentiates possibility

• Knowledge stabilises it

• Value systems weight it

• Technology accelerates it

• Creativity reconfigures it

• The future emerges from it

At no point did we need inner representations, hidden meanings, or pre-given destinations.

What we needed were relations.

Closing the Horizon

The future is not something we move toward.

It is something we are continually helping to bring into being — not alone, not freely, not predictably, but together, within constraint.

To live responsibly, creatively, and ethically is not to choose the right future.

It is to keep futures possible.