Modernity after Modernity

A strategy for the second modernization raises, beyond objectives, a series of epistemic responsibilities. It is known that modernization stemming from the Enlightment had, among other things, the pretense that it is a project which is self-legitimating. Its profound rationales are the only justification. Referential self-centering proved to be the one that made possible a practice of the new. Modernization having the function of renouncing myth – meaning an eliminatory formula for the past – and the fixation in the opportunity and potentiality of the present, seemed to close an insoluble but extremely engrossing problem: that of a propensity towards utopia, of the risky escape towards the future. The traditionalization of the new constitutes a support for the daring to break out of the captivity of the moment. Modernization becomes the experience of combining the new which, thus, creates a succession of present times. The future is no longer the result of fantasy, but a system’s direct expression to combine the new. Therefore the future is an option for one or another model of the present, often tested previously somewhere else. In a non-metaphysical way, the future can be seen, touched, tried, lived by simple geographical movement. The sense of evolution has de-temporalized taking the form of the concomitant, parallel, enclosed, neighboring space. We just have to be in the trend, to evolve in the context. Globalization defines the context and its conception – as a project of the second modernity – shows us the trends. The problem is how to understand the context in order to find the sense of the trend. Are we the load the sense with the values of the first modernity or will we have to turn to the values of another modernity? Why do we have to move away from the significance of the processes which made up the first modernity? How do we relate to the content of the new context in which the structural trends of today’s world are taking place? What is the key to understand both the context and the trends?