Anthony Giddens also agrees that “we have not moved beyond Modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalisation”26 and, accordingly, he speaks about Late Modernity to emphasize continuity and change, rather than break or disjuncture. He characterizes Late Modernity as dynamic and distinguishes three dominant sources of its dynamism, each connected with the other.27
The separation of time and space. In pre-modern societies, “‘when’ was almost universally either connected with ‘where.’… The invention of the clock… expressed a uniform dimension of ‘empty’ time, quantified in such a way as to permit the precise
25 Ernesto Fiocchetto, “Forty-Five Minutes of Intense Connectivity.”
26 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 51.
27 Ibid., 17-54.
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designation of ‘zones’ of the day.”28 As a result, there has been standardization and globalization of time, and everyone now follows the same time and date systems which turned out to be autonomous of real spaces. “The ‘emptying of time’ is in large part the precondition for the ‘emptying of space.’”29 In pre-modern societies, space and place coincide, since the others’ presence dominated the spatial dimension of social life.
Modernity increasingly separates place from space by articulating relations between absent others. All in all, “time and space are recombined to form a genuinely world-historical framework of action and experience.”30
The development of disembedding mechanisms. Traditional institutions such as family, education, religion, and politics were integral parts of the local societies and allowed the structuration and reproduction of such societies. With the coming of modernization, those institutions became disembedded from local communities. By disembedding Giddens, thus, means “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”31
Such a process takes place through two types of disembedded mechanisms:
symbolic tokens and expert systems. Symbolic tokens are media of interchange that can be “passed around” without regard to individual or group characteristics.32 The best example of a symbolic token is the money whose exchange disturbs the perception of
28 Ibid., 17.
29 Ibid., 18.
30 Ibid., 21.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 22-27.
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space and time because, in Late Modernity, money provides for the inmediate enactment of transactions between agents widely separated in time and space. Expert systems are systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise consisting of engineers, doctors, architects, lawyers, and so forth who run the community by organizing large areas of the material and social environments in which we live today.33 Thus, the manner that individuals relate to housing, health, or personal problems is not direct but
mediatized by those experts. This mediation puts into perspective the notion of time-space based on a weak inductive knowledge. Therefore, “all disembedding mechanisms, both symbolic tokens and expert systems depend upon trust. Trust is therefore involved fundamentally with the institutions of Modernity. Trust here is vested, not in individuals, but in abstract capacities.”34 Individuals need to trust because they live in “environments of risk” that collectively affect large masses of individuals.35
The reflexive appropriation of knowledge. Two notions are fundamental to properly understand this source of modern dynamism. First, Giddens asserts that
“inherent in the idea of Modernity is a contrast with tradition.”36 Second, he states that
“all human beings routinely ‘keep in touch’ with the grounds of what they do as an integral element of doing it,”37 what he calls “reflexive monitoring of action.” In
traditional cultures, there is a mode of integrating the reflexive monitoring of action with
33 Ibid., 27-29.
34 Ibid., 26.
35 Ibid., 33-36
36 Ibid., 36.
37 Ibid.
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the time-space organization of the community, and thus, reflexivity is limited to the reinterpretation of tradition. This limit of reflexivity is challenged in modern societies, in which reflexivity “is introduced into the very basis of system reproduction, such that thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one another.”38 In other words, reflexivity is the regular use of knowledge by institutions and individuals who
continuously explain their actions through this knowledge and create or change modern systems and forms of social organization. Social practices are regularly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices. The production of systematic knowledge about social life becomes integral to system reproduction, rolling social life away from the fixities of tradition. Moreover, this does not mean that tradition disappears; rather, actions guided by tradition in Modernity are reflexively justified.
In sum, Late Modernity is post-traditional. The lack of analysis of individual actions that was possible within societies in which tradition dominated, increasingly turned into a much more reflexive attitude towards social life and all its dimensions, including religion and the configuration of identities. Consequently, while earlier societies with a social order based firmly in tradition would provide individuals with clearly defined roles and identities, in post-traditional societies, we have to work out our roles for ourselves. In Giddens’ words, “What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of Late Modernity—and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day
38 Ibid., 38.
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social behavior”.39 Consequently, in Late Modernity, self-identity is a reflexive project of the self.
2. Toward the Comprehension of Religion in High Modernity: The Contribution of