The Contours of High Modernity

In the first chapter of Modernity and Self-identity, Giddens overviews the general transformations, which reframe the constitution of self-identity in the late modernity. These processes include the separation of time and space, the disembedding mechanisms separating interactions from the local character, the mediatization of experience and the augmentation of institutional reflexivity. These macro processes reconfigure the constitution of self-identity in the sense that they pose existential and moral questions, which need to be answered individually through the decisions made in the everyday life. In this constellation the self becomes a reflexive project of balancing between angst, contingencies, lack of trust and meaning.