Identidad, mundialización e «historización» de la experiencia

Abstract

This text is concerned with the alterations in individual and collective personality which have brought, as a corollary, modernity or late modernity. Taking as its point of departure an examination of Anthony Giddens' propositions in Modernity and Self-Identity, it analyzes the impulse to construct identity and the tribulations and tensions between the global and the particular, and the ephemeral and the durable, in which men in contemporary developed societies live. The mass media mean that the experiences of their subjects will be “excessive" in their intensity and extent. In contemporary societies a kind of new "mass rebellion" is developing in opposition to extremely homogenizing pressures imposed by abstract social forces. However, that rebellion does not attempt to break the system. A new form of historicity is the origin of a powerful trend towards the "historicising of experience" as opposed to the traditional History of the Past. This is the basis for the construction of a History of the Present.