ABSTRACT
As nature becomes, through the science that has exploited and continues to exploit it, once again a model for imitation by culture, modernism, as characterized by instrumental rationality, is acquiring the potential to bring about the negation of its initial condition: the master/slave relation between itself and nature (Fig. 3.1). Aspects of western culture have changed dramatically since the late 1960s, but these changes, instead of being cast as ‘post-modern’ could as easily be viewed as the beginning of a new stage of modernism: a ‘post-imperial’ or, in Ulrich Beck’s terminology, ‘reflexive’ modernism (Beck, 1992).
