This article traces a portrait of the social context of both the current transition and the one that is emerging, and examines the challenges they pose for current sociology and that of the coming decades. The goal is to show that a qualitative change is taking place, a shift not from modernity to post-modernity, but to another socio-historical form of social relations "awareness" (la conscientivité). To do so, the author examines four socio-historical trends: the evolution of the objectification-subjectification relation; the evolution of the capital-subject relation; the transformation of the identity-solidarity relation; and, lastly, the change occurring in the system of values. The author argues that while the current transition simultaneously involves the possibility and the necessity of shifting to the era of awareness, the likelihood of this shift is questioned in light of the possibility of the extended reproduction of capitalism, which, as such, would push its structural characteristics to a high degree of radical exacerbation, completely denying the legitimacy and primacy of the subject. The first section dwells on the issue of the genetic structuration of the transition situation, which the author examines through the lens of the objectification-subjectification dialectic. The author then examines three modes of objectification (the production of material objects; the production of non-material objects; and the production of intelligent objects) and their consequences for the development of the possibilities for subjecti-fication. The following two sections focus on the problematic of capitalist continuity, its discontinuities (long expansion phases) and the exhaustion of modernity. After having indicated how continuity is disrupted by endogenous causes due the incessant confrontation of the logics of capital and the subject, the author reviews the state of development of the crisis of the Fordist-Keynesian mode of regulation, dwelling on the causes and consequences of capital's declared war on the subject, on the form assumed by the crisis of the exhaustion of the consumption sphere's absorption capacity, and, lastly, on the increase of the possibilities and means of individuation through the Fordist, then the Fordist-Keynesian ways of life. The third section deals with the possibility of shifting to a new mode of regulation discussed-programmed regulation which would facilitate the shift to "awareness." This section successively discusses the following problematics: the emergence of the new techno-economic paradigm programming and of a new mode of alienation; the transformation of the competition relation; the emergence of the discussed-programmed mode of regulation on a global scale; and the duration of the transition in light of the uncontrollable pace taken on by capital's domination. In the fourth section, the author discusses the transformation of identity relations and of the form of solidarity, as well as the role of the subject's will. Lastly, the author argues for the need to shift to a system of values that goes beyond the determinisms of facts of origin. The article concludes by bringing together a number of comments with a view to defining "awareness."