(Notes on) Panic & Plentitude

"American citizens in particular are encouraged to fracture their self-conceptions on the hard edges of panic and plentitude, suspicion and sympathy, particularity and universalism."
--Castiglia and Castronovo, A "Hive of Subtlety": Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Criticism
If reading the daily paper is modern man’s form of prayer, then it is a very strange man indeed who is doing the praying today while reading about these mixed-up affairs. All of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day. Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press (1993).