But I wonder if Bennett’s theories of thing-power can perhaps help us think about objects as possessing a kind of agency that escapes our understanding, and therefore exists “for itself”?

I find that in the effort to rethink our privileging of the human subject, it helps to break the human itself down into parts/objects, like Malabou does with the brain (http://fordhampress.com/index.php/what-shoud-we-do-with-our-brain-cloth.html), which is what I was attempting to explore, conceptually, via Freya Olafson’s work.

The question I keep returning to is What happens to the political when we attempt to think things for themselves? Bennett’s book, “Vibrant Matter” offers some potential answers…

Yesterday I was reading this in the NYT: “According to quantum mechanics, particles do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. Until then, they can exist simultaneously in two or more places. Once measured, however, they snap into a more classical reality, existing in only one place.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/science/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky-interactions.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Perhaps there is an ontological dimension to ‘vibrant matter’ in the relationship between humans and things, on a level we are just beginning to be capable of observing empirically. I don’t want to say too much about this comparison lest I step into the overtly metaphysical, but I think there is something to consider, namely that there is a sense by which the things that make up ‘reality’ are ‘real-ized’ by our gaze.