Things are so sexy. That’s because they are dead. Or fundamentally useless. According to Heidegger, a thing is an object fallen. An object has use, real use, functionality; it becomes a thing when it is broken down and we can no longer use it—at least not for the purpose for which it was designed. A thing is therefore kind of like art, which, in some classical-modernist sense, is meant to have no function other than to impel reflection.

But objects have been asserting their thingness a lot as of late, thinging all over the place, in a hylozoic revivalism presented to us by twenty-first-century