… when we cast about for objects to contemplate, our tendency is to encounter objects in relatively fixed circumstances. … Intellectual work today, no less than in ancient Greece, is dependent on a certain distribution of labor that renders academic life possible by relieving a particular segment of society largely independent of manual labor. This, in turn, leads objects to be encountered in a particular way insofar as the academic, by and large, does not encounter volcanic potentials hidden within objects by virtue of not directly acting on objects.
— Levi Bryant , in The Democracy of Objects on how mugs don’t posses the colour blue, but rather do blue. Rather than thinking of objects as possessing fixed qualities, we need to think about their virtual properties, those which exist in reserve, but are just as real, if not actual. The cup blues. The cup is bluing. (but it can do black, in a lightless room, too)
