"There is something compulsive about the a telephone. The gadget-riden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish."
Chandler, The Long Good-Bye, P170
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Something else makes things suspect even while they stand before our gaze.  At the theatre, if the candles in the last act of Wallenstein are burning on the table, say, and Wallenstein undersigns the treaty with Wrangel: then the candles and the table are truly candles and table - they're not play acting.  They weren't the same ones, but they were candles and table no differently when Wallenstein in fact signed himself over to the actual general.  Yet the people presently around the candles and desk - the present actors - are play-acting; why, then, does no fissure open? Why does the audience, illusion here, illusion there, sense no different levels of sincerity? Do inanimate objects play-act? On the stage does their pretense, far from creating a fissure, have a homogeneous space? 

From Bloch, 'The Reverse of Things', Traces, Stanford University Press, 2006, p135

A partial object is not representative, even though it admittedly serves as the basis of relations and as a means of assigning agents a place and a function; but these agents are not persons, any more than these relations are intersubjective. They are relations of production as such, and agents of production and anti-production.

Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p50-51

"Communicative technologies are not instruments of exile from the world, nor reversible deviations from reality. Rather, they are mechanism contributing to the construction of the world that we experience as a society, in our way of being together. If in Berlusconism "being together", living in the public sphere, means to be within the world of publicity - and this is one of its most hateful aspects - then what we need is another way of being together. What we need is another language, able to produce the public sphere as political community."
Marazzi, Capital & Affects p136

Marazzi is clear that Berlusconism is "an experiment in post-Fordist goverance" and not some aberration from or extremity of the existing regimes. This 'experiment' has grasped the tool/weapon duality of language (what, after all, is more projective than language [cf. Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus]) on a most basic level & mobilized new strategies of dominance on this basis before 'we' even had time to realize what had happened. 'We' must urgently develop strategies for the deployment of language as weapon before our use of this weapon is stripped from us (the voice stealing gun of the weaponised neurology is ALREADY HERE). ------------------

"The struggle is situated within language, in the ability to produce other version of the same fundamental desire of belonging to community. The real problem is how to create other common places able to fill the gap between the desire for community and its internal, political inconsistencies."
Marazzi, Capital and Affects, p124

The role of topoi (the common places of language) in the means of production of post-Fordist society is of urgent concern. The complicity of communication in production that post-Fordism has achieved (initiated) is new but communication did once dominate the means of consumption and by turning to the culture of that time (i.e. of antiquity; of the time marked by what Barthes called 'the old rhetoric' rather than the new rhetoric of mythology) we can find means of thinking about those very topoi and their relation to the skein of power & domination in the hope of turning them towards an understanding of our own situation. The study of the masters of that 'old rhetoric' should equip us to comprehend and begin the task of defeating the new masters. It is time to realize that Libanius must be 'exploded out of his time' and into ours before it is to late. ------------------

In his discussion of 'the middle class' Marazzi directs us to their problematic relationship to hegemony & the spectacle:
"Indeed, it is on this class that rests the very possibility of governing a society. It is obvious that the "general interest" refers to the average of the particular interests crisscrossing a society, but representing such a middle class today is much less obvious. To represent means to forcefully present, to choose not only a lens but an image: this, of course, implies that the middle class is socially visible"
Marazzi, Capital and Affects, p115
This imagistic quality of the 'possibility of governing' was always a concern of Marxism before Debord pinned it to the floor in his discussion of The Spectacle. Benjamin & Gramsci must also be drawn into this iconoclasm. ------------------

"Today, our most pressing problem is not a more equitable distribution of labour, but of income: it is on this basis that we can define the meaning that we want to attribute to different activities."
Marazzi, Capital and Affects, p53 ------------------

"In short, the theory of art which makes it possible and worthwhile to create reputations is not timeless; it arises in societies which subscribe to more general theories emphasizing the individual over the collective, and under particular social conditions."
Becker, Art Worlds, p354

Becker carefully shows that the mythology of the artist as individual is an effect/function of industrial capitalism before making the statement above. The interconnexion with Barthes (in The Death of the Author & S/Z) and Althusser (in the ideology essay) is quite clear. ------------------

“Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface.” Deleuze & Guattari (2011) Anti-Oedipus, p11

I cannot shake off the echoes of The Arcades Project that this quotation from Anti-Oedipus generates.  The dreaming phantasmagoria that Benjamin found in the Paris of the Arcades (and thus in C19th capitalism) was similarly constructed from the ruins of production that were its only record.

Everything is politico-ecological (is imbricated with power & resources). For instance:
"... all artists depend on the state and their work embodies that dependence."  
Becker, Art Worlds, p191 

In his discussion of the legal frameworks that provide some of the structures of 'art worlds' Becker takes in the law of nuisance and art world participants subjection to that part of the civil law. Becker then extends this line of thought into the comparative:
"In all the relevant respects, they [artist or art world participants] can be thought of as not very different from industrial or business polluters."

The implications of this (the extensions of this idea we could follow) are not taken up by Becker but we should draw this into our considerations of the ethics of objects. ------------------