We quit the Official Thingified World of Things with its rational lexicon long ago. Away from objecthood into....a un-place where it has become improper to speak even of reification anymore.
This was what Antonioni was so relentlessly after in that fierce middle period from Red Desert to The Passenger:
Antonioni: What interests me now is to put the characters IN CONTACT with things, because what counts today are things, objects, matter.
Giuliana panics not at what the world of objects MEANS, (what you would find in the ordinary expressionist world of Stendhal or Flaubert, -- & of course, Hollywood's) but rather at its' cryptic, occulted non-messages. Because things now have a sort of animal spirit and they chatter incomprehensibly -- rather like Princess Raccoon, if you would encounter her in real life. Communication frighteningly without expression. Grandiloquent Blankness. Strange OMENS of Further Abstraction and Separation.
Marxist unease (Panic!) with the fetishism of the commodity lies with the suspicion that the idea hijacks the scientific and inevitable character of revolution and leads ideology into what is, frankly, animism. The superstitious world of magic, the occult, and the primitive.
Two basic polarities in language that also apply to cinema and to reality:
explicitness and ellipsis. And the spirit-substance halfway in between is The Glyphic, which splits the difference.
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