"A society [...] devotes considerable time and resources to the elaboration of systems designed 'to make the world heavy with meaning', to convert objects into signs. But on the one hand it seems that 'men deploy an equal energy in masking the systematic nature of their creations and reconverting the semantic relation into a natural or rational one'. [...] Yet, on the other hand, the very energy employed in the proliferation and naturalization of signs - the desire to make everything signify and yet to make all those meanings inherent and intrinsic - finally undermines the meaning accorded to objects. These two processes which seek in opposite ways to affirm meaning, by creating and naturalizing it, contribute to what becomes, in effect, a self-contained activity. Absorbing and undermining the two contributary forces, the process of signification becomes an autonomous play of meaning. One has only to think of the way in which the rallying cry of 'realism' has served to justify changes in literary artifice, and of the ways in which the desire to make the real signify has led to the creation of autonomous worlds, to see that such paradoxes are not the property of fashion alone."
Jonathan Culler - Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature