Eagleton dixit

   'When signs detach themselves from the material world, a curious paradox tends to result. On the one hand, such signs are now purely vacuous, dead letters emptied of all constraining content and so free to couple promiscuously with each other in an orgy of inbreeding, On the other hand, signs which have shaken themselves loose from the world now stand at an operative distance from it, able to reach back into reality and mould it to their own capricious designs. S. is continually struck at once by the 'nothing' of such estranged language, its lack of ground or substance, and its power to bend the world to its own will. The sign as fetish, shorn of a significant context to become an end it itself, is ironically the sign at its most materially potent, manipulating real situations until it and they seem once more inextricable.'