The enduring puzzle is why the effect of meaning persists, not why it collapses.

Evidence

Despite the ease with which such feats of deconstruction seem to be accomplished, what needs explaining is not why meaning collapses but why it does not. Politically, what seems important is not just to show that outside the text, or outside the exhibition, there is only a further text or a further exhibition, but to consider why, in that case, we have come to live more and more as though the world were a real exhibition, an exhibition of reality. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 467

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes the standard deconstruction move against Derrida; connects to the book’s enframing thesis and later work on the exhibitionary complex and spectacle.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — from ‘why meaning collapses’ to ‘why it doesn’t’ — reframes the entire poststructuralist project as a political question about how a world comes to be experienced as an exhibition.