"If it includes everything, it becomes meaningless."

[alixtii]

There is a claim I've seen being made a lot lately, in a lot of different places (but part of the same overall argument) by different people, that if a word applies to everything it becomes meaningless. Can anyone explain this claim to me?

If I say "everything is made up of atoms" does that mean "made up of atoms" is a meaningless category?

I remember having a conversation on the OTW FAQ and the language it uses, referring to what I would call source texts as "original works" and thus inadvertently imply intentionality which isn't truly there in the case of many RPF canons, in the comments of this post, with jadelennox, in which she said:

The jargon term "text" encompasses the idea that all objects, experiences, encounters, etc. are analyzable under the same lens is we would use to analyze the non-jargon "texts". There really isn't any jargon-free way to say "I mean everything in the world, except everything in the world from the point of view that you can look at everything in the world as a text". I'm not even explaining it well when I try to translate it into a whole lot of English words. *shakes tiny fist*

Is the "except [. . .] from the point of view that you can look at everything in the world as a text" part of her definition really lacking any semantic content?

If I say everything is about sex, or the death-drive, or the means of production, or the will-to-power, am I making meaningless statements?

If everything is X then, a) that may say something meaningful about the state of everything, and b) that doesn't eliminate the possibility that some things are more X than others, closer to the center of the conceptual web, less problematically X, while others lurk in the fuzzy boundaries.

Or am I just insane?

Comments

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I don't think that lumping everything in one category makes that category meaningless, but I do think that it oversimplifies and tries to make connections between two things which are either tenuous or non - existent. I mean, you could say that everything anybody does creatively is driven by a buried sex drive, but that would be ignoring a whole range of possible motivations for the creative act, in my opinion.

Well, it wouldn't be ignoring them so much as reducing them to really being about a buried sex drive. I think the sex drive way of looking at it is silly and not really useful, but it's self-consistent and doesn't seem to contradict reality. (How could it? It's ultimately tautologous.)

Also, I don't think RPF has a source text in the same way other media fandoms do. Those fandoms operate of sources that were created by one or more people as explicitly fictional, while RPF builds off real life events to a greater or lesser extent.

Well, RPF is about real (for a given social construction of "real"; Buffy Summers won't be found in any SoCal phonebook) people and FPF is about fictional people. While that distinction can be problematized, I'm not really about to disagree with that claim; it's pretty much part of the definition of what RPF and FPF are.

The main thing I can parse your comment as saying something that goes beyond that is that RPF source texts, in addition to being "real," lack intentionality; they're not created. That premise I would argue with; since I do think that our decisions we make in the "real world" are parts of deliberately fabricated constructions, even when we are with the people with whom we are the most comfortable.

[youngest-one.livejournal.com]

(How could it? It's ultimately tautologous.)

Which is my problem with those kind of statements.

The main thing I can parse your comment as saying something that goes beyond that is that RPF source texts, in addition to being "real," lack intentionality; they're not created. That premise I would argue with; since I do think that our decisions we make in the "real world" are parts of deliberately fabricated constructions, even when we are with the people with whom we are the most comfortable.

And I stand by my definition. RPF isn't based on the fictional texts celebrities create, they're based on reports of those celebrities' lives. There's a big difference, I think, between fictional events which are purposefully created to be consumed and interpreted by an audience and private lives which - aren't. I'm not trying to imply that RPF is less valid than other forms of fanfic, because writing about real people is just as valid as writing about fictional ones and celebrities wind up creating public personas through there public actions, but I still think they're operating from two different kinds of sources.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

But "private lives" aren't completely interior, so they are "purposefully created to be consumed and interpreted by an audience." The performances might not be the same; Summer Glau performing the role of child for her parents is different than Summer Glau performing the role of actor for reporters is different than Summer performing River is different than Summer performing herself on an audio commentary. But they're all performances.