Artifact Selection

Artifacts Are Dynamic

This points to the underlying assumption that artifacts are not static entities; rather, they are intrinsically malleable, dynamic, fluid, ever-changing, and sometimes ambiguous. They are shaped by our perceptions of them, as well as by our communication about them. Roland Barthes compares a text to a work. For Barthes, a work is a completed object, whole, finished, and closed; a text, meanwhile, is open, living, incomplete, and ongoing—it operates in a constant state of rewriting, reworking, [Page 57]meaning making, remaking, and re-appropriation. Artifacts are more commonly described as texts rather than as works or acts; they are considered stable in their tangible form, yet also unstable because their meaning exists at the intersection of the textual producer, the text itself, the surrounding context, and in the audience for the text. All of these factors influence the meaning of the artifact or text, making our understanding of what an artifact is all the more ambiguous and slippery. For instance, John Fiske argues that for an artifact or text to be an instance of popular culture it must be relevant to the everyday lived social situations of the audience. To be popular, the artifact must possess both the forces of domination as well as opportunities to resist them. Popular culture is made by those at the intersection between the commodities or products of culture and the everyday lived experiences of the people. For Fiske, popular texts are provocateurs of meanings and pleasures. They are incomplete, always in the process of meaning making and remaking; they are made complete only when used by people and incorporated into their everyday experiences. Popular culture artifacts are sites of resistance, a struggle over sense making, power, ideology, and identity. Hence, as Barry Brummett has argued, it is the social function for which artifacts are used that give them their fundamental rhetorical meaning. Following this perspective, artifacts constitute the ways in which people actually read a text and the relevance they have to their sociocultural situation and everyday lived experiences. Clearly, what an artifact is and is not depends on the research paradigm one ascribes to and the specific methodologies chosen for examination of the artifact. As Kenneth Burke has said, the very fact that artifacts are symbolic acts makes it challenging for critics to break them down conceptually.

...