Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College
WORDS OF ART: THE E_LIST

WORDS OF ART: THE E_LIST

Compiled by Robert J. Belton
If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to contact bbelton@okanagan.bc.ca.

ECHO: See visual rhyme.

ECLECTICISM: The composition o something by selecting details and stylistic features from a wide variety of sources. Nineteenth-century architecture, for example, was eclectic in its rather derivative adherence to the manners of bygone eras, as in Classical Revival, Gothic Revival, and the like. Postmodern architecture is more ironically eclectic, as in Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans.

ECONOMY: The organization, structure or mode of operation of a group; more specifically, the system of exchange within an identifiable group, whether the exchange be of money (economy in the widest sense) or of some more ephemeral thing, like meaning (see signifying economy). When some reference is intended to a smaller, marginal or veiled system of exchange within a dominant economy, it is often designated a sub-economy. See also general economy.

(L')ÉCRITURE: "Writing," but with connotations taken over from the death of the author to the effect that what is written is an open-ended (see open-endedness) text, with multiple possibiities of meaning beyond those intended by the author. Some writers use the word "scription" to indicate much the same idea.

(L')ÉCRITURE FÉMININE: A type of writing which rejects intellectual paradigms of logic and logocentrism -- such as intellectual neutrality, disinterestedness -- and so on, in favour of allusive, divergent, and expressive associations -- like the body, desire, and a sense of connectedness. Although Hélène Cixous's "Laugh of the Medusa," Signs (Summer 1976) is considered the key source, Chantal Chawaf put it this way: "Isn't the final goal of writing to articulate the body?... Language through writing has moved away from its original sources: the body and the earth." See language, thinking as yet not thinkable. Cf fleshless academicism.

EDITING: Go here

EFFECT: Something that invariably follows a cause (see causality); the consequence of inflection; and/or the overall emotional or dramatic impact or tone of an artwork. See also meaning effect.

EFFECT OF THE REAL: In art and literature, the creation of a fictive world that appears to be seen through a transparent window, rather than as the result of a particular individual's creative behaviour or the processes of an audience's enunciation. The basic challenge offered to this position in artwriting is described under the heading perceptualism. The phrase itself derives from Roland Barthes' essay by that name in the journal Communications (1968).

EGO: Generally, one's conception of the self. More specifically, in psychoanalytical thought, one of three main divisions of the psyche. The ego makes distinctions between the self and the not-self (i.e., the environment) and in the process mediates between the primitive, infantile mind ( id) and the moral mind ( superego).

EGOCENTRIC: Considering the ego as central, as in simple selfishness or in developed philosophies or ethics which give priority to self-interest.

EIDETIC IMAGERY: Mental images with extraordinary vividness, as if actually perceptible.

EIDOS: Term for the Platonic conception of the essential (see essentialism Forms or Ideas underlying all experience.

EKPHRASIS: Synonym for description.

ELABORATION: A tactic in rhetoric by which a theme is progressively argued by gradual repetition with emendations, alterations, and the like. Visual equivalents are easy enough to imagine. See also secondary elaboration.

ELEGY: A solemn meditation on death and the like, particularly when presented in a gravely formal manner. Antonio Canova's Tomb of the Archduchess Maria Christina in Vienna's Augustinerkirche is notably elegaic.

ELEMENTAL: Pertaining to the four basic elements (air, earth, fire, and water) and, by analogy, anything fundamental, rudimentary, or expressive of the basic forces of nature.

ELISION: Omission of a component, usually of a word or a part thereof (as in contractions like can't). In medieval imagery, illuminated texts frequently had elisions signalled by a short line above the contraction.

ELITE CULTURE: See high culture.

ELLIPSIS: The omission of one or more words whose sense can be easily supplied. For example, in "Bernini's sculpture reached the zenith of Baroque exuberance, his painting the nadir," the identity of the missing word in the second clause is signalled by "reached" in the first. Discussion of the mechanics of ellipsis might clarify how a specifically visual trope works.

EMBLEM: A picture associated with a motto, usually moralizing in tone. An example is a popular print showing King Midas, unable to eat because his touch turns everything to gold, accompanied by the words "both rich and poor."

EMBOURGEOISEMENT: The suppression of difference in class by attributing to all members of a society the values of the middle class (the bourgeoisie). See hegemony, ideological effect.

EMOTION: Psychological and/or physical reactions to stimuli subjectively experienced as feelings. See betraying versus expressing emotion, unique aesthetic emotion.

EMOTIVE: See mind-set.

EMOTIVISM: Also known as emotive theory, emotivism holds that value judgements are neither good nor bad but simply expressions of emotion, like laughing or fear. Where simple subjectivism offers a statement like "Walter De Maria's Earth Room is good art" when what is really meant is "I like it/esteem it/approve of it," emotivism sees "Walter De Maria's Earth Room is good art" as an honest (or dishonest) and appropriate (or inappropriate, etc.) statement of the speaker's feelings, but it cannot be either true or false. Ayer started the idea in Language, Truth and Logic (see also boo-hooray theory) and it was further developed by C. L. Stevenson in Ethics and Language, where it was linked with the rhetorical desire to persuade with or without valid argument. Given that so much popular talk about art includes often wooly value judgements, some consideration should be given to these issues.

EMPATHY: Now loosely the same as "sympathy" - - i.e., identification with another's feelings -- but careful users usually stipulate empathy as an imaginative projection of one's own feelings into an event or object. One should perhaps be suspicious of the latter, inasmuch as it can easily produce meanings that are read into an artwork.

EMPHASIS: Any of several means of drawing special attention to some feature(s) of an artwork for aesthetic impact.

EMPIRICAL: Derived from observation, whether through anecdotes or through controlled experiment. See empiricism.

EMPIRICISM: Popularly understood as the philosophy that all understanding must derive from or be indebted to actual experience. Empiricists assert that the mind is not invested with a priori categories or concepts (see Kantian, platonic) from birth but is instead a blank, receptive surface, as it were. The prime movers were Berkeley (see immaterialism), Hume (see constant conjunction) and Locke (see tabula rasa). Cf logical positivism, positivism.

EMPOWER: To enable; to give recognition to; to facilitate self-expression, particularly of marginal groups within a dominant culture.

EMULATION: Thus can mean either "imitation" or the "striving to equal or exceed." As a contemporary technological term, it also means a device allowing a program written for one computer to be run on another computer or a musical instrument which records sounds digitally for playback, manipulation, etc. See sampling.

ENALLAGE: A figure in which there is an exchange of grammatical forms, as in instances when nouns are used as verbs -- e.g., "toe the party line" -- or when past and present tenses are switched. The application of the latter idea to visual imagery should be obvious to those who have always found peculiar the representation of, say, the Madonna and Child as if they belonged to the race and era of the painter, rather than to history.

ENCLOSED RHYME: A rhyme in the form "a.b.b.a." Rudolf Wittkower has pointed out similar structures in Italian architecture.

ENANTIOMORPHS: Mirror images, in effect, as a left hand is to a right. As simple as the idea seems to be, it has been used in such difficult Kantian philosophical questions as "is space relative or absolute?" Students of visual art might care to examine a once-popular conception -- similar to some aspects of information theory -- that whatever a viewer experiences before an artwork is the exactly reconstituted emotional expression of the artist.

ENCODING: In information theory, the conversion of a message into a form that can be transmitted along a channel. In postmodernist artwriting, the idea is discussed more frequently from the point of view of code and decoding.

ENCOMIUM: In Greek literature, enthusiastic praise, delivered in soberly formal terms, of anyone or anything aside from the gods. Any decidedly glorifying treatment of a subject's visual representation could be described as encomiastic. Sometimes it backfires, as in the rather absurd sculptural cases of Canova's Napoleon and Greenough's George Washington.

ÉNONCÉ: See enunciation.

ÉNONCIATION: See enunciation.

ENTELECHY: The actuality or truth of a thing, rather than its potentiality. In Aristotelian thought, entelechy was used to distinguish the soul from the body (see mind-body problem). In vitalist thought, entelechy is an unobservable, hypothetical agent that directs organic processes. Bear the idea in mind while considering holism, possibilities, and teleology.

ENTHYMEME: A syllogism with a hidden premise. For example, in "Artists should be seen and not heard. Be quiet, Pablo," the minor premise that Pablo is an artist is suppressed but understood.

ENTROPY: Originally from the study of thermodynamics, entropy has been used in a variety of ways in other disciplines. In certain sociological circles, for example, the original definition of entropy as the degree to which energy in a system is available to do work becomes a description of how social progress slows and finally stops because social change uses up energy which cannot then be retrieved for reuse in further change. Related is the psychoanalytical usage, in which psychic energy cannot be transferred from the object in which it is originally invested. A more straightforward application of entropy as the tendency of ordered systems to degrade into a state of inanimate uniformity can be seen in the writings of artist Robert Smithson. Related to this is the usage in information theory, where entropy is a measure of the apparent disorder of a system, so that the more there is known about it, the less entropy it seems to have. I.e., entropy is understood as the number of possibilities, which decreases as knowledge grows.

ENUNCIATION: In theories as diverse as Lacan and speech-act theory, an énoncé is the thing uttered (e.g., a statement), whereas an énonciation is the act of uttering it. In some contexts, enunciation is construed as the interpretation or performance of a text conceived of as a discursive activity, rather than as the isolated act of a single individual. Enunciation is neither the writer producing an unequivocal meaning nor a reader understanding an unequivocal significance. It is the network of conceptual processes involved in the production and reception of a text, including the effects of contextual factors. The term is most clearly defined by Tzvetan Todorov in Les Genres du discours: "A discourse is made not of sentences, but of enunciated sentences, or more simply, of énoncés. Now the interpretation of this énoncé is determined on the one hand by the sentences enunciated, and on the other, by the énonciation itself. This énonciation includes a speaker who enunciates, a listener whom one addresses, a time and a place, a discourse that precedes and follows; in brief, a context of enunciation." See also reader-response.

EPAGOGE: Greek for argument from induction.

éPATER LE BOURGEOIS: To shock the bourgeois audience, to flout conventional moral or aesthetic norms, to startle through unconventional behaviour. This is a basic component of anti-art, but it has lost much of its force. See avant-garde, bohemianism, dramatic conventions.

EPHEMERA: Published matter intended to last only for a very short time (from the Greek ephemeros, "lasting a day"), like broadsheets, leaflets, pamphlets, and all manner of cheaply produced visual materials. Museologists and art conservators rack their brains over how to preserve visual art produced without high technical standards, serving to meet ephemeral needs, as in some Dada, say, or in preparatory drawings.

EPIC: A long narrative, usually in the form of a poem or film, in which the stories of a number of characters are traced against a background of sweeping historical importance, as in Leon Uris's novels. The term is only rarely applied to the visual arts.

EPIDEICTIC: Now rarely used Aristotelian term for the type of rhetoric used chiefly to please an audience, as in encomium. See also deliberative, forensic.

EPIGRAM: A concise aphorism with moralizing overtones, which ensures that they will have a rich history in visual illustration. A notable example is Landseer's Man Proposes But God Disposes.

EPIGRAPH: The inscription of a motto or similar on a coin, relief, titlepage and the like. The study of such things collectively is called epigraphy.

EPIPHANY: A sudden manifestation of divine insight, as in Bellini's Ecstacy of St. Francis. When the term is used figuratively to indicate a sudden intuitive insight, especially in popular criticism, readers should cautiously note whether the writer is seeking to persuade through emotional rhetoric.

EPIPHENOMENALISM: The doctrine that consciousness is a product of neural activity in the nervous system (i.e., an epiphenomenon of material existence). See mind-body problem.

EPIPHENOMENON: An accessory or accompaniment to some phenomenon, but considered incidental to it and not a causal factor in its development. It might be worth considering whether certain types of art criticism really consider specific artworks basically ignorable epiphenomena of the systems under examination. For example, one of the commonly repeated complaints regarding Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art was that it said virtually nothing about art per se (cf interpretive agnosia). In Grounds of Dispute, John Tagg defends himself against Donald Kuspit's similar objections by stating that criticism has lost its object -- i.e., that as criticism is socially marginalized, it loses its institutional security and its privileged methods and soon comes to realize that its object never had an independent existence but was constituted by criticism itself (see constitutive). While this is certainly an important issue, it places sole emphasis on context and tends to treat the artwork as an epiphenomenon instead of as autoptic evidence. See also insufficiency.

EPISODE: An incident which, when taken as a step in a sequential series of incidents -- regardless of the order of the sequence -- constitutes a narrative. The individual scenes in the iconographic programs of medieval churches could be so described. The word is also used as a loose synonym for "installment," as in an episode of a sitcom.

EPISODIC: A literary term applied to structures of stringed episodes which do not necessarily follow a logical pattern or even seem to develop the plot. The Fragonard Progress of Love paintings in the Frick Gallery could possibly be described as episodic.

EPISTEME: A Foucauldian term, deriving from epistemology and "-eme" (the smallest significantly distinctive unit of a structure, like a morpheme, phoneme, seme or sememe), to mean something along the lines of "distinctive units of the social institutions (e.g., relations of power) which give shape to what we think of as knowledge." Foucault himself wrote more allusively in The Order of Things: "what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge ... manifests a history ... of its conditions of possibility.... Such an enterprise is not so much a history ... as an 'archaeology'." John Tagg's Grounds of Dispute reads much as a series of essays exploring one such episteme, the discursive field (see discursive practices) created by the intersection of art history and cultural politics. See space.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL HEDONISM: In the first issue of Swift (1997), a newsletter of skepticism and debunking of claims of the paranormal, professional magician Jamy Ian Swiss characterized credulity and uncritical acceptance of unrepeatable and unprovable phenomena like astrology, spoon-bending, UFOs, etc., as "'epistemological hedonism,' i.e., if it feels good, believe it." Needless to say, this is anathema to skeptics.

EPISTEMOLOGY: Philosophy concerned with theories of knowledge -- i.e., what knowledge is, how it is obtained, how reliable it is, and so on. The basic opposition is between rationalism and empiricism, but there are all sorts of intermediary positions. Not the least of them is Kant's synthetic a priori, which allowed for an account of art, among other things. Cf skepticism.

EPISTROPHE: See palilogy.

EPITAPH: Inscriptions and the like marking a burial place.

EPITHET: A characterizing word or phrase appearing with or in place of a name or thing, as in Homer's "rosy- fingered dawn." They need not be disparaging, although they often are in satire. See transferred epithet.

EPITOME: A summary or typical example of something. Chartres Cathedral might be called the epitome of Gothic church design, which would mean not that it represents the best of what was available, but that it is typical of what was available.

ÉPOCHÉ: Suggestions anyone?

EPONYM: A name so closely linked to a characteristic, a place, or some other general thing that it comes to stand for that. Examples are Machiavelli (deceit, treachery), Romulus (Rome), Bowdler (bowdlerize), and so on. The principle operates when artists' names are used to characterize general tendencies in the arts.

ERASURE: Suggestions anyone?

ERISTIC: Fond of wrangling, as in people who argue for the sake of argument. The word is sometimes used in place of polemics.

EROTIC: Pertaining to sexual love or desire. Although one commonly finds "erotic" ditsinguished fundamentally from pornography, the dividing line between the two is by no means as clear as etymology would suggest (i.e., erotic from eros [love], pornography from porne [sexual servitude]). As a result, there is considerable debate regarding the definition and role of the erotic in such things as appetitive drive, the critique of representation, the erotics of engagement, people who are libidinally driven, and so on.

EROTIC-FOR-MEN: See erotic-for-women.

EROTIC-FOR-WOMEN: Phrase coined by Joanna Frueh to distinguish the conventionally erotic, which she sees as really erotic-for-men and therefore an expression of scopophilia. She argues that erotic-for-women has more to do with the sense of touch because this is the primary way women explore their sensuality, whereas men see the principle sign of their sex. See her "Erotic as Social Security," Art Journal 53.1 (Spring 1994).

EROTICS OF ENGAGEMENT: Jane Gallop's term (in Art in America, [November 1984]) to designate a sexuality that resides not in the object -- e.g., within a nude human figure -- but in an intersubjective dynamic -- i.e., the encounter with that object. She uses the notion to ask if psychoanalytic criticism looks for sexual subject matter, however deeply disguised, or if it finds all subject matter sexual. Mainstream Freudians describe the experience of the male child as a move from dependency on the mother to detachment from her in the recognition that she has been "castrated" (see castration). Gallop describes psychoanalytical criticism as an analogous rebellion against the object's power and assumption of superiority over it due to its "lack" -- i.e., its need for interpretation.

ESEMPLASTIC: Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented this word to indicate the faculty of the mind that can fuse unrelated things into a poetically organic unity. It is a useful idea, but postmodernism is generally suspicious of the aesthetic (see aesthetics) holism it implies.

ESSENTIAL COPY: Norman Bryson maintains that artwriters who look only for realism in a painting overlook historical and social dimensions in favour of the esential copy -- i.e., the empty verisimilitude of the painting's ability to convince the viewer that it "is" the thing, instead of "meaning" the thing.

ESSENTIALISM: Any of a variety of notions concerning the primacy of essences -- i.e., permanent, unchanging, "real" identities that lie "behind" appearances -- rather than the temporary, changing, specific manifestations themselves. The most common essentialisms are the Platonic doctrine of universal types and the originally Aristotelian doctrine that things in a particular category all have at least one common characteristic without which they could not be members of that category. Essentialism is frequently attacked in postmodern writings as a kind of wooly wishful thinking, especially when it is thought to have been produced by unreflective racists or sexists. A regrettably common example might be something along the lines of an art criticism which insists that women's work is essentially feminine -- meaning that it is lacking in certain supposed formal strengths and is preoccupied with "minor" subject matter, like pastel-coloured flower paintings.

ETHICS: Popularly, the (moral) standards which a particular group sets to distinguish acceptable behaviour from unacceptable behaviour. Philosophical ethics has a long and complicated history. See meta-ethical, normative ethics.

ETHNIC: Deriving originally from "ethnos" (nation or people), ethnic once meant any social group bound by race, customs, language, values, etc. Its current use to indicate any visible minority in a Eurocentric (see Eurocentrism) culture is often a thinly veiled reflection of an older use meaning "heathen" (non-Christian, with a spin meaning uncivilized). The word should be used with care. Cf ethnocentrism.

ETHNIC CHEERLEADING: Dinesh D'Souza (see illiberal education) used this phrase to characterize the worst aspects of required courses for the purposes of enforced multiculturalism. In fairness to D'Souza, whose extreme conservativism is easy to caricature, it should be pointed out that he did not mean every course in non-Wsetern culture, but only those which evoke a kind of Romanticism instead of clear analysis of what makes a particular culture truly worthy of study.

ETHNIC DOMAIN: Susanne Langer's once influential Feeling and Form (see also presentational symbol), in asking what certain types of art were for, proposed that the space created in an image or in architecture was not real but "virtual." By extension, architecture especially created an image of the world which was actually an expression of the self and the relations of the self to others in an ethnic domain of sorts, a system of functional relations in which signs play a less important role than the embodiment of feeling -- " the symbol of humanity to be found in the strength and interplay of forms." Ethnic, in this scheme, is not to be understood as "heathen."

ETHNOCENTRISM: The tendency to see one's own ethnic group as the norm and all others as marginal.

ETHNICITY: Ethnic identity, or the discourse which concerns it. See also hyperethnicity.

ETHNOGRAPHY: Generally, social or cultural anthropology. Among studies of art, the most overtly ethnographic are those which deal with general patterns in non-Western cultures, rather than with artist and object-centered interpretations, so that individuality and uniqueness are less highly prized than epitome. See also ethnology.

ETHNOLOGY: Sometimes synonymous with ethnography, ethnology is also sometimes distinguished from it by being less focussed on the data-gathering of field work and participant observation and more concerned with the historiography of cultures.

ETHOLOGY: Originally a branch of zoology, ethology counters behaviourism by arguing that certain types of human behaviour are innate genetic developments that had survival value in evolutionary terms. Some of these ideas are creeping into aesthetics in the form of a supposedly universal "behaviour of art," a kind of investment of value and meaning in what is otherwise valueless and meaningless by means of play and ritual. This supposedly ensures the survival of the organism by making special. Ellen Dissanayake's What is Art For? is the only lengthy study to attempt this approach.

ETHOS: The distinguishing characteristic, usually of a social group, particularly when it is a case of moral values or beliefs. By extension, in Aristotle's Poetics, the character projected by a speaker, writer, artist, etc. See also evidence, implied author.

E-TOPIA: Title of a book by William J. Mitchell (not to be confused with W.J.T. Mitchell) describing the kinds of changes he anticipates will take place in urban spaces as a consequence of the digital revolution. Mitchell foresees the home as a space in which people both live and work, redefines "public" space as any of a variety of types of electronic "meeting" areas, anticipates decentralization of the production and distribution of goods, and do on.

ETYMOLOGY: The study of the origins of words. See folk etymology.

EUPHEMISM: The opposite of dysphemism; an expression of an disagreeable state of affairs in mild or oblique terms calculated to avoid unpleasantness or offense. E.g., "to pass on" is frequently used instead of "to die." Inasmuch as day-dreaming and dream-work are supposedly palatable expressions of something which cannot otherwise be tolerated, both are euphemistic. Clearly, then, much Surrealist art could also be so described.

EUROCENTRISM: The tendency to see European culture and history as the norm and all others as marginal. It is a frequent complaint of postmodernism that what pretends to be disinterested objectivity in, for example, ethnography is actually the veiled self-interest of a white, anglo-saxon hegemony. It is clear, then, that first-year art history textbooks like Janson's History of Art and Gardner's Art Through the Ages are generally Eurocentric, despite recent valiant attempts to include more non- Western material. See also Foucauldian, postmodern catechism, power.

EVIDENCE: A legal term indicating the facts about a case that can be introduced as premises to determine a reasonable conclusion (see argument, circumstantial evidence). A great deal of published art criticism has glibly come to conclusions that are not based on what the legal world would call admissible evidence. See hearsay. There are various types of evidence: autoptic (the thing itself, like a murder weapon), character (pertaining to ethos, sometimes not admissible), exculpatory (tending to prove innocence), exemplars (forensic and other materials, like fingerprints), expert (reliance on authority figures in a given field), inculpatory (tending to prove guilt), material (objects, substances, measurable data), oral (testimony of witnesses), rebuttal (arguing against the relevance or reliability of another interpretation), and so on. Most of these conceptions have loose analogies in various types of criticism, though they are rarely addressed as such, and similar standards of acceptability, however flawed they might be, have not been articulated.

EX-CENTRIC: Those who have been pushed from a central position or marginalized by a dominant ethnic group, institutional practice, or ideology. The artwork of Black American women like Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold and that of North American Native artists like Jane Ash Poitras and James A. Luna is thus said to be ex-centric because it is produced by voices that have been traditionally suppressed. It is accordingly not to be confused with "eccentric," which means "deviated from accepted conduct."

EXCESS: In psychological and neurological circles, an excess is the opposite of a deficit. While a cognitive deficit is an impairment of mental function preventing the patient from forming a complete representation of experience in consciousness and thus deriving meaning from it, a cognitive excess is a superabundance of meaning that originates with the patient, not in the outside world. Paranoia is a good example: a car that just happens to be parked down the street might be interpreted by the paranoiac as a sign of his having been followed. Meanings read into artworks are equally a matter of excess. This observation casts an interesting light on the connotations and use of excess in writings on base materialism, indeterminacy, metaphor and polysemy.

EXCULPATORY: See evidence.

EXEGESIS: Interpretation, understood chiefly as explanation, originally of the Bible, but now of any text.

EXEMPLARS: See evidence.

EXEMPLIFICATION: See language.

EXEMPLUM VIRTUTIS: Term used in Robert Rosenblum's Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art to describe artworks whose themes are moral lessons or examples of virtue which should be emulated. The theme is particularly common in neoclassicism.

EXERGUE: A small space for an inscription, originally on coins and medallions, but now also on any other object, visual or verbal. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (see deconstruction, grammatology, quotation) has an introductory exergue of quoted material.

EXPERT: One who is supposed to have special authority, experience, knowledge, skills, and the like. See also evidence, subject presumed to know.

EXISTENTIAL CRITICISM: Criticism which downplays or undermines traditional themes and conventional methods, especially those purporting to use scientific disinterestedness, in order to investigate more personal, existential issues, as outlined under existentialism. Probably the most famous proponent is Jean- Paul Sartre.

EXISTENTIALISM: Existentialism is a heterogeneous cluster of philosophical ideas which have the common element that existence precedes essence. This mean that there is no overarching meaning in the universe beyond that which we choose to create through our actions. Endowed with consciousness, humans are confronted with the knowledge that the world is basically absurd -- i.e., it simply exists, with neither justification nor organised structure which could yield to rational analysis -- and this knowledge usually produces feelings of alienation, discomfort, fear, loneliness, and the like. Necessarily, the exploration of these feelings will be subjective, peculiar to each individual who endeavours to live an authentic existence (see authenticity) through acts of self-definition. The names most frequently associated with existentialist thought are Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gabriel Marcel, but there are distinct existential strands in the thought of currently influential figures, like Jacques Derrida.

EXPANDED FIELD: Rosalind Krauss (in October 8 [1979]) argued that persistent attempts to describe miminalism and earthworks according to the logic of modernist monuments were misleading. Instead, she noted that scultpure could be defined in terms of what is was not: "not- landscape" and "not-architecture." Borrowing freely from mathematics (Klein) and structuralism (Piaget), she then expanded the field of discourse by noting that "not-landscape" was really a way of saying "architecture" and "not-architecture" was a way of saying "landscape." (Such a relation is called a deixis.) She argued that if sculpture could be situated relative to "not-architecture" and "not-landscape," there was reason to assume that there would another term situated in a similar manner relative to both "architecture" and "landscape." This she called "site-construction." Finally, she noted that if "site-construction" could be both "architecture" and "landscape" -- and a sculpture could be neither -- then "architecture" had a relation of contradiction, sometimes called a schema, to "not-architecture," "landscape" to "not- landscape," and so on. She used the term "marked sites" to designate the position between "landscape" and "not-landscape" and the term "axiomatic structures" between "architecture" and "not- architecture." More important than simply inventing a useful new terminology, Krauss's article was an early contribution to the rejection of historicism, which she saw as an endless attempt to mitigate difference and diminish newness, in favour of a postmodern celebration of difference.

EXPENDITURE: A gift, loss, or payment through use of a resource. The idea crops up frequently in sociology, particularly where it concerns exchange rituals like the famous potlatch of the Northwest Coast. Using the word dépense, Georges Bataille added to this a Nietzschean, dionysian eruption into normal life of uncontrollable forces giving expression to man's base nature (see base materialism). Ejaculation and excretion, for example, were just different kinds of expenditure and, as such, could be understood as part of the same sorts of sociological structure. (See the Bataille anthology Visions of Excess.) Something of the idea of expenditure also plays a role in deconstruction inasmuch as potentially new meanings of texts can always be produced: the illusion of a stable, determinate meaning is thus expended.

EXPRESSING: See betraying versus expressing emotion.

EXPRESSION: See language.

EXPRESSION THEORY: Probably the most popular and long-standing notion of art is that it is the expression of the artist's emotion. Although such a simple expression theory stretches back as far as Plato, the first person to make the idea a criterion of systematic aesthetic inquiry was Eugène Véron, who wrote in L'Esthétique (1878) that "art is the manifestation of emotion...by expressive arrangements of line, form, or colour...[and/or] by a series of gestures, sounds, or words governed by a particular rhythmical cadence." While Leo Tolstoy, Benedeto Croce and many others have made significant contributions, the most thorough development of expression theory is generally agreed to be that of R. G. Collingwood. Collingwood distinguished very carefully between art and craft on the grounds that true art involved the genuine expression of an emotion and its recreation in the spectator. He also argued that true expression was not a simple matter of having an emotion and showing it (see betraying versus expressing emotion), because expression meant a coming to self-awareness. One of the implications of this line of reasoning is that art lies in the mind rather than in the object. Despite substantial differences in other regards, principally regarding how much Romanticism is acceptable (see bohemianism), a wide variety of aesthetic attitudes has held this to be a truism for many years.

EXPRESSIONISM: Any of various styles and/or movements in art giving priority to the expression of inner experience, particularly where the manifestation is conspicuously deformed or paralinguistically altered (see paralinguistic).

EXPRESSIVE: Vague, overused adjective indicating vivid or especially apt descriptions, depictions, performances, and the like, of personal moods or sentiments.

EXPRESSIVE THEORY: More or less a synonym for expression theory, used in the literary criticism of M. H. Abrams.

EXPRESSIVITY: Dictionaries define this as the quality of being expressive (in addition to an obscure genetic reference). Paul Ricoeur, however, has used it in "The Problem of Double Meaning" in The Conflict of Interpretations to describe not the expression of a particular emotion, but the fact that language says anything at all. Following A. J. Greimas and others, he says that there is no mystery in language -- i.e., the structural rules for determining meaning are accessible to all -- but there is a mystery of language: "namely, that language speaks, says something, says something about being. If there is an enigma of symbolism, it resides wholly on the level of manifestation, where the equivocalness of being is spoken in the equivocalness of discourse." He concludes by asserting that philosophy's task is to reopen discourse to the expressivity of being. See also extralinguistic.

EXTENSIONAL DEFINITIONS: Definitions which identify members of the class of things named by that term ( for example, visual arts means painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, etc.). Such definitions link our experience to the world. Without them, all words would be circular.

EXTRALINGUISTIC: Paul Ricoeur uses this word to refer to the expressivity of being: "while linguistics moves inside the enclosure of a self-sufficient universe and encounters only intrasignificant relations..., hermeneutics is ruled by the open state of the universe of signs." The term is thus not to be confused with paralinguistic.

EXTRINSIC: External; extraneous; not forming part of or belonging to a thing. In some artwriting, contextual information is characterized as extrinsic. For instance, information concerning the social circumstances under which a given artwork was produced might be dismissed or downplayed by a critic or art historian who exploited only artistic biography and who intended to demonstrate his subject's genius. Obviously, methods which emphasize social circumstances (e.g., Marxism, feminism) would argue that such "external" conditions are not really external at all but constitutive of the work of art. Cf epiphenomenon, intrinsic.

EXTROVERSION: See personality types.

EX-VOTO: Under construction.
© Copyright 1996 Robert J. Belton
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