Two Inter-s: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality

Internationality

So far in these lectures I have advocated an engagement with Europe detached from identity, one that is open to, and respectful for and even taking enjoyment in difference, but not indifference. Quite the contrary: I am calling for a form of identity with an expectation and a promise of relationality. Europe needs such a commitment if it wants to be a union. The mode of living in what I have called ‘being in-between’ entails a relationship with others, persons, groups, and cultures, even in cases where linguistic difference makes communication difficult. Here, I wish to continue that reflection considering different usages of that preposition inter- in its usual form derived from Latin. I will discuss two ‘inter-ships’, composite words that contain inter- that yield quite different consequences – at least, at first sight. As thinkers, academic or not, in what we call interdisciplinarity we are frequently confronted with the difficulty, comparable to that of European multilingualism, of not knowing in enough depth another discipline that we are engaging with. And as a European and a traveller, I cannot avoid that other form of inter-: internationality. Different at first sight. I will begin with internationality, but the transition to interdisciplinarity will be more flexible than we might expect.

‘Internationality’ as a noun is not used frequently. It sounds abstract. But the qualifier ‘international’ is quite common; it is used so frequently that it becomes almost abstract. Hence, inter- is at stake, even if both the rare use of the noun and the frequent use of the qualifier hamper more profound reflections. Europe is bound to internationality. The paradox of my plea for relationality as an encounter with respected differences is clarified in a recent study of history – and I must warn you, this is not really my field – by Glenda Sluga.

In that solid and creative study, Sluga (2021) analyses lucidly and in detail how, after Napoleon, Europe was slowly reinvented according to concepts that were then current. The book condenses everything I would like to bring up in the processual side of that enduring and ‘Saharic’ invention (Buydens, 2005). The principle that matters for the imagination of a unified Europe that remains international was sewn two centuries ago in the practices of diplomats – official ones like Metternich (1773-1859) and unofficial ones, often women, headed by the thinker-creator Germaine de Staël (1766-1817). The temporal vision of Sluga’s rich and convincing history only makes sense as pre-posterous, as an example of inter-temporality (Sluga, 2013, 2015).

Between offices and salons, conversations among women, discussions among men, reflections, sometimes even mixed between the two groups, conceptions and creations, sometimes Babylonic, have not stopped to ‘essay’. The connection between national autonomy and the federation of nations, at the heart of the problem of Europe, remains precarious. Sluga’s (2021) book, significantly titled The Invention of International Order, contains a chapter on Europe that explains lucidly the tensions between those two poles in the invention of Europe. Given the title, which contains the words invention and Europe, I find it fascinating that it is only in the fifth chapter of the book that Europe as a creation of thinkers and creators is analysed, after chapters on diplomacy, war and peace, politics, public and private. All these subjects are subordinated to the paradox that produces tensions.

In relation to this Annual Chair mentioned earlier and the present moment, it seems relevant that the words denoting political abstractions were not yet thought up, while they have become so important not only for describing, but for practicing European politics in internationality. Inventing this sort of words is part of the activities facilitated by the semiosphere, in this case the European one. The historian attributes to Germaine de Staël the invention of key words like ‘liberalism’, ‘nationalism’, and even ‘culture’. Obviously, the tension between the federation of countries towards nationalism and the autonomy of nations is, and has always been, the pain-point of the EU, with its great diversity of languages as a central element. But, as I keep emphasizing, that tension is productive: a joy-point. Another insight a history book of this calibre offers is to consider once more the temporal as in-between. If Metternich, a conservative statesman-diplomat, was interested in the nineteenth century, to promote inter-cultural solidarity, we can notice that the inter-temporality of the anachronism of my pre-posterous history shows up again in internationality (Sluga, 2021: 295).

In connection to that solidarity, Sluga quotes a legal scholar, Jennifer Pitts (2018: 24), who analyses Metternich’s views on the tension between internationality and the nation in view of empire. The solidarity is formulated strikingly when we confront it to one of the most burning issues of our present time:

Europe was part of a wider world . . . that ought to be shaped by ‘the principle of solidarity’ and ‘balance between States.’ The ‘law of nations’ could be applied to encourage a ‘striking openness on the part of Europeans to the possibility of shared legal frameworks and mutual obligations between Christians and non-Christians, Europeans and non-Europeans. (Sluga, 2021: 78)

This idealistic appeal to solidarity among people of different religions, ethnicities, and/or nationalities has nothing anachronistic about it (in the traditional sense of that judgmental word). It is now, in the present, that such solidarity is more necessary than ever. The only element of the formulation one would wish to foreground is the binary logic of positive/negative, which leaves the negative side in vagueness. But even if we prefer today to speak of ‘diversity’, the spirit of this proposition would still be very welcome in our present.

Studying history serves especially that purpose: without the linearity of chronology that implies the acceptance of the illusion of progress as well as comparisons that foreground both similarities and differences, the study of history can help us to understand the past not as detached from the present, but rather in a mutual relationship with it. This is again a form of being in-between, temporally articulated. If I invoke the reasoning of historians, it is with the goal of connecting inter-temporality with inter-nationality. For, as the works of Sluga and many others demonstrate, the idea and even the existence of nations are subjected to a Saharic aesthetic. If there are borders, these are framed by the ambiguity that Inge Boer (2006) has analysed: both line, limit, and demarcation, on one side; and a space of negotiation on the other. Hence, ‘Saharically’ instable.

In the present, for example, when it concerns businesses, internationality does not let them off the hook of the fiscal laws of the countries where they are established. But as the situation of Ukraine demonstrates, those borders do not guarantee at all a European landscape with fixed limits or forms. This makes the international modes of life in Europe even more fascinating. Whether one likes to travel or is obliged, for reasons of work or other reasons, to emigrate to another European country, temporarily or permanently, apart from bureaucratic rules for which my impatient temperament has no time, one always has the opportunity to do what Hayden White (2022; see also Lund, 2022) recommended: to identify in order to be in-between, in relationality, with those others whom one didn’t know before the adventure.

It is impossible, in view of Metternich’s statement, even if anachronistic in the bad sense, to leave out of the reflection on internationality the issue of refugees and immigration. I mention these two words separately, since refugees are usually distinguished from immigrants by the degree of necessity that has pushed them to leave their homes. When we say ‘refugees’ we think of people who have fled the country where their lives were in danger, mostly due to a war. The endless civil war in Syria, lasting for over a decade, for example, has incited many Syrians to seek security in European countries. Upon arriving there – I am thinking of the city of Berlin, where many of them end up – they are obliged to, and need to, enter a new environment that allows their being in-between. This extends beyond needing to learn German, to also learning modes of living (finding an apartment). This has often been called ‘integration’, a term a bit problematic because of its resonance with the obligations imposed by the nation-state.

The American anthropologist John Borneman (2011, 2007) has done long-term ‘field’ studies on, or rather, with Syrians in Berlin. The intimacy produced by continuous contact, which led to enduring friendships, facilitates an understanding that is much more profound and close-up than research containing philosophical and statistical reflections, which is also important but insufficient. Borneman hesitates and reflects on possible better terms than ‘integration’. For refugees, he proposed the term incorporation. That term resonates with ideas like ‘infusion’, ‘introjection’, the relationship between interior and exterior, ‘incorporation’, and contains – the key aspect – the idea of the body. In English this resonates with ‘embodied’. The relevance of this association with the body becomes even clearer when we consider his co-edited book Digesting Difference: Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging (McKowen and Borneman, 2020). That title, and the active form of the verb ‘to incorporate’ also draws attention on the temporality of the state of refugee. A state that is not an identity. Irritated, even humiliated by pity and charity as well as by hostility and indifference, many refugees consider incorporation as a transitional state, which ends when the person feels sufficiently at ease in the new country; sufficiently ‘Germanized’ to pass for an immigrant, no longer in need of hard efforts. Because immigrants, obviously also motivated by the wish to better the quality of their lives, are not in immediate danger of their lives.

I have always thought that anthropology was the discipline closest to my interests. Without the specialised studies of Borneman, but with a comparable attitude – and here, we approach the transition to the next inter- – I have undertaken beginning in 2002 to make a series of what I have called ‘experimental documentaries’, not about but with immigrants. That shift from about to with is the central issue of the experimentation. Because of that shift my films cannot be considered classical documentaries. Nor had I been trained in filmmaking. But thanks to encounters with persons better trained in the cine-profession and of the same socio-political persuasion, I was able to exercise the disciplines and practices needed. As a team, the first film of this genre we made, entitled A Thousand and One Days, with its clear allusion to the Arabic literary classic, it was necessary, or let’s say desirable, to enter into the social body of the family of the main characters – to incorporate into it. ¹ As guests, we were warmly welcomed and I can say that an enduring friendship ensued, one which continues to this day. But for the question of interdisciplinarity, which I now want to integrate in my reflections on inter-, I must mention the knowledges, the understandings, the glimpses about immigration – in this case, into France – but also the identification with, rather than the identity of, that would never have achieved the profound level of cultural analysis without the determination to do the research with the people. Only in that closeness, that we can now call incorporation, is it possible to learn new things about being in-between.

Interdisciplinarity

In my view as a teacher and researcher, the second inter- functions differently. This is inevitable, since the entities among, or rather between, must establish a relationality of a very different order than that between nations. With a passion for the democratisation of knowledge, I am constantly looking for an understanding of art in the socio-cultural context in which it functions, and the one from which it has emerged. In that perspective, the borders between disciplines lose much of their relevance. They become porous. And in my teaching, my first ambition has always been to provide students with the means to perform their own work of analysis. To impart an autonomy of spirit that encourages them. I distinguish interdisciplinarity from ‘multidisciplinarity’, where a group of scholars from different disciplines collectively examine a specific problem. In medicine, for example, this can be useful. Nor am I enthusiastic about ‘transdisciplinarity’, which consists of choosing a theme, such as the well-known misogynistic example of the nasty stepmother, and then considering and comparing its recurrence in art, opera, theatre, and worst of all, religious canonical texts, frequently wrongly interpreted. That encourages simplification which, in turn, incites stereotyping. In contrast, in a true inter-disciplinarity, the encounter occurs among aspects, guidelines of disciplines, historical periods, media, ethnicities, and also, scale: between detailed, close analysis and provisional generalisations, as well as between the local and the global.

Such encounters must be supported with methodologically responsible tools. If not, the analyses depend entirely on the competencies of individual analysts and lack grounds of comparison and intersubjectivity. Hence, they are not teachable. Nevertheless, between or among disciplines, concepts as tools for intersubjectivity are not fixed. Their meanings, usefulness, and operational value differ. Those processes of differentiation must be overtly discussed before, during, and after each attempt. Their flexibility helps to avoid rigidity as well as arbitrariness and neglect. At the same time, it mobilizes the imagination and identification. With the help of those serious discussions one can develop research questions outside of the pre-established paradigms within each singular discipline. Instead of those ‘apriorisms’, one can accept guidance by distinct disciplinary fields without the necessity of becoming experts (no need to obtain diplomas in each encountered discipline). But without the necessity of obeying the methodological rules reigning in each participating discipline. Instead, I plead for the priority of concepts as I did in my book (2002) on the subject, now (twenty years later), also published in French. Concepts are the tools of intersubjectivity: they facilitate discussions on the basis of a common language. But concepts are not fixed; they travel, among disciplines, individual scholars, historical periods and academic communities geographically dispersed.

Let me give a linguistic example. It comes from Greek, of which I have practically forgotten everything I had learned in high school. In 2016, Maria Boletsi (2016), a specialist of modern Greek language and culture who teaches at the University of Amsterdam, published an article in The Journal Greek Media and Culture, which was reiterated in a publication for Documenta, an event and publication devoted to visual art. When we think of Greek culture today it is less of the alleged tragedies, the genre of which William Marx (2022[2012]) has effectively deconstructed the stereotype, than it is of the economic problems that this member-state of the EU suffers. At the centre of Boletsi’s article is the verbal form of the ‘middle voice’ (μέση φωνή, pron. mèsi phoni). This form is easily relegated to linguistics – hence, to a rather formalist discipline the social relevance of which is not self-evident. But it helps us to imagine an ethical position between, or beyond, the status of either culprit or victim, powerful or powerless. A possibility of non-binarism. Boletsi has not limited herself to that discipline. She also approached the form in visuality. She has studied street art, where the word, or slogan, of ‘Βασανίζομαι’ in the middle voice occurs surprisingly frequently. As Boletsi writes (2016: 5): ‘It could be (partially and inadequately) translated as ‘“I suffer”, “I torture/torment myself” or “I am (being) tortured/tormented” are possible but partial translations but “I am in torment” comes the closest to the verb’s meaning. She (2016: 25) concludes that

the middle voice. . .probes the very premises of agency and responsibility in current discourses and negotiates alternative frameworks for their understanding, beyond clear-cut binaries between passive/active, guilty/innocent, victim/perpetrator, powerful/powerless.

In addition to the profound analysis of an artistic expression that avoids the elitism of art exclusively based on ‘great art’, and a reflection on the verb form known from Homer and Herodotus but still vital today, Boletsi proposes a socio-philosophical revision of the binary opposition between victim and perpetrator, which contributes to the indispensable critique of binary opposition as a mode of thinking and organizing the world. In all these aspects, Boletsi’s study is profoundly interdisciplinary as well as intermedial, which is important if we aim to revise our curricula.

This may be a good moment to recall why binary opposition is so devastating. As a mode of thinking, as a logic, binarism performs the following movements, all equally damaging for understanding: (1) it reduces complexity to simplicity, and thus helps us to understand what is difficult but at the same time makes us forget the complexity; (2) subsequently it reduces the already-reduced number of possibilities to two poles, in a strong opposition to each other; and (3) it orders those two poles hierarchically, so that one is valued and the other despised. This logic functions so that the negatively-valued pole becomes invisible, hated, despised, ridiculed, and thus administratively powerless. The structure of binary thinking is always the same. And this structure, which dominates all sectors of society, generates conflicts for which it blames those who seek to restore the complexity of and thereby take responsibility for rather than remain in a position of victimhood. For the strongest binary is that between subject and object. In other words, as long as the logic is maintained, the structure between the power brokers and the powerless people remains unchanged. This is the structure that produces racism, sexism, agism, the division between rich and poor, and other ways of disadvantaging groups that don’t have the power to demand participation, for example, the young. Language, often with a binary structure, hampers the possibility to overcome binarism. Except, as Boletsi argues, in Greek. But it is totally possible to take the form of the middle voice as a model and to learn an alternative mode of thinking. So when we adopt an interdisciplinary perspective, the human sciences are in a good place to help society to develop such a competence.

I must now call on an inter-temporal, inter-disciplinary and international thinker, who was also an immigrant son of refugees: the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) he argued that the Bible is not derived from God, but is a social construction. He builds his argument through encounters with the disciplines of philosophy, biblical hermeneutics, cultural theory, and historiography. His method allows for comparisons between different versions of the same fabula, of which I have studied one in detail (Bal, 2008). This was the story of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran. Joseph passes for one of the earliest refugees. Against the expectations of many Europeans, the socio-political tendency in the Bible is misogynistic and racist; the Koranic one, rather feminist. Spinoza’s idea allows for the establishment of a multi-focalisation as the norm. The different directions and choices of an author lead to different versions in a text. Thus, these have a normative signification. This reveals the imagination in the Spinozist sense, which makes them indispensable for the construction of meaning.

For Spinoza, the inter-cultural meaning of responsibility can be attributed to the fact that we live in a shared, divided, heterogeneous world (se Gatens and Llyod, 1999). But that responsibility can only be understood if it is not reduced to an individual, a sovereign subject; but is rather dispersed in a collective imaginary. Such a responsibility makes the preoccupations of the past and the future relevant for the present. The imagination is the primary form of knowledge for the philosopher. Beauty belongs to the imagination in that sense, impregnated as it is with the production of cultural norms that unify a society. The entire field that the imagination covers comprehends also the fantasies of the prophets that generate coherent cultural myths.

Spinozist responsibility has consequences. We are not guilty of the crimes perpetrated by our ancestors, but, nevertheless, we are responsible for their consequences. This is because we live with and in those consequences, and we benefit from them. That has an impact of the way we live in the aftermath of slavery, exploitation, and colonisation. Hence the impossibility to speak of ‘post-coloniality’. The same holds for the university administrators and managers of today, who are busy destroying the humanities in their blind chase for money. They are not guilty. But, as we all are, they are complicit with the fatal turn academic education has taken since 1999. Not guilty, but co-responsible, as we all are, with its consequences. Rejecting that responsibility constitutes the crime of indifference. Opposed to this crime, as I have argued in my 2008 book on Joseph/Yusuf, is an ‘ethics of non-indifference’. If only those decision-makers would read, perhaps not the difficult texts of Spinoza but at least the small, concise, clear and convincing book with the illuminating title, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, by Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd (1999), they might stop adhering to that damaging ideology: the binary opposition between economically fruitful disciplines and those devoted to beauty, pleasure, enthusiasm and affect. If only because all disciplines are connected. They constitute a culture. And without culture. . .see what happens. ‘True believers’ opposed to ‘pagan dogs’. And much worse.

Spinozist responsibility is anchored in the concept of the person, the subject, as a social being. It consists in back-projecting the responsibilities with which we experiment in the present on a past that is only determining from the perspective of what is in the future of that past, our present. Such a mutual, pre-posterous responsibility is anchored in memory and imagination. As such it gives agency to an individual consciousness based on collectivity. In Gilles Deleuze’s work, this is called ‘becoming’; a key concept that includes movement. And it is that lack of stability that complicates any division between ‘I’ and ‘the other’; hence, also the ostracism that results from alterity. The European semiosphere becomes a being in-between.

I have said that an interdisciplinary project does not require the complete study of another discipline. Incomplete knowledge, as all knowledges are, can easily be blamed for amateurism, for a lack of expertise, and thus make colleagues and students reject interdisciplinary work. This accusation is both right and wrong. Right because interdisciplinary work requires an effort to make serious detours through other traditions, methodologies, and contents comparable to other countries. That takes time, effort, and yields an enriching methodological creativity for the two (or more) disciplines. Wrong, because to encounter a different discipline one does not need to be an expert and earn a degree in it; just to know enough to continue responsibly.

In an analysis of the concept of performativity, Jonathan Culler has inspired me with his central metaphor of travelling, prominent in my first thoughts about Europe, where I invoked the travels of Edvard Munch as cultural movement and internship. Dangerous, fascinating and exhausting, travelling is necessary when one wishes to have new experiences. Dangerously, as Culler’s article, first travels back and forth between philosophy, where the concept was first used, and literature, where it has resolved major problems; then back to philosophy, towards cultural studies, and once more back to philosophy. His article stands out as a model for the kind of studies of ‘travelling concepts’ that I had in mind when I was considering writing a book on this subject. Like Culler’s inspiring article, my book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (2002) can indeed be read as a travel guide because

this point of arrival, with talk of a performative concept of gender, is very different from the point of departure, Austin’s conception of performative utterances, but to make your fortune, as the genre of the picaresque has long shown us, you have to leave home and, often, to travel a long way.

The work of the anthropologist, however, is more clearly divided than the relation between philosophy and literary studies. To do anthropology, one has to choose a domain, apply a method, and construct and object, as Marc Augé wrote (1992: 1) The same holds for cultural analysis, on the condition that some words are changed to indicate that the world of culture is not so easily cartographed. This is where interdisciplinarity thrives. The field of cultural analysis is not delimited because traditional delimitations must be suspended. We can call that field a methodological semiosphere. Moreover, selecting an object implies interrogating a field. Methods are not stacked in a toolbox waiting to be applied. Rather, methods are part of the exploration. One does not apply a method; one encounters, in a plural moment, in which the encountered object also participates, so that object and methods become together a new field, not clearly defined but rather ‘Saharic’.

This is where the voyage or trip occurs within the instable field of cultural analysis. Like anthropology, cultural analysis constructs an object, even if with a slightly different meaning of what that object is. At first sight, the object is simpler than that of anthropology: a text, a piece of music, a film, a painting, a ritual, a habit. However, returning from the concept of travel Culler gave us, the constructed object is no longer the ‘thing’ that fascinated us enough to have been chosen. That object is a living creature, anchored in all the questions and considerations that the mud of the trip has splotched onto it, and which surround it as a field. But there is more. Culler’s allusion to the picaresque tradition inserts an element of fiction in the act of travelling. The trips appear as detours, even if traversed in an armchair. Perhaps they appear simply on stage, in a classroom, or an office. In that sense, the fictional theatricality of the staging underlies the metaphor of the travel, as if to recall the basis of studies in the human sciences in that vast unmanageable field that is culture.

The vaster the field is, the harder it is to travel there and find one’s way. This is why, I have proposed that interdisciplinarity in the human sciences as necessary, fascinating, and serious as it is, must seek its heuristic and methodological foundation in concepts rather than methods. In spite of the simplicity of that idea and its de facto approval in articles such as the one by Culler, I am not aware of any publication that approaches its consequences frontally. The turn to interdisciplinarity in the 1990s must necessarily have been accompanied by many such articles, encyclopedias and small textbooks. However, my effort, in Travelling Concepts, was and remains to examine the practice of cultural analysis.

Practicing Inter-ship

My conviction that a methodology based on concepts is crucial emerged from my experience of teaching. During the first phase of my academic studies, the need for concepts immediately became clear. My early book (in French) Narratologie (1977) responded to that need. Since then I have been more and more immersed in the development ‘from scratch’ of a great number of doctoral and postdoctoral projects that were not easy to house within a single discipline. The reduction of the number of scholarships and, hence, of the size of classes, as well as the increasing interest for work that went beyond disciplinary borders, have yielded a loss of homogeneity within classes. From this beginning, I have felt that change as fascinating and productive – not the reduction of scholarships, but the rest of it.

I have frequently been confronted with the following situation. A philosopher, a psychoanalytic critic, a narratologist, a historian of architecture, and an art historian discuss together in a seminar on ‘signs and ideologies’. This was a topic that interested many young scholars who were impatient, enthusiastic, committed, and coming from different disciplines. The concept-word ‘subject’ kept recurring. With increasing perplexity during the discussions, the first participant assumed that the theme is the increase in individualism. The second sees in it the unconscious. The third, the voice of the narrator; the fourth, the human being confronted with space. And the fifth considers the subject the figure represented in a painting. This could be simply amusing – if only all five did not consider their own interpretation of the ‘subject’ as the only adequate one. All they did, in their own view, was ‘apply a method’. Not because they were egotistic, stupid, or uneducated, but because their disciplinary training had never given them the opportunity nor the motivation to consider the possibility that a simple word such as ‘subject’ could, in fact, be a concept, provided with multiple tentacles. Another participant questioned the usage another one made of the word. Everyone simply supposed that the other is confused and, in reaction, they disengaged with the discussion and one another. Every one of the fictional participants of this drama used the pronoun ‘we’ without specifying to whom they referred. The other members of the seminar who were listening didn’t understand what the fuss was about and fell asleep. At the moment when the participants realized that there was a misunderstanding, the seminar was over.

It was in reaction to this kind of situations that I have proposed to prioritize concepts. I tried to demonstrate how the various ways in which a concept can be devoted to an object turns it into an analytical practice that is both open and rigorous, teachable and creative. The encounter between concepts and objects is the site for differentiated yet specific functions of concepts as places for methodological opening up and reflection, without the loss of responsibility and intersubjective communication that so frequently accompanies such openness. Often, concepts partially overlap. This is due to their initial background. The overlapping of concepts is the inevitable consequence of their creation and subsequent adjustment within each of the participating disciplines. That is precisely where the work of interdisciplinarity begins. The overlapping of concepts risks provoking their confused and vague use. Concepts travel between various places: between disciplines, between words, object, and other concepts, whether half-baked or rigid.

A key case in my work has been the encounter between the concepts of focalisation and that of the look. By extension, the encounter between narratology and visual studies. The trip brings us rather far from home. Its goal is to show that it is logical to take the trouble to learn the language of the country we visit. Here, the unique concept of image comes to the fore, dressed up with three elements – focalisation, look, and view – inherited from the reflection on the concept in general. The tensions between visuality and textuality remain on the primary level; as key fields of interdisciplinarity, neither one will ever disappear from the analyses in the human sciences. As an emblem of the contested and fascinating field of the study of words and images, the word, term, or concept of image, contested and fascinating as it is, remains very ambiguous. It is lodged in the eye of the maelström of related concepts that circulate in that field, of which ‘metaphor’ is the most relevant one.

Metaphor is dualistic because it signifies the simultaneous deployment of two meanings. It can be taken and used in its literal sense, meaning ‘translation’, or, in Greek, ‘moving house’. But the ‘translation’ itself is also double, shifting between language and visuality, present and past. Both ‘translation’ and ‘moving house’ inevitably re-invoke internationality. Whereas the concept of image indicates the most objectified object in the humanities and is distinct from text in that it depends on a material support that is an integral part of the object, it is, paradoxically, by its very nature subject to dispersion, even diffusion. However, the inevitable metaphoricity of the noun ‘concept’ evokes more metaphors, like a river whose flows can be wild but must also obey the bed in which it flows. Indeed, I wish to argue for the dispersion of any concept in order to foreground that it is precisely this pluri-semic potential of the concept that affords its usefulness as a tool for analysis, thanks to the precision that remains indispensable.

But even though the analyst as much as the concepts can travel back and forth between the (academic) concept and the (cultural) practice, this does not prescribe a symmetrical itinerary. As a neighbour of ‘image’, the concept of framing, that is currently quite popular, is also a ‘normal’ word, but it can be mobilised for the resolution of the dilemma referred to above that connects theory and practice in a potentially lethal embrace. Here, however, the return trip does not follow the same itinerary as the trip forward. To reinforce the case, the ‘practice’ is here taken literally. The concept makes several back-and-forth trips between the (artistic) practice and the (academic) theory as well as between the (academic) practice and the (artistic) theory. The starting point is a simple request to do the practical work; the result is a generalised position concerning the practice within which that practice is integrated, even ‘framed’. The ‘framing’ and the act of being framed, followed by a framing that is limiting and productive, are considered auspicious for a form of analysis that does not respect borders, not even the one between the academy and cultural life.

Because the travellers can get lost if they encounter concepts that are simultaneously near, close, and distant, I must say a few words on the conceptual issue of ‘confusion’. Many complain about the travelling use of concepts, asserting the ‘lack of rigour’ with which they are (ab-)used. For instance, when the student or researcher does not even know the precise meaning or context. I have often heard such complaints regarding the frequently-used concept of the performative. ‘They don’t even know who Austin is’, said a colleague bitterly, one whose principal preoccupation is the ‘correct’ philosophical understanding of concepts. That remark made me reflect because I agree with this complaint about badly-used concepts. But, for me, the principal preoccupation is not so much a ‘correct’ but a ‘significant’ use. Concepts are frequently just used as labels. Whereas for my colleague the loss was one of precision, for me it was analytical understanding. The label does not yield perspicacity. But neither does precision alone. The concept must serve as a mini-theory that can be used in the encounter with the object.

The ‘direction for use’ for which I have pleaded concerns the possibilities to deploy concepts in the analysis, and not the analysis itself alone. If there exists a metaphor that might be useful for evaluating the specific use of a concept, it could be ‘elasticity’. For, that word suggests an unbreakable and a near-unlimited extensibility, thus invoking our Saharic aesthetic. This is the paradoxical status of concepts that help us live with and through the following dilemma: only practice can pronounce on theoretical validity, while without theoretical validity, no practice can be evaluated. Hence, it is in the double framework where thinkers and creators hold hands that we can continue to invent Europe in significant-creative ways.

Before entering into yet another in-between topic, intermediality, I am very pleased that this journal will foreground the text, based on her seminar intervention, that Professor Kamini Vellodi has generously devoted to the merging of the two inter- issues I have discussed here: internationality and interdisciplinarity. She is the editor of the new book series at Edinburgh University Press dedicated to the interdisciplinary inter-ship between art and philosophy called Refractions, of which my book Image-Thinking (2022) was the first volume. Vellodi is one of the most creative thinkers in and on visuality, and her incisive critique of the much-(ab)used concept of ‘artistic research’ convincingly undermines the implicit hierarchy still reigning in the world where artistic and intellectual activities are trying to merge (see Vellodi, 2018 and 2019).