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Introduction
(2014)
The experience of multistable figures or so-called Kippbilder - the sudden and repeated 'kippen' of perception as the same object is seen under different aspects - is fascinating in its own right. However, what animated the year-long discussion leading to this volume was a critical exploration of the proposition that such figures may offer a helpful model for thinking through the intercultural and interdisciplinary effort of productively negotiating between conflicting positions.
The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality.