Bal proposes the concept as a mobile analytical instrument whose meaning changes as it crosses disciplinary, methodological and object-specific boundaries. Interdisciplinarity, in this account, does not require a synthetic metalanguage positioned above disciplines; it can proceed through concepts that travel, acquire friction and become partially transformed in use. The methodological operation is controlled displacement. Terms such as narrative, metaphor or meaning become diagnostic precisely because their transfer makes assumptions visible that remain tacit within a single field. This changes conceptual borrowing from a question of fidelity into one of situated translation: the useful question is not whether a concept remains identical after travel, but what its movement enables and what it distorts. Bal bridges cultural analysis, art history, literary theory and methodology while offering a strong precedent for a transdisciplinary lexicon. A Socioplastics reframing can therefore be rigorous without claiming equivalence to the source concept, provided that movement, difference and disciplinary provenance remain explicit. Relational expansion begins where lexical inheritance stops behaving like ownership.
