Field Notes

Field Notes is a sub-series of In Material Terms that defines concepts used in the main series. Every episode uses a common method. In Material Terms uses words like liberalism, mass society, and fascism in specific ways. Field Notes asks what those concepts are actually doing and provides an operable definition. The point isn’t what words are supposed to mean, what their defenders say they mean, or what a pristine definition would preserve if history were set aside. We need to know what a word does, where it operates, what it carries, and what it makes possible to see.

The first episode, Defining Concepts, lays out the four criteria that structure the series.

Defining Concepts

This episode explains the methods Field Notes uses:

  • Function: a word means what it does.
  • Historical development: a concept carries the history of the struggles it has been used to wage.
  • Material conditions: what a word does is shaped by the institutions, pressures, and arrangements in which it is being used.
  • Utility: the point is not simply to define concepts, but to use them.

Together, these criteria form a method of praxis: the unity of understanding and action. The episode explains why concepts cannot be separated from their historical record, why political language is never a neutral toolkit, and why getting a concept right matters only insofar as it helps illuminate power, clarify conditions, and make intervention possible. The episode closes by applying the method to two examples: liberalism and mass society. Same method, different concepts, different kinds of historical records, different weights of analysis. This is the starting point for Field Notes: one concept at a time, defined through what it does in the world.

  • Liberalism
    “Liberalism” does heavy lifting in describing American politics and gets used in incompatible ways. After all, the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the 20th century were committed to liberalism. This episode defines “it “liberalism” through what it has done, what it carries, what it is operating in, and what naming it precisely makes possible to see. “Liberalism” isn’t defined by the Democratic Party, although Democrats are often reproducing a mode of politics that the word names. The word is certainly not defined by the history of “the left.” It also can’t be defined purely through the… Read more: Liberalism