Field Composing
A working publication form.
A field composing is a kind of writing. Each composition has three parts that do different work: one installs how the composition is to be read; one makes its diagnoses navigable; one holds them in duration. The parts diagnose different dimensions of the same field and do not stand on the same line.
Field composings are self-published, in process, distinct from blogs and from finished books. They include the visibility of their own becoming.
On AI co-composition
The compositions on this site are made with AI as part of their working infrastructure. This is named openly. The form does not pretend the AI isn't there, and it does not pretend the AI is a co-author either.
Where AI work shaped the architecture of the text, the text shows it — through marginalia (the small trace and note markers in the left margin) where specific moves were rehearsed, revised, or arrived at through co-writing. The marginalia are part of what is published, not a making-of.
The author remains primary. The AI is infrastructure — like a piano is infrastructure for what a pianist plays. The instrument shapes what is playable; the piece is played by the player.
Compositions
On sources
Each chapter relates to its sources in one of four ways. The relation is not editorial decoration — it carries epistemological weight: how the source's knowledge enters the composition, how much of its frame comes with it, and what jurisdictional limits the composition recognises.
- [type a — inadvertent witness]
- The source's data shows something its own framework cannot fully see. The data is read here against that framework — used, not adopted. The source's interpretive categories are explicitly recomposed.
- [type b — architectural source]
- The source structures part of the chapter's analytical apparatus. Concepts and analyses from the source operate as architectural companions; their development in the source is preserved as background grammar.
- [type c — imported with transformation]
- A concept from the source is recomposed in this chapter's vocabulary, not used as in the source. The import is named as import; the transformation is made visible. Often carries appropriation risk that the chapter's compost signal foregrounds.
- [type d — contact surface]
- The source touches a jurisdictional limit — ceremonial practice, sovereign knowledge systems, ground the chapter does not cross. The boundary is named, not crossed. No import, no transformation — only acknowledgement of where the chapter's own vocabulary has to stop.