Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Interpretive Methods

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Ghost Metropolis employs two general strategies for recounting the past: interpretive and analytical.  Both approaches take narrative form, so "interpretive narrative" and "analytical narrative" would be the most accurate characterization.  I follow Wilhelm Dilthey's stance that the "human sciences" (humanities) are intrinsically interpretive disciplines, whose goal is understanding of values, purposes and meanings.  Because all humans are situated in historical contexts, all, including the observer/historian, must interpretive their worlds through the complex of situated institutions and discourses that shape each individual.  Historians, therefore, are interpretive beings who interpret other interpretive beings, across gulfs of time and space.

I also adopt, in several essays in Ghost Metropolis, a social-scientific analytical approach.  In this mode, the goal is to explain social outcomes, through a scientific process of hypothesis-testing applied to variables.  As a historical institutionalist, this mode is often apparent.  It is especially apparent in the quantitive-statistical essays in the "Segregated Diversity" Path.

I owe my greatest debts to the phenomenological, pragmatic, and existential traditions, beginning with Dilthey and James, through Bergson and Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, de Beauvoir, Ricoeur, and Casey.  Drawing from Simmel's students Benjamin and Kracauer, along with the Frankfurt tutelage of Horkheimer and Adorno, through their student Habermas, I have long attempted to develop an effective framework to interpret public and mediated discourse.  Language, always historically situated in place-time, is a form of action and inscription.  Human and non-human animals alike write themselves into landscapes. Inscribed action endures, at every scale of time, from seconds and minutes to years and generations.  

Overall, I identify with the aporetic tradition, beginning with Aristotle, through Nietzsche, Simmel, and Wittgenstein.  These philosophers did not seek to build "systems," like Kant, Hegel, and the many "founders" of sociology in the 1890s (e.g. Durkheim, Weber).  Rather, like Montaigne in his Essais (1570-1592), they chose to examine the world one puzzle (aporia) at a time.  The path through sociology that I follow most consistently is that of Georg Simmel, to whom he owes the insight to focus on the metaphoric with the geometric sense of space.