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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 Credits Root

Theory and Methods

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Visual | Interpretive | Institutional | Spatial | Quantitative | Narrative | Digital | Bib

I have labored for years to sharpen tools that are versatile, powerful, and also, when needed, delicate and fine-tuned enough, to help us both know (saber) and to understand (conocer) so giant and diverse of an entity as the global metropolis of Los Angeles. This page is a mere introduction to a much larger effort I have made in several theoretical and methodological articles, to broaden the tool set for historical research and representation. Those essays can be found in my overall bibliography (see link above).

While I wrote the narrative essays in the vocabulary of common English speech, Ghost Metropolis is based on theoretical work I have conducted for more more than two decades, and most of that work is written in very technical language, specific to several disciplines. Ghost Metropolis is a historical work built with the tools of many disciplines, from the social sciences to the humanities, and so its theoretical framing is necessarily diverse: the theories underpinning the social sciences and the humanities, natural sciences and the latest emergent field of neuroscience, descend from very different intellectual genealogies.

The discussion in the next two paragraphs summarizes very quickly the intellectual pathways I have taken and the basic premises of the work as a whole. I also offer far more detailed introductions to my theory and methods on pages specific to the several discourses involved, and each of these points to my publications that delve more deeply into the various questions involved:

In the philosophies of knowledge, understanding, and cognition, I owe my greatest debts to the phenomenological, pragmatic, and existential traditions, beginning with Dilthey and James, through Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, Ricoeur, and Casey. But in philosophy, I also identify with the aporetic tradition, beginning with Aristotle, through Nietzsche, Simmel, and Wittgenstein. These philosophers did not seek to build "systems," like Hegel, but rather, chose to examine the world one puzzle (aporia)at a time. I am also very influenced by work in the cognitive neurosciences, from Schneewind to Lakoff, and have joined that with the emergent field of visual studies, and the much older field of art history. There my debts are to Erwin Panofsky and the acid criticism of Art Forum in the 1970s. I have participated, in real time, in the "spatial turn" sparked by Lefebvre and Foucault, Bachelard, Soja. In political science, I have long identified with the historical institutionalists, especially the work of Theda Skocpol, and the "American Political Development" school associated with Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronick. Among U.S. historians, I have participated in, and identify with, the "global turn," which seeks to embed any episode of U.S. history in a fluid context that very requires recounting events and actions in every continent of the globe. Underlying my whole endeavor has been a desire to emulate Fernand Braudel's great masterpiece of interdisciplinary history and regional geography, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949).

Putting these various disciplines together has been my ongoing theoretical and methodological project during the fourteen or so years that I have labored to produce Ghost Metropolis. Indeed, I have been driven to invent theoretical tools and methods for my own use, or else goals of the research program would have been unreachable.

The intersection of all these philosophical and theoretical and disciplinary paths can be summed up in a paean to the embodied individual, whose understanding of the world and intentions for action are inseparably "grounded" in that persons' socio-spatial position and place.

All human action takes and makes place.
The past is the set of all places made by human action.
History is a map of those places.

The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. This takes us from the realm of underlying theories to the theory and method of its outward presentation of the work. The textual, spatial, and visual dimensions of the past are here presented simultaneously and in parallel.

Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives.

I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together.

This page is referenced by:

Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000
Note: This edition of Ghost Metropolis can be sampled with free access to this page, the Preface, Reader's Guide, Narratives, Genres, Theory and Methods, and Credits, and the entire essay Crossroads of the LA Metropolis: The Four-Level Interchange and Bunker Hill. Full unrestricted access to the entire forty-two visual-spatial-narrative essays, paths, and networks, is available for the price of 0.99 cents.
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Ghost Metropolis is a global history of Los Angeles since the earliest human habitation, presented as a hybrid of textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print and online formats. It aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. Past actors inscribed their labors into the landscape and left the scene; their actions haunt every subsequent inhabitant--shaping later lives invisibly. The spirits of our creative predecessors, whose who did great and just things, are also celebrated in Ghost Metropolis. They haunt us as friendly helpers.Other spirits haunt us not with a retrospective dream, but as an ever-present nightmare: brought to us by the spirits of the unquiet dead, whose justice remains to be served.

Simlodon californicus, the saber-toothed cat who ruled the region until conquered by the first humans, is the original demon haunting El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Ángeles, The town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. The past is the landscape of what took place. The present is the past of human labor inscribed and projected beyond the deaths of each generation, haunting every global landscape. Historians make the ghosts of the past visible. Ghost Metropolis maps the past to give the living a guide into it, not merely for the sheer pleasure of reading narratives in text, cartography, photography, and video, but ultimately for the goal of accountability. The blood of countless generations stains the streets of Los Angeles. Ghost Metropolis seeks to make the ghosts of The Angels visible, readable, knowable, and therefore accountable. This work follows several models: Livy's history of Rome, Ab urbe condita (53 BCE); Plutarch's Lives (c. 100 CE); Cervantes's Don Quijote (1601-15); Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (1949). Equally a visual work, Ghost Metropolis is a 21st-century “Atlas,” inspired by the Renaissance atlases of the 16th and 17th century: rich mixtures of typography, graphic arts, and cartography. It owes a deep debt to the Renaissance cartographers: Gerardus Mercatur, Abraham Ortelius, Joan Bleau. My own Ghost Maps are extensions of this tradition. This is also a work of the photographic and cinematic age. Ghost Metropolis draws these previous textual and visual traditions together into a multimedia work of storytelling and argumentation.

Ghost Metropolis is also a global history of a mightily influential global metropolis. Founded by conquering and imperial regimes, Los Angeles has shaped world history. The stories I tell are recounted at every scale: local, metropolitan, regional, national, and global. Please visit the Reader's Guide, which explains and maps the conceptual structure of paths and the weblike network intersections. Preamble Los Angeles, California, United States of America, is the heart of the Southern California region, a global metropolis so huge and complex that its weight in world history would be impossible to calculate. This graphic history attempts to tell its story, since the beginnings of the city as a permanent settlement. Los Angeles has devoured millions of immigrants, harbored millions of residents, birthed millions more. It breathes in and exhales tens of millions of visitors daily and yearly through its ports, airports, and highways. Its gargantuan human population--16.5 million in 2000--is drawn from all continents of the Earth. These teeming millions stand atop the shoulders of the many millions who preceded them as settlers and sojourners, each individual altering the region in some way, small or large. These millions--since the age of Smilodon the sabre-toothed cat and the long-tusked Mammoths, through the Age of Aerospace, of which Los Angeles served as founding global capital--have been drawn to Los Angeles for the riches and freedoms and pleasures that it promises, and has promised, for thousands of years. Los Angeles has been the site of joy and beauty for many, but it has also been a deadly siren, devouring its lovers in chronic and spectacular paroxysms of repression and social violence. The ghosts of the injustices of the past haunt us in the form of institutions of unequal power etched into the landscapes all around us. Also surviving among these ghosts are the institutional beginnings of human rights, the echos to our ears and reflections to our eyes, emanating from past champions of justice. While Ghost Metropolis lies on the cynical side of historical appreciation, it also shines a spotlight on those who have contributed creative spirit to the future triumph of peace and justice, so that hope may endure for a metropolis that promotes the human rights of all.

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