Theory and Methods
The goal of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present in order to explain and interpret* a region that became a center of world power by the end of the 20th century and produced an American tyranny. I have used many theories and methods, and developed several new ones, to reach these goals.
Although Ghost Metropolis as a whole is not freighted with theoretical language or methodological discussions, it is nevertheless a matter of great importance for those who evaluate this work critically as scholarship and as narrative art, to know how this work is conceived and executed. Following Norman Mailer's method in Armies of the Night (1968), Ethington will henceforth review Ethington in the third person.
Only a mere precis is presented here, to much larger, deeper explorations Ethington has published as theoretical and methodological articles in applied humanistic social and natural sciences, from the years 1992-2014.Note. Ghost Metropolis is a historical work built with the tools of many disciplines. Its theoretical framing is necessarily diverse.
Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible as a three-dimensional form of narration and mapping. Those three dimensions are: 1) the linear chronological narrative, recounting actions by actors; 2) the visual encounter with the past in photographs, graphic arts, and motion pictures, and 3) the cartographic: visualizing the topography of human action. Each of these dimensions is historical and chronological, but there is no single, privileged timeline or narrative.
The intersection of the philosophical and theoretical and disciplinary paths taken by Ethington to create this work can be summed up in a paean to the embodied social individual, whose understanding of the world and intentions for action are entwined in historically unique topoi, metaphorically and geometrically producing place even as they are grounded in it. Persons, communities, networks, groups, and all plural assemblages of individuals and their means of communication, are also suspended in webs inscribed institutions, which resonate through metropolitan regions and regions of any social system,
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. (Ethington 2007)
Ethington owes his 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. From Simmel's students Benjamin and Kracauer, along with the Frankfurt tutelage of Horkheimer and Adorno, through their student Habermas, Ethington has long been at work on public, mediated discourse. Language, always historically situated in place-time, is 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.
Ethington also identifies 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 socioloigy followed most consistently by Ethington is that of Georg Simmel, to whom he owes the insight to focus on the metaphoric with the geometric sense of space.
His minor 1997 work on Georg Simmel's spatial theory in Cybergo, (the European Journal of Geography) became a reference point in the "spatial turn" sparked by Lefebvre and Foucault, Bachelard, and Soja. As a political scientist, Ethington has long participated in historical institutionalist movement, including a generative two years in the Workshop on American Political Development seminar at the Harvard School of Government, organized and led by Theda Skocpol. Ethington's publications in the 1990s featured an association with the Cambridge journal Studies in American Political Development, edited by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronick. As a U.S. historian, Ethington is both an urbanist and a participant in the "global turn," which seeks to embed any episode of U.S. history in a fluid context that very requires recounting events and actions at every scale, from personal to local to regional to continental to global and even interplanetary.
