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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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.

The core premise of this entire work is this passage from Ethington's 2007 essay, "Placing the past":
 
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)

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  1. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from the Clovis Conquest to the Nixon Tyranny Phil Ethington