Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography
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.Note
Form ever follows function.Note
Ghost Metropolis is a work of applied theory and methodical empiricism. I have joined the strengths, as I see them, of the interpretive humanities and the explanatory social sciences, and I have joined verbal with visual and spatial argumentation. A narrative mapping of the past of Los Angeles, this work also seeks to traverse spacetime, to
I seek to show that all historical processes are grounded by their regional enactments and inscribe institutions into the Earth's landscapes; that all social power is produced by and flows through specific regions; that the production and consumption of mass media are real lived experiences and integral to political culture; that in the United States, regional political cultures succeed one another to dominate U.S. national politics. The most recent U.S. national regime is a massive realignment that was built by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, is Southern Californian in origin, and for a full understanding, must be followed back centuries in origin.
I have been inspired by, and have tried to build upon four exemplary works of historical scholarship: Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean, Carl Schorske's Fine-de-siecle Vienna, Eric Foner's Reconstruction, and William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis.
A major difference between my own approach and that of Braudel is taht I do not put "politics" on a superficial level, . I build on but depart from his "depth metaphor," as Alan McGill put it. My depth is time, not category of social being. The exercise of power, in the state, in economic instutions, and in culture itself, is an integrated whole. Culture; the world of meaning, is everywhere humans behave and interact. Ruleers rely on it to maintainpower over otehers. The state is not built on top of the economy, as the marxian tradition has ever imagined, but rather co-equual with it, deeply integrated with it, and finally, the material world is reasonably conseived f as the "foundation" of everythign in the sense that all human action tkes place. Places are the ground, quite literally, on which everythign is enaced, includeiing seemingly ephememerqal communications from movies and telvision to the internet. Alo visual culture is produced from certain places and is about certain places. So, we cannot really untangle the areas of study that have traditionally be divided into different areas of study: politics, the edonomcy, fine arts, mass culture.
In cultural and media studies I am part of a movement to place media in embodied spaces; in political science and sociology I am a historical institutionalist, but my heaviest debt is to Georg Simmel, himself sui generis; in philosophy my allegiance runs along paths of aporetic thinkers (Aristotle, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein), and especially through the phenomenologists, existentialists, and early pragmatists; in geography and history it would be hard to classify my approach according to any existing school. In the present work I attempt to demonstrate that history is geographical, that the past is a vast topography of places: topoi, and every topos has two principal dimensions: those of metaphoric and geometric spatiality. All temporality is a function of motion, or an emotion of motion, and all places/topoi are intersections in the currents of motion. Geophysical place-making is inscription of institutions into the landscape, which accumulate to produce regional differences. From these principles it is possible to map the past with new levels of interpretive understanding (humanistic inquiry) and relatively objective explanations (analytic inquiry).
Deep discussions of that author's many theoretical and methodological positions are presented here by topic: Visual | Interpretive | Institutional | Spatial | Quantitative | Narrative | Digital | Publications | Historical Scholarship.
