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.
While I deliberately wrote the narrative essays with a vocabulary of common English speech, the whole of this work 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:
Visual | Interpretive |
Institutional |
Spatial |
Quantitative | Narrative | Digital
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. underlying my whole endeavour has been a desire to emulate Fernand Braudel's great masterpiece of interdiscinplinary 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 to apply those tools, or else goals of the research program would not have been reachable.
The intersection of all these philosophical and theoretical an ddisciplinary 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' position and place. The intersection of my theoretical and methodological "groundwork" is also the region:
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 brings me from the realm of underlying theories to the outward presentation of the work, its expression in the multi-genre (multimedia) form that you, the reader, are engaging now.
