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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 Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Spatial Theory

677

"The past cannot exist in time: only in space. Histories representing the past represent the places (topoi) of human action. History is not an account of ‘change over time,’ as the cliche´ goes, but rather, change through space. Knowledge of the past, therefore, is literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of history indexed to the coordinates of spacetime."

Ethington, P. “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History,” Rethinking History 11:4 (December 2007), p. 466.

I have taken several paths toward my spatial theory of history. I began with studies of Georg Simmel, the founding sociologist who, alone among the European and American founders of sociology theorized the spatial dimension of human cognition and collective action. His theory of "social distance," which comprehends space as both metaphoric and geometric, is a theory I have sough to recover from the dilution of his American student Robert Park. From studies of social distance I moved toward a phenomenal ontology of social being that is inescapably spatial. That line of thinking is summarized in my short 2007 treatise: “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History,” Rethinking History 11:4 (December 2007), featuring critical responses from Thomas Bender, David Carr, Edward S. Casey, Edward Dimendberg, and Alun Munslow.

Simultanelusly, I sought to spatialize the social science of institutions. I began, in collaboration with Eileen McDonagh, with a reconsideration of the "Old Institutionalism," of Thorstein Veblen, Albion Small, and Frank Goodnow, in work from the founding generation of political scientists and sociologists, and an attempt to link that work to the "New Insitutionalists," led by Theda Skocpol. In my collaborations with Jason McDaniel and David Levitus, I sought to spatialize the instituitonalist tradition, asserting that every institutional has terrestrial footprint,a nd also an imangined spatial dimension of its boundaries, networks, and reach.

After that work, I purused linkages between teh spatial and the visual, all the while building-out Simmel's insight into the dual metaphoric-geometric qualities of human spacetime, as well as his quest to theorize a sociology of "forms." This led me in the direction of cognitive neurobiology, work that is summarized in my critical essay, "Sociovisual Perspective: Vision and the Forms of the Human Past," in Barbara

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Reader's Guide
about   |  narratives |  genres | methods  | credits

Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 is a large, multidimensional work about a very large and very old region. It is composed of hundreds of elemental textual and visual units in multiple genres. The reader is invited to travel through the historical Los Angeles metropolis along multiple paths and networks of textual, visual, and spatial narratives. Ghost Metropolis has a spatial-temporal-textual structure that is modeled on the metropolis itself.

Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible, so it literally visualizes the past, as a three-dimensional form of 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
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.

Readers may follow many different paths through this work. It can be read chronologically from 13,000 years ago until the present. It can be read by narrative pathways that follow the course of a general area of social and political life. It can be read across subject areas, within the same chronological period. It can also be read via intersections and networks of tags, through and between the textual and visual narratives.

The forty textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into six thematic narrative paths. Those with a Blue Link are ready for review, because they have a sufficient visual companion narrative built-out.

All essay drafts in their most up-to-date versions are accessible, via the Narrative Essays path.

Principal Narrative Paths (Path Titles in Bold)

1) Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
Regime I: Clovis Conquest: First Peoples and Megafaunal Extinction. ~13,000 calendar years Before Present (BP).
Regime II: Archaic or Millingstone Era (~10,200 B.P. to 1 Common Era)
Regime III: Uto-Aztecan Aristocracy (1 CE to 1769)
Regime IV: Spanish Franciscan Theocracy (1769 – 1822)
Regime V: Mexican Latifundia (1822 – 1848)
Regime VI: U.S. Latifundia-Commercial (1848 – 1881)
   Regime VII: U.S. Industrial-Imperial/Porfirian Borderland (1881-1940)
   Regime VIII: U.S. Military-Industrial (1940-1992)
Regime IX: U.S./Global Networked Neoliberal (1992-Present)

2) Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
Inscribing the Boundaries of Power: The Production of Governing Spaces, 1781-2000

The Boom of the 1920s: Industrial and Residential Groundwork
From Footpath to Freeway: Circulation Networks
Making Democratic Spaces: A Visual Geography of Southern California Architectural Moderism, 1900s-1960s
Avenue Journey: Central Ave to Watts
Love with Strangers: The Los Angeles Counterculture and the Birth of an Art Capital
Crossroads of the LA Metropolis: The Four-Level Interchange and Bunker Hill
Postwar Suburbia: The Commercialization of Metropolitan Space

3) Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
Manna From Hell: Petroleum and the Inscription of Power
“Doheny El Cruel”: The Chihuahua Connection
Los Ángeles contra La Raza Cósmica: The Los Angeles Counterrevolution of the 1920s
Hell’s Angels: Air and Power in a Cinematic Metropolis
The Furies: Los Angeles Industrial Mass Killing In the Second Word War
   Space Station Los Angeles: From Peenemünde to Disneyland to Mars

4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry
Ahn Chang-ho and Philip Ahn
White Shadows in the South Seas
Dolores del Río and Maria Rovitz Ramos
Radio City: Cinema’s Sister
Tarzana of the Apes
Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
Hollywood’s White Hunters
Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City

5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
Richard the 37th: The Rise and Demise of Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994
Sympathy for the Devil
The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010

6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
Segregated Diversity: Los Angeles County, 1940-2000
Placing Segregation: The Race-Ethnic Geography of Municipal Places, 1940-2000
Geopolitical Economy of Whiteness 1940-1990
The Political Geography of Race, 1940s-1990s
The Spacetime Transection: Pico-Whittier, Lakewood-Rosemead, and Sepulveda Blvd.

The location of each essay within these Narrative Paths is its "home position," because I wrote or revised most of them to belong to those series. But most Narrative Essays also belong to other paths or networks, reachable via numerous linkages within this weblike Scalar book.

The Narrative Essays that have have been woven together with a Visual Narrative can be reached via the Reviewer's Page.
Theory and Methods
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.