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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

Visual Theory and Practice

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Why is Ghost Metropolis a visual as well as a textual work? Human beings are descendants of organizims that evolved for hundreds of millions of years to sharpen spatial and visual cognitive affordances, long, long before Homo sapeins sapiens evolved the facillity of languages through semantic cognition. Vastly more grey matter of the human brain is dedicated to visual processing than semantic processing. In short, our minds are far more adept and efficient at parsing and reading visual forms than they are at interpreting language. It makes sense then, to use forms of visualization to convey very complext information, such as the collective lives and processes of a global metropolis of millions of individuals and countless sites and moving parts.

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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.