Author(s): Vincent Garton; Edmund Berger

CRITICAL THEORY | URBANOMIC

A historian and a political economist investigate the occult forces that control history. If historians measure the passing of historical time by the explosive rhythm of progress and collapse, Vincent Garton's Aeons Without History is a handbook to its conditions of stasis and directionless suspense-the forgotten intervals of hopelessness in which empires rot and prophecies fail. The wreckage surveyed sprawls from the dawn of civilization to the triumph of the automatic world, from Uruk to Beijing. Out of the gloom, distant yet uncomfortably familiar, we glimpse entire eras in which time itself became directionless, seemingly reduced to ruin. But the edifice of antiquarianism soon begins to crumble, and beneath the surface lies something more immediate- a meta-historical conspiracy for our times. Edmund Berger's Thesis on the Metacartel begins from a similar premise- something has happened to history. The accelerative thrust of modernity has been throttled, obsolesced by molten flows of monetary mass governed and regulated by an invisible axiomatic system whose contrivances unfurl in the dark corners of offshore financial havens and in the halls of the world's central banks. Within this occult architecture, technocratic planners outline schemes for the centuries to come, acting in concert with countless spooks and hired agents who thrive in the secret anarchy of the world system. From New York to Basel, from the tropical islands of the Caribbean to the webs of interlaced development zones, the ligaments of this entity are traced and a series of theses concerning the nature of its operations is proposed. Rising up from the smog of non-history is the spectre of the Metacartel.