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.
