The societies we study in books, the societies that make up the past, which have left an iridescent pool of detritus or have vanished leaving almost no trace, like bird tracks, all obeyed the need to negotiate, clash and be reconciled with something external to themselves. And from that external thing they drew their finest strength. Or they became chattels of the Despot, who governed them for his own ends—the ends of an individual against those of everyone else. The society into which we are born is the first, in the history of the planet, that seeks to be self-sufficient and answerable only to itself. The names of the Outside exist now only in dictionaries, apart from the word nature: but nature today indicates first and foremost a sequence of social facts or, at most, accidents. This is another reason why we have to find a different name for this kind of society, and calling it post-historical signifies that the whole of history, in comparison, now appears like a panorama of ruins, an inexhaustible contagion.

In 1908, during twelve weeks of visionary experience, the first post-historical city appeared to Alfred Kubin: its name was Pearl.

History: transformations (events described in history books) happen against an order that presents itself as stable. It is an order of substances, of correspondences, of analogies. The invisible, omnipresent, inevitable axis of the world.

Post-history: transformations are implicit in the experimental nature of order, which presents such character as stable.

Today we can recognize the great naïveté of those (and they were many) who in the nineteenth century accused the new age of “materialism.” The hidden and imperative gnosis of the modern age assumes, in fact, that all is spirit and that spirit is the most pliable of materials.

“It’s no more than x plus y”—today this phrase, more than any other, has full right to rank as Commonplace. We hear it repeated in many forms: it is the wisdom of the man in the street, the insight of the psychologist, it goes with the fixed smile of the researcher: “Life? There’s nothing to be surprised about, it’s physics plus chemistry.” And then we hear the second voice, which Bloy has taught us to recognize in Commonplaces. For something to be “nothing more than,” some part of it has to be useless, negligible, voidable. This part is its very appearance, the letter, which has to be replaceable with its components. But as soon as we express this formula, a suspicion arises: that the world before us is one of patent esotericism, that it has rejected the nexus with the exoteric, that the letter is no longer a protective shell but the secret meaning itself.

Capitalism: the economic name for an immense upheaval in the brain, the supremacy achieved by exchange—hence by digitality—over all things; every other principle becomes an island within it, just as there are tribal islands inside the global market. Socialism itself, fraternal enemy of capitalism, depends on capitalism in the same way that a Salvation Army leaflet echoes the verses of Isaiah. In theory, that is. In practice, when socialism is then applied to correct the intrinsic evils of capital, it immediately produces far greater evils, while having no effect on those evils it counters. And this time they are more loathsome evils, since they are more human. In the crudity of capitalism, one element of ordeal remains: money. In socialism, which has the most inept goal—namely to place everything in the hands of man—there is no longer a dark extra-human discriminating factor, such as money. In its place there are new priests: spies.