The Multipolar “Pressure” and the Arktos Diamond

by Jafe Arnold

Arktos editor Jafe Arnold unravels the tension behind recent disputes over “multipolarity”, positing that genuine multipolarity is a culture-building endeavor to which Arktos’s publishing has been uniquely, rightfully devoted in reimagining an authentically European pole.

The meanings of words tend to fade away. The force of proposed terminologies tends to ossify, then break under pressure, then crumble as if it was always shaky ground. The being(s) and idea(s) that once flowed through words and terms get distorted, replaced by snapshots, imitations, and simulacra, which are then torn apart by restless hands and minds. For seeing through this process of devolution, some academic placeholder gets a salary, some blogger counts his views, a freelancer tests himself against AI, and gaggles of faceless online profiles behave as if they’ve participated in an event and exercised their inalienable right to virtue-signal. Short-sighted careers are hatched, “discourses” are hash-tagged, and generations get misled and lost as if nothing ever happened… again. Such is the fate of so many things in our lamentably inauthentic, virtual world — a world that is unipolar in one sense above all others: the point almost always ends up misdirected and missed.

We recently bore witness to this familiar phenomenon in the case of one of the most definitive terms of the early 21st century: “multipolarity”.

After Arktos announced its parting of ways with former editor Constantin von Hoffmeister (an announcement which, by the way, made no mention of “multipolarity”), the latter proclaimed himself the hitherto censored and now free-running champion of “multipolarity” and the founder of “Multipolar Press”. This unleashed a slew of (mis)apprehensions — not only with respect to Arktos, but in regards to the concept of multipolarity itself.

On the one hand, some cheered the “announcement” as signalling a turn away from “multipolarity” in the specific slant increasingly represented by von Hoffmeister, which was taken to be a form of “Third Worldism” that uncritically celebrates the rise of the “Global South”, as if greater power in international relations for former colonies would entail fundamentally positive changes in the international architecture to the common benefit of other peoples. One of the arguments to the latter effect is that the weakening of liberal globalist hegemony throughout the “Global South” positively contributes to the weakening of liberal globalist hegemony in its headquarters in the “Global North”. Some of the counter-arguments to the latter include that such is a highly abstract and naive perception of the trajectory of the political and economic situations in the Global South, that such ignores one of the fundamental problems posed to the “Global North” that is mass migration from the Global South, and that such leads to fundamentally neglecting the struggle against liberal globalist hegemony within the “North” itself, as if, for instance, the existence of a European pole in a multipolar world is of much less significance, or requires much less work, than the affirmation of a Chinese, Indian, or African pole. For some, thus, the issue became a matter of a distinguished publishing house devoted to European identity and a European renaissance returning to its own people, to its own civilization’s pole-building, instead of uncritically propagating whatever runs to the tune of “anti-colonialism” and “anti-imperialism”.

On the other hand, some denounced the “announcement” as signalling a turn away from “multipolarity” in a backwards sense, i.e., retreating from the promotion of perspectives which operate with the basic understanding of the diversity and plurality of civilizations — a diversity and plurality within which European civilization, or a “Western” or “Northern” pole, has its own decisively unique place among others and can regain such for the first time in a long time, counter to liberal globalist universalism. According to this train of thought, “reverting” to “Europe First” — as the divergent statements were interpreted as insinuating — is equivalent to forgetting that liberal globalist hegemony became a part and project of European history, underlying the concept of the globally-oriented “West”, which otherwise needs to be deconstructed so as to be rediscovered and reconstructed. Seen from this angle, the matter seemed to be a mere reassertion of a form of “unipolarism” that is oblivious to the civilizational dynamics unfolding around it, a slide from the hard-won recognitions of the “New Right” back to the “Old Right”, one that is more concerned with more provincial forms of “ethno-nationalism” than with the kind of continental and civilizational perspective that sees liberal globalist hegemony as the enemy and realizes that only a fully-fledged civilizational project can overcome former dark offspring. The danger thereby sensed, as more sympathetic perspectives would put it, is in presuming that Europe is a given simply to be defended, rather than a project in need of reconstruction — and one that is in especially dire straits, one that is not itself.

Still others have been confounded by the sudden “bipolarity” subsuming “multipolarity”: Does it really have to be “the West vs. the Rest?” or vice versa? Is it really necessary to take “multipolarity” as the touchstone signboard for any kind of dissident-civilizational publishing? Does operating within a multipolar worldview mean fixating on others’ struggles to become poles?

Once again, Arktos, the publisher of works as differing in their imagination of multipolarity as Dugin’s Theory of a Multipolar World and Faye’s Archeofuturism, made no mention of “multipolarity” in its announcement. Nor can we attribute the tension around “multipolarity” to von Hoffmeister himself, whose ideological positions’ constancy over the years has been that of flux, and who is more of a pioneer of the use of verbiage and AI on the topic than he is of original multipolar theorizing.

Whence, then, is the tension, the “pressure” around “presses” on the button of “multipolarity”?

On one level, multipolarity is simply an established fact, a description: there have been, are, and will be different civilizations and poles on Earth. After a few decades — or centuries, depending on one’s analysis — of pretending that this is not the case, and attempting to construct a world order on the basis of this negation, no one really benefits from this illusion anymore. Only liberal globalists deny such — for the sake of an ulterior imperative and the maintenance of their particular interests — all the while as they always manage to find different places and peoples to afflict in the name of annulling such differences, and all the while as they bemoan the persistence of “different regimes” around the world, including at “home”. And yet, even the globalist liberals’ functionaries have admitted the lasting onset, or return, of multipolarity: to give but one lesser known, significantly telling example, the US National Intelligence Council and Atlantic Council already acknowledged multipolarity as the 21st-century trend in their documents in 2008. Needless to say, even the most intensive and extensive dislike for, or opposition to, the actuality or possibility of another pole is, in essence, a recognition that there is an other.

Beyond this basic ascertainment, multipolarity is a question, a tension, a challenge on a more profound level — the human, existential, cultural level. On this level, one does not “accept facts” as if they were objective, superior entities and then retires to scrolling a feed, but deals in and with facts, interprets facticities, and exists on the grounds of one’s resolved approach to conceiving of and responding to proposed factualities. If multipolarity is a fact of differences, then the differences of these differences, the distinguishing of the differences, and the power of differentiation are tasks for thinking, tasks for acting, tasks for being and becoming.

Shall there be a truly European pole in the newly emerging arrangement of the multipolar world? A Russian pole? A Chinese pole? Could there even be, against all the recent odds and so many questions, an American pole? What on Earth could an African pole ever be? Perhaps some of the poles we imagine today will merge together, or, conversely, split. These are not questions with answers snoozing in the bed of facts, to be awakened by copying-and-pasting “multipolarity” in headlines or cheerleading BRICS. They are questions summoning responses on the horizons of philosophy, of political theory, of cultural studies, of literature, of diplomacy and war, of conspiracies and happenstances, of very different visions and different capacities for making such visions visible to oneself and others.

Arktos has never altered its mission and commitment: there can and should be a strong, authentically European pole in a multipolar world (again)… Instead of “Multipolarity!”, Arktos’s publications pose the productive question: “Multipolarity? Naturally, now what about us?”

For, no one can claim “multipolarity” any more than one can claim the right to be a pole. One can only strive to imagine, affirm, cultivate, and defend the expanding or contracting borders and horizons of one’s polar force. Like diamonds, poles only take shape, purity, authenticity, and unique value under world pressure.

Multipolarity is not a general cause that one goes along with or not. It is a call to cultural creativity. Multipolarity is not a matter of “the news”, “information”, or “opinion”; it is a matter of transformation and renewal in order to be one’s better, higher self, and to dare to project this self with a stake in world order. There are no guarantees.

Since 2009, Arktos has been publishing works that contribute to thinking through the past, present, and future of the world’s poles, primarily that of its own, European civilization, — but not exclusively, of course, for what good is a pole that cannot read others, learn from others, or critique others? Moreover, unlike cases in other countries and civilizations, Arktos has not had the pleasure of living in its own sovereign, self-conscious space and culture, but has been in the position of existential dissidence, with all the consequences, against the reigning trajectory and powers that be.

Hence the special value of how in the hundreds of books that Arktos has brought to the world — or worlds — there is something that speaks about, or speaks to, the development of pole-consciousness, pole-conscience, and pole-confrontation. Why else, after all, would one devote themselves to publishing books and authors, if not for staking out the poles that demarcate the world? There is arguably nothing more multipolar than publishing, which is in many respects just as much the affirmation of a civilization’s possible discourses as it is one of the planes on which different discourses and civilizations meet, exchange, duel, and resolve to meet again.

In this lies the current tension around multipolarity and one of the deeper reasons why it is much more than a “storm in a teacup”, an “online drama”, or a “split” within one or another movement: multipolarity is a challenge, a responsibility — never “in general” or “abstractly”, but always in relation to oneself, one’s own — and as such, it is a matter of being and becoming a pole rather than observing and commenting on, whether promoting or disparaging, other poles taken for granted.

No amount of blogs, Substacks, or media celebrating “multipolarity” as a given can do this for us. Likewise, no amount of ranting about the “death of the West” and deconstructing “Western civilization” can forge any new pole(s). Instead, the kind of thinking and being that is represented by, among others, Arktos’s publishing, is what defines the real civilizational thrust of which any multipolar arrangement is a result, whether a victory, defeat, or compromise.

Arktos has never altered its mission and commitment: there can and should be a strong, authentically European pole in a multipolar world (again), and Arktos’s publications, in many different ways, speak of or speak to this pole — and, sometimes more importantly, its friends, its allies, its interlocutors, and its enemies. Instead of “Multipolarity!”, Arktos’s publications pose the productive question: “Multipolarity? Naturally, now what about us?”

Arktos is, unlike countless other “media” that have come and gone, more like an institution for a European pole.

I say all of this as someone from one of the younger generations who has grown up with Arktos books, who was inspired in part by Arktos to seek my own path in publishing, and who has seen Arktos go through different phases, editors, and associations. For many people like myself, Arktos is, unlike countless other “media” that have come and gone, more like an institution — an institution for a European pole that has brought the bold thinkers of civilizational poles, like Spengler and Evola, de Benoist and Faye, Venner and Dugin, to the world, while other outfits only followed the news, fought over terms, or picked through whatever suited them in one formulation at a given speck of time.

Grasped from the longue durée, Arktos has been an enduring home, platform, and forest passage for authors and readers who rise above the brandings of terminologies, the ghosts of serialized words, and the fluxes of associations thrown together by circumstances. Like a true publishing house, Arktos — like the mythical land alluded to in its name — is a peculiar mythopoetic space. This space is where poles are originally questioned and forged, projected and reimagined. This work is far subtler, but further-reaching and longer-lasting, than other “media”.

This is because Arktos is a pole in the multipolar world of publishing and literature, i.e., of ideas — a pole that represents some of the most thought-provoking expressions of the very possibility of conceiving a European renaissance and European pole in our dark, pre-occupied, turbulent throes of “multipolar disorder”. If there is to be a fully-fledged European pole in this century or millennium, then Arktos will prove — and, indeed, will still have to prove — to be one of its ideational wellsprings. Such pole-forging is of far greater importance to Arktos than tweets declaring one or another thing about “multipolarity!”.

And this is why, no matter whatever announcements or proclamations can be heard from time to time, from one corner or another, glossed in one or another (mis)understanding, Arktos continues to forge forward, hammering away at the anvil of thought in and for the 21st century and beyond. With every Arktos book that challenges us to (re)consider our pole’s fate and others’, one can surely, thoughtfully press forward without the need for sundry other “presses”.