Alejo Stark

In what follows, I will provide some elements for constructing Mariátegui's plural spatiotemporal conception of history. I will do so by focusing on the two books he published in his lifetime: The contemporary scene and Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. In a footnote in the Seven Essays, the reader encounters a concept that opens up the problem of plural temporality in Latin American Marxism: relativismo histórico (historical relativism). This will be the keystone concept upon which certain fragments of Mariátegui's writings will be put together to construct the concept of plural temporality. This involves taking a detour through what Mariátegui understood by relativismo (relativism). In that detour, we find that Mariátegui's use of relativismo consists in translating and assimilating the insights of one of the pillars of contemporary physics: Einstein's theory of relativity. For Mariátegui, the relativistic theory of spacetime undermined the old "absolutes" of the positivist unilinear philosophy of history. I then argue that Mariátegui, through his friend and comrade Hugo Pesce, assimilates and translates the "revolutionary" theory of spacetime as a weapon against the unilinear philosophy of history and as a resource to construct a concept of plural spatiotemporal concept of history. Re-situating Mariátegui's work along this axis puts some pressure on certain Bergsonian and Sorelian readings that overemphasize the importance of Myth and Humanity as a "metaphysical animal" and thereby tend to underemphasize or outright suppress his creative assimilation and translation of the sciences of his time.

A certain tension cuts across Althusser’s many theoretical experiments:  a  tension —perhaps  even  a  “paradox”—between science  and  struggle.  In  a  conjuncture  in which  a  self-defeating skepticism  short-circuits  the  conjunction  between  science  and struggle, it seems vital to reformulate this problem anew. By turning to  Althusser’s  formulation  of  the  “revolutionary”  materialist dialectic in the so-called “theoreticist” texts this essay elaborates a re-formulation of the supposed aporias of this paradox and finds a possible way out of it. Science and struggle are disarticulated insofar as no other practice produces the effect of their conjunction. That is the task of the revolutionary materialist dialectic. Having defined “Althusserianism” as the philosophical practice which continuously produces  combinations,  conjunctions,  or  encounters  between science  and  struggle,  this  essay  then  turns  to  the  theoretical  and political  practice  of  Mauricio  Malamud.  The  variations  in  the “Althusserianism”  of  this  communist  philosopher  and  militant further displace the apparent paradoxical character of the relation between science and struggle. In the political and theoretical practice of Malamud, this essay encounters both the necessity of theory as “a  guide  for  action”  and  affirms  neither  “a  scientism  without politics” nor a “politicism without science.”

What effects are produced in an encounter between what Gilles Deleuze calls Spinoza’s ‘practical philosophy’ and abolition? Closely following Deleuze’s account of Spinoza, this essay moves from the reifying and weakening punitive moralism of carceral state thought towards a joyful materialist abolitionist ethic. It starts with the three theses for which, Deleuze argues, Spinoza was denounced in his own lifetime: materialism (devaluation of consciousness), immoralism (devaluation of all values) and atheism (devaluation of the sad passions). From these three, it derives three parallel abolitionist theses: (1) Spinozan materialism undermines the reifications of carceral state thought; (2) Spinozan ethics undermines the punitivism of the carceral state; and (3) Spinozan joy is inversely proportional to the power of the carceral state. While Spinoza’s corpus may not give us an adequate account of the complex dynamics of the carceral state and racial capitalism today, this essay argues that in the infinite streams of the Ethics we nonetheless find some vital strategies through which we might compose an anomalous alliance between this condemned philosopher and abolition.

Resumen. En su libro On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra hereda otro Marx, y otro materialismo. Un materialismo aleatorio, un materialismo de la contingencia dinámica de Marx y sus “cosas”. Tal “corriente subterránea” del materialismo aleatorio es excavada por Lezra en su desvío por las cartas, cuadernos y notas “privadas” de un joven Marx que trabajaba en su tesis de doctorado. Siguiendo el hilo necrofilológico de Lezra, que se topa con Lucrecio y sus “cosas,” encontramos que, paralelamente, Marx también busca un concepto de ciencia en su tesis: lo que tentativamente nombramos ciencia de la contingencia. Ciencia, no ya disciplinaria, que abre la posibilidad de una alianza con el materialismo performativo de Karen Barad que desplaza el humanismo de los “nuevos materialismos” desde una reflexión critica que piensa a la par de otra ciencia de la contingencia, también de cierta herencia lucreciana, con la cual Marx no llegó a pensar: la mecánica cuántica.

Palabras clave: Jacques Lezra; Marx; materialismo aleatorio; ciencia; Lucrecio.

- - - -

Abstract. In his book On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra inherits another Marx and another materialism. It is an aleatory materialism: a materialism of the dynamic contingency of Marx and his “things”. This “subterranean current” of aleatory materialism is excavated by Lezra in his swerve through the letters, notebooks, and “private notes” of a young Marx working on his doctorate thesis. Following Lezra’s necrophilological thread –which encounters Lucretius and his “things”– we find that, in a parallel fashion, Marx is also searching for a concept of science in his dissertation. This is what here is tentatively called a science of contingency. This science – though not in the usual disciplinary sense– opens the possibility of an alliance with Karen Barad’s performative materialism that displaces the humanism of the “new materialisms” by thinking alongside another science of contingency, also of a certain Lucretian inheritance, and which Marx did not get to think: quantum mechanics.

Keywords: Jacques Lezra; Marx; Aleatory Materialism; Science; Lucretius.

The 2016 and 2018 wave of prison strikes in the United States presents itself as an extraordinary flashpoint of the prisoner resistance movement. But how might these events be understood in relation to what has been broadly characterized as an “age of riots”? Following Joshua Clover’s characterization of the contemporary riot in Riot. Strike. Riot. as a “surplus rebellion” of racialized “surplus populations” and given the characterization of the contemporary carceral state as a warehouse to contain such racialized populations, this essay characterizes the contemporary wave of prison riots accordingly as a “surplus rebellion.” More specifically, it focuses on the Kinross prison strike-riot that broke out in September 2016 in Michigan’s Kinross prison in order to derive some general parallels between the surplus rebellion and the singularity of recent prison strikes.

Thomas Hobbes’ theory of punishment plays a constitutive role in the Leviathan’s theory of state sovereignty. Despite this, Hobbes’ justification for punishment is widely found to be discrepant, weak, inconsistent, and contradictory. Two dominant tendencies in the scholarship attempt to stabilize the Leviathan’s justification for the state’s right to punish by either identifying it with the sovereign’s right to war or by elaborating a theory of authorization within the state. In contrast, by tracing the deployments of the metaphor that Hobbes utilizes to evoke the state’s right to punish in the Leviathan (i.e. that of the nerves of the Leviathan) this paper finds that these two accounts can be made to be consistent with each other — thereby destabilizing the grounds upon which the theory of punishment can be founded.

La promesa de este ensayo es la siguiente: nos enfocaremos en poner en escena este encuentro entre Marx y Derrida en relación a la pregunta por la historia para pensar, desde ese encuentro, ciertas fracturas o vacilaciones en el texto derrideano en torno a la espectralización como la historicización de la historia. Llegando ya al final del ensayo, y suscitando el concepto marxiano de tendencia, trabajaremos lo que provisionalmente llamo espectralidades tendenciales como una manera posible de pensar la relación entre los elementos dislocados de la problemática derrideana de la espectralización de la historia.

The 2016 prison strike was the most widespread coordinated action undertaken by prison rebels in the history of the United States. Today, we are in the midst of a second wave of such extraordinary actions. But what is the prison strike, the specter that haunts the racial capitalist state in an “age of riots”? To begin to answer this question, this essay thinks the relation between the prison strike and the recurrent crises of state and capital, showing that the terrain of struggle of the recent waves of prison strikes is partially produced by state budget cuts in the wake of the 2008-10 “financial” crisis. I then proceed to defend an abolitionist strategy of “disruption” of the reproduction of the carceral state apparatus. Lastly, I provide one possible framework that might help us think the relation between the prison strike and other contemporary flashpoints of Black struggle, such as the 2014 Ferguson rebellion.

PhD Dissertation in Astronomy and Astrophysics.  University of Michigan. 2018.

Abstract: The late-time cosmic acceleration of the universe is one of most profound mysteries of physical cosmology. What is at stake with this discovery is the following: either our universe is composed of some exotic "dark energy" which drives the dynamics of the acceleration or our general relativistic theory of gravity must be radically transformed. Clusters of galaxies, some of the largest gravitationally-bound objects in our universe containing hundreds of galaxies, have been fruitful sites from which to study the consequences of our cosmological models and the gravitational theory from which these models are derived. In this work, we derive and test a novel model that takes into account the effects of our accelerating universe at the scale of galaxy clusters. More specifically, the theoretical observable we work with in this dissertation is the escape velocity profile of galaxy clusters. Our model implies that in an accelerating universe, the escape velocity profile of galaxy clusters is lower than what is expected from a universe that is not accelerating. Put differently, if the universe is accelerating, galaxies confined to their clusters have an easier time escaping them. However, testing the implications of this model is difficult given that observations can only allow us to infer the projected escape velocity profiles. Here, we study how the observed profiles can be de-projected via a function that depends on the cluster velocity anisotropy profile. To that end, we also develop a novel approach to derive cluster velocity anisotropy profiles with joint dynamical and weak lensing data. We further show that our cosmology-dependent model of the escape velocity profile can be utilized to constrain cosmological models. In particular, with the Fisher matrix formalism we show that our theoretical observable has the capacity to set competitive constraints on relativistic cosmological models of the accelerating universe in the near future. Lastly, we drop the presupposition that general relativity is the only way to describe gravitational phenomena and develop a novel probe of gravity that utilizes the sensitivity of our theoretical observable to changes in the gravitational potential.

We present an analytic approach to lift the mass-anisotropy degeneracy in clusters of galaxies by utilizing the line-of- sight velocity dispersion of clustered galaxies jointly with weak lensing inferred masses. More specifically, we solve the spherical Jeans equation by assuming a simple relation between the line-of-sight velocity dispersion and the radial velocity dispersion and recast the Jeans equation as a Bernoulli differential equation that has a well-known analytic solution. We first test our method in cosmological N-body simulations and then derive the anisotropy profiles for 35 archival data galaxy clusters with an average redshift of <zc> = 0.25. The resulting profiles yield a weighted average global value of  <beta (0.2 <= R R200 <= 1> = 0.35 ± 0.28 (stat) ±0.15 (sys). This indicates that clustered galaxies tend to globally fall on radially anisotropic orbits. We note that this is the first attempt to derive velocity anisotropy profiles for a cluster sample of this size utilizing joint dynamical and weak lensing data.

We present a novel approach to constrain accelerating cosmologies with galaxy cluster phase spaces. With the Fisher matrix formalism we forecast constraints on the cosmological parameters that describe the cosmological expansion history. We find that our probe has the potential of providing constraints comparable to, or even stronger than, those from other cosmological probes. More specifically, with 1000 (100) clusters uniformly distributed in redshift between 0≤z≤0.8, after applying a conservative 40% mass scatter prior on each cluster and marginalizing over all other parameters, we forecast 1σ constraints on the dark energy equation of state w and matter density parameter ΩM of σw=0.161(0.508) and σΩM=0.001(0.005) in a flat universe. Assuming the same galaxy cluster parameter priors and adding a prior on the Hubble constant we can achieve tight constraints on the CPL parametrization of the dark energy equation of state parameters w0 and wa with just 100 clusters: σw0=0.10 and σwa=0.93. Dropping the assumption of flatness and assuming w=−1 we also attain competitive constraints on the matter and dark energy density parameters: σΩM=0.072 and σΩΛ=0.114 for 100 clusters uniformly distributed between 0≤z≤0.6. We also discuss various observational strategies for tightening constraints in both the near and far future.

Modified theories of gravity provide us with a unique opportunity to generate innovative tests of gravity. In Chameleon f(R) gravity, the gravitational potential differs from the weak-field limit of general relativity (GR) in a mass dependent way. We develop a probe of gravity which compares high mass clusters, where Chameleon effects are weak, to low mass clusters, where the effects can be strong. We utilize the escape velocity edges in the radius/velocity phase space to infer the gravitational potential profiles on scales of 0.3–1 virial radii. We show that the escape edges of low mass clusters are enhanced compared to GR, where the magnitude of the difference depends on the background field value |f_R0|. We validate our probe using N-body simulations and simulated light cone galaxy data. For a Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Bright Galaxy Sample, including observational systematics, projection effects, and cosmic variance, our test can differentiate between GR and Chameleon fðRÞ gravity models, |f_R0| = 4 × 10 −6 (2 × 10 −6) at >5σ (>2σ), more than an order of magnitude better than current cluster-scale constraints.

We use N-body simulations to quantify how the escape velocity in cluster-sized halos maps to the gravitational potential in a ΛCDM universe. Using spherical density-potential pairs and the Poisson equation, we find that the matter density inferred gravitational potential profile predicts the escape velocity profile to within a few percent accuracy for group and cluster-sized halos (10 < < M 10 13 200 15 M  , with respect to the critical density). The accuracy holds from just outside the core to beyond the virial radius. We show the importance of explicitly incorporating a cosmological constant when inferring the potential from the Poisson equation. We consider three density models and find that the Einasto and Gamma profiles provide a better joint estimate of the density and potential profiles than the Navarro, Frenk, and White profile, which fails to accurately represent the escape velocity. For individual halos, the 1σ scatter between the measured escape velocity and the density-inferred potential profile is small (<5%). Finally, while the sub-halos show 15% biases in their representation of the particle velocity dispersion profile, the sub-halo escape velocity profile matches the dark matter escape velocity profile to high accuracy with no evidence of velocity bias outside 0.4r 200 .

Introduction:

This essay was originally published in 1970 in the structuralist Argentine magazine Los Libros and has recently been republished in Malamud's Escritos-edited and introduced by Marcelo Starcenbaum. The communist philosopher and militant Mauricio Malamud was asked to comment on what had become at the time a key book within left academic circles: Oscar Varsavsky's book Science, politics and scientism (Ciencia, política y cientificismo). In this short polemical book published in 1969, Varsavsky, an Argentine chemist and mathematician, argued in favor of an anti-colonial and national "rebel science" which opposed the apolitical "scientism" of his scientific co-workers. The historical-political conjuncture was the dawn of the "golden age" of Argentine science-periodized by Varsavsky to be between the end of Perón's second presidency to the Onganía coup. This period was violently ended by the infamous 1966 "Night of the Long Batons." That night, just months after the coup, the federal police entered the buildings of the University of Buenos Aires and sovereignly suspended a long tradition of university-based political autonomy by brutalizing students, faculty, and staff, in particular, those in the "natural and exact sciences." Varsavsky's intervention in this conjuncture was to pose the question of the relationship between science and politics. Malamud argues that although Varsavsky's intervention was worth considering, the scientist posed the problem poorly. Through a detour via Althusser's distinction between historical and dialectical materialism as well through Bachelard's "Rationalist Materialism" Malamud deactivates the false opposition between "a scientism without politics" and "a politicism without science." At stake is the need to specify the means to correctly define the relationship between science and politics.

This is the transcript of a conversation between Verónica Gago and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar. The two authors speak of the "constellation" as a methodology for approaching the process of the "feminist strike." They discuss a kind of mourning-struggle, a feminist embodying, that by placing itself singularly in all places, becomes irreducible to attempts to limit it via localization/dispersion. The authors ask: what happens with struggles that are able to project themselves on a massive scale without losing their minoritarian vector? It is precisely here that the feminist strike emerges as a threshold, which is to say, as an instance of actuality in the direction of a new political technology of social struggle that also generates a change in the "riot" as a political concept.

Audio recording by Rustbelt Abolition Radio. Transcription and introduction by Tatiana Oliveira. Translation by Alejo Stark.

El Aromo # 98 (17 de Septiembre, 2017). Para el movimiento abolicionista contemporáneo, la abolición de las prisiones necesariamente implica la transformación de la sociedad en su conjunto. Las crisis de la encarcelacion masiva de personas en Estados Unidos es al mismo tiempo una crisis del capitalismo y el orden racial estadounidense.

El Aromo # 91 (27 de Julio, 2016). Acerca de las encrucijadas entre la ciencia y la lucha de clases a comienzos del siglo XXI ¿Es casual que las nuevas teorías cosmológicas, que hablan del " fin de la historia " cósmica, surjan en el mismo momento en que el capitalismo proclama el " fin de la historia " humana? Frente a esto, la relación entre la ciencia y lucha de clases sale a la luz y requiere ser analizada.