Immanent Creativity and Constitutive Power

I argue that the resources for political change do not exist as already constituted entities, whether in the form of transcendent values or an already-given consensus. Instead, they must be created; constitutive political action is rooted in creativity, and requires the creation of new movements, new powers, and new values. This creativity, though, does not come from a transcendent outside, as though a bolt from the blue. Instead, political creativity, and the creativity which humans may use to transform politics are themselves rooted in the immanent creativity of the natural and material world. I bring the sciences of Complexity into relation with the philosophies of Spinoza and DeLanda in order to argue that the world is made up of only the one reality of matter-energy, but that this matter-energy is capable of creatively generating novel phenomena. This understanding of the creativity of matter-energy is then used in order to reconceptualise political creativity in materialist terms. Political orders are constituted by a set of capacities or powers in relation, but the field of powers and their possible relations vastly exceeds any one configuration that it enters, and this field of possible relations, and the possible powers that might be formed through these relations, provide boundless resources for constitutive political change.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements