The agency of hybrids: overcoming the symmetrophobic block

We respond to ‘challenge 3’ presented in Rose, Jones and Truex’s excellent polemic by way of elucidating the meanings of hybrids, actants, agency and symmetry in Actor-Network Theory. We provide a (very brief) account of Latour’s project to unravel the modernist epistemological settlement that separates humans and non-humans in the world, and that alas so often results in errors and confusions. We contend that the framing of the challenge itself implies the very distinctions that ANT seeks to reject (namely the dichotomization of the world into mutually exclusive ‘subject’ and ‘object’ divisions). Following Latour, we argue that such pure forms do not exist—and furthermore that ‘agency’ is the property of complex hybrids comprised of various strands of human and non-human materials and abstract elements. This is the true meaning of the principle of symmetry! We conclude with some counter-challenges of our own

Coordination Dependence of Hyperfine Fields of 5sp Impurities on Ni Surfaces

We present first-principles calculations of the magnetic hyperfine fields H of 5sp impurities on the (001), (111), and (110) surfaces of Ni. We examine the dependence of H on the coordination number by placing the impurity in the surfaces, on top of them at the adatom positions, and in the bulk. We find a strong coordination dependence of H, different and characteristic for each impurity. The behavior is explained in terms of the on-site s-p hybridization as the symmetry is reduced at the surface. Our results are in agreement with recent experimental findings.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure