Object-Oriented Heidegger: An Interview with Graham Harman

How Should Historians Talk about Spatial Agency?

“…46 Indeed, the claim that such mutual feedback loops can, in fact, effect change is "self-contradictory, since the ability of a thing to receive or process feedback entails that it is already something more than whatever it is doing right now". 47 Another objection suggests that it is methodologically unsound to collapse structure and agency together; one needs to separate them in order to examine how they interact: "it is hard to see how one can talk about interactions among structures and agents if they were not different from one another". 48 In short, there are considerable problems with recursive theories, and one critic is especially scathing: "the incantation that 'structure controls actors who simultaneously reconstitute structure in turn' is simply that -an incantation".…”