Material and nonhuman agency–surely this is a mistake? Is not agency a solely human property? How then can we devote a whole volume to a topic with such obviously shaky foundations? Certainly, the odds seem to be stacked against us when we think of agency as not only the capacity to act, but also the capacity to reflect on this capacity. A subject may feel his or her arm moving and recognise ‘ownership’of that movement, but this is not necessarily the same as being able to reflectively understand that he or she is the cause or ‘agent’of that movement (Gallagher 2007, p. 2). When agency is linked strictly to consciousness and intentionality, we have very little scope for extending its reach beyond the human.

Even those nonhuman entities that seem to threaten this neat equation most–let us say software agents or robotic agent-artefacts–do not get close to fulfilling these criteria of agency, even though they are closely modelled after the human (Suchman 2007; Sørensen and Ziemke 2007). In this view, then,‘material agency’is a secondary property, a mirage even, with agency (as consciousness and intentionality) still very much in human hands. Nonetheless, there is some sense, even an anxiety in folk psychology, that the autonomy and interactivity of such artefacts is a step towards agency. But achieving agency is from this perspective a question, essentially, of becoming human. This human-centred view of agents and artefacts is not limited to those artefacts we design to be like agents. It extends to a much wider and more prosaic world of artefacts and matter, an environment of things that is conceived on our own terms, under our control and designed to serve. We do not give a second thought, on the whole, to chairs, mugs, steps, litterbins, wooden, ceramic, concrete or plastic: these objects are overlooked because we engage with them habitually and haptically every day. They would not serve our ends very well, if we could not overlook them. Designed to be secondary, they have to be secondary, forming the backdrop to our lives, of which we are of course the stars, the decision-makers, the agents. It is common sense that agency should be conceived anthropocentrically–how can it be otherwise? We are centre-stage in our lives, not these artefacts, however mundane, or indeed intelligent. Although here glossed rather simplistically, this anthropocentric worldview means that the material or environmental counterpoints to human agency have