29
25. As M. Merleau-Ponty describes it in The Phenomenology of Perception (New York:
Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1962, 110), motor intentionality is a kind of directionality inside the
motion of an arm or hand which is not reducible to any subjective or self-conscious decision.
26.Bernard Stiegler (The Technics and Time 1, trans. George Collins and Richard Beardsworth,
[Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) contends, for example, that conscious reflection
first emerges in proto-humans (millions of years prior to modern humans) when they begin to use
stone tools. The stone tool is the first known exteriorization of memory and anticipation.
Conscious interiority emerges through the incorporation of this non-human exteriority,
articulated in parallel in the material evolution of the brain (corticalization). The materiality of
the tool functions as an exterior “archive” of its function, recalling to consciousness its projected
and recollected use, thereby producing the first interiorization, the first hollow of reflection, by
way of this non-human outside. I am grateful to Ben Corson for this point. See his Speed and
Technicity: A Derridean Exploration, (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2000).
27.This tendency to figure the effectivity of human-nonhuman groupings in passive terms is
exemplified in the following quotation, which describes the consensus view within archaeology:
28. The debate over which is more potent, agency or structure, seems to have been settled with
the view that agential individuals and constraining social systems are mutually constitutive -- as
per Anthony Giddens’ dialectical notion of structuration or Michel Foucault’s idea of a
disciplinary power which engenders the individual as a responsible, moral agent. But despite
Foucault’s insistence upon the productive power of collective agency, most social scientists
Convention