Reading :: People are STRANGE

 People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness

By Lambros Malafouris

The link above goes to MIT Press, where you can download this book for free as a PDF. I suggest doing so if you’re interested in Material Engagement Theory (MET) or the link between artifacts and consciousness more broadly. 

I previously reviewed Malafouris’ How Things Shape the Mind, in which he considers how archaeologists treat the mind and suggests MET as an alternate approach grounded in Hutchins, Clark, and Latour. I also reviewed his PhD student Antonis Iliopoulis’ book Early Body Ornaments and the Origins of our Semiotic Mind, which applies MET along with Peircean semiotics. This current book (published 2026) builds on that previous work. 

In Chapter 1, “Selfbound and STRANGE,” Malafouris explains that humans realize self-becoming through the process of Situated TRANsactional GEnesis, at the intersection of mind and matter. He argues that humans enact a self-bounded life world (umwelt) (p.3) He approaches consciousness as a continual process that is codependent on a material world: a system that “emerges in the form of a heterogeneous hylonoetic field (from the Greek hyle for ‘matter’ and noesis for ‘intelligence’” (p.5). He gets here by emphasizing the process of becoming over being: “what we see or experience as an object is actually a process (i.e., self-becoming)” (p.8); “the human condition is in a permanent state of incompleteness,” i.e., “anthropoeisis” (p.10). Thus a “process archaeology of mind” has two characteristics: It “emphasizes the active role of things in human cognitive life” and “sees thought processes as hylonoetic fields — that is, mindscapes extending into the extra-organismic environment” (p.11). He uses the term “thinging” to describe how things around us become part of our minds; thinking is considered a multisensory mode of material engagement (p.12) rather than a passive act of representation (p.13). This brings us to STRANGE:

• “Situated” “denotes codependency of the ‘situated’ on its ‘situation’ and of the ‘situation’ on what is ‘situated’”
• ”TRANsactional” “denotes relations in which the relata only become what they are after their interaction”
• ”GEnesis” “denotes the generative ecology of continuous creation, i.e., becoming” (p.16)

Regarding the second point, he says, “Thinking is a joint transactional accomplishment of the fusion of people and things” (p.21; cf. Hutchins). Meanwhile, culture is understood as “a compound of material forces and energies that mingle and assemble, allowing us to become what we are” (p.25). 

In STRANGE, “humans display a selfbound mode of becoming” (p.29), extending beyond the brain or the organism to the environment around it. 

With this background, he moves to Chapter 2, “Outline of a Theory of Material Engagement.” Using the example of doodling, he says, “Our most habitual actions (psychical or physical) are experienced and become constituted where brain, body, and culture conflate” (p.47). And “Humans think by constructing material signs and memory traces … primarily by using their bodies” in ways that are enacted, not just externalized (p.49). Thus he argues for “a radical continuity between cognition and material culture” (p.50). His unit of analysis for studying human thought is a metaplastic recursive relationship (p.54). To illustrate, he analyzes how a potter makes pottery from clay (p.58 et passim). 

In Chapter 3, “Anthropos: Beyond Nature and Culture,” he asks: “What makes us human?” (p.65). Or: “What mode of becoming are we?” (p.68). His overarching working thesis is that although other organisms show signs of intelligence, such as octopuses, only humans are selfbound (p.74). 

This brings us to Chapter 4, “How Humans Become.” If humans are selfbound, not products of nature or culture, what is human becoming? His position is that — contra Vygotsky — we don’t need to posit a break between evolution and history or between biological and cultural evolution (p.89). Humans become through creative engagement with the material world; for us, creativity and meaning-making are existential conditions (p.90), for “we construct and transform the conditions of our own becoming” (p.91). 

In Chapter 5, “Metaplasticity and Human Incompleteness,” he argues that plasticity and an openness to creative evolution are distinct features of our species (p.95). By metaplasticity, he means the relationship between neural and cultural plasticity (p.98). Contra Geertz, he says, culture is not made of symbols; it is a cognitive ecology grounded in action and material engagement, i.e., “thinging” the world rather than interpreting it (p.103). The mind’s primary function, he says, is not to represent but to form rhizomes with the world (p.104). 

Chapter 6, “What is This ‘I’ that I Know?”, considers the self and postulates three types of self-knowledge: the ecological self, the interpersonal self, and the extended self (pp.112-113). This brings us to agency: The sense of agency is uniquely human, he says, but agency itself is shared across humans and nonhumans as a property of material enactment (p.117). He continues this thread into Chapter 7, “Beyond This ‘I’ That I Know,” considering individuals and dividuals (p.146) and concluding that we cannot separate biological and social aspects of self (p.151).

Chapter 8, “Self-Bounding,” gets to the question of human situatedness. Is a situated body more (i.e., extended through prosthetics) or less (incomplete) (p.158)? He argues with Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia that objects are “hypotheses of action,” with enactive potential. “Things and material environments constitute the ecology that sets our bodies in motion” (p.164). The self only makes sense as a bounding process inside a hylonoetic field of active exploration and sensorimotor engagement; “selfbounding is a tool of relatedness between brains, bodies, and things” (p.169). The self is a self-bounded assemblage (p.170) that is constantly re-self-bounding (p.172). 

Chapter 9, “The Situated Person Perspective,” considers situatedness, which is considered relatedness “captured from the perspective of a process ontology that prioritizes becoming over being” (pp.176-177). He returns to the example of the potter, who has a situated body that engages in a process of dynamic enskillment (p.182). 

In Chapter 10, “Tools for the Self and Body: The Prehistory of ‘Me’,” he examines stone toolmaking (knapping) and body decorations, both of which “constitute an ecology of selfhood” (p.196). Based on these, he argues for two levels of self-binding: causal and intentional/temporal (p.211). 

Chapter 11, “Digital Selves,” uses the term “digital self to refer to those aspects of human consciousness constructed or performed as we engage in or immerse inside this new virtual lifeworld” (p.229). It represents an extension of the process of self-bounding. 

Chapter 12, “Epilogue,” wraps up the book, leaving us with the claim that humans become by creating (p.252).

Quite a read. I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I am generally on board with the distributed/extended cognition perspective described here, and I like how the author has surveyed so much literature and illustrated it with so much material. He has spent a lot of time working out MET and its implications for cognition, agency, and selfhood. I also appreciate the focus on processes rather than objects, something that he has in common with dialectical approaches. On the other hand, I felt worn down by the many neologisms, which sometimes felt as if they were standing in for concepts that had already been established under different names. More than anything, I was overwhelmed by the amount of territory covered. So even though I have written the review, I think I will need to reread it along with the book to feel as if I have really gotten it down.

Should you read this book? If you have been interested in the things that interest me — questions of how the cognitive, social, and cultural interact materially in the human experience — definitely. If you have been intrigued by Latour, Hutchins, Clark, Deleuze & Guattari, Bateson, Geertz, or Vygotsky, sure. If you’re interested in how to understand reading and writing as material practices, probably. 

Reading :: Envisioning Education in a Post-Work Leisure-Based Society

 Envisioning Education in a Post-Work Leisure-Based Society: A Dialogical Approach 

By Eugene Matusov

I am not really that interested in a post-work leisure-based society — which seems theoretically possible but unlikely — but I am very interested in the book’s subtitle: “A dialogical approach.” Matusov has spent a lot of time across many publications thinking about dialogism and what a dialogical approach to pedagogy looks like. And I’ve been interested in his thoughts as they pertain to learning, especially in a situation I’ve been studying for a while: Startups. So it was with this focus that I picked up this 2020 book.

I quite liked it. Even though pedagogy is not my central interest (I don’t do pedagogy research), I have taught graduate instructors about pedagogy and have of course gone through pedagogy classes myself. So when Matusov starts out with examples from his own pedagogy classes, they sound familiar. Specifically, in Chapter 1, he discusses how he asked his students to remember “good” and “bad” teachers and identify their characteristics. Then he gave them problematic scenarios with students and asked them how they would react. To his surprise, they consistently imitated the “bad” teachers, being rigid with rules and assignments even when students found them less than meaningful. After puzzling over this apparent discontinuity, Matusov realized that it concealed actual continuity: as students and again as teachers, these undergraduates were seeking to survive, to stay employed, to do what they needed to do in order to maintain their positions (p.3). On both sides, as student and as teacher, school was work and those who toil in it had to survive.

But, he argues, genuine education can be a form of leisure, i.e., “education that is not driven by survival and necessities,” and education-as-leisure is indeed “a fundamental existential need of humanity” (p.8). “Leisure allows people to transcend their nature, their given culture, their given society, their given psychology, their given social roles and positions, and their d-needs” (p.8). He sees an Age of Leisure coming in which “genuine leisure will dominate over survival, labor, and work” and in which “education will be primarily intrinsic: education for education’s sake, where its process will take priority over its outcome” (p.9). Matusov argues that education is currently in an alienation crisis, with alienation not being driven by capitalism but by the nature of work itself (he sees capitalism as flawed, but still the best system on offer) (p.11). He critiques “the Marxist notions of equality and equal participation in leisure and economy in favor of diversity and uniqueness” (p.9). Based on a Bakhtinian framework of ethical dialogism, he argues that “leisurely self-transcendence is not only a personal, but a societal, ethical, and deeply dialogical process,” one that “involves not only recognition and evaluation of the person’s authorship but also questioning of this authorship by others and the self in a special process of the person’s taking responsibility for the authorship” (p.12). 

Matusov envisions a future Universal Basic Income (UBI) that will address physiological, safety, relational, and esteem needs (p.13). The future he envisions is different from the Marxist vision in which everyone works some limited number of hours, a solution he finds to be “undesirable and leading to totalitarianism” (p.13). Rather, he thinks the future is capitalist (p.14). He bases these conjectures on the following assumptions:

• The economy and production will keep growing
• The need for human labor will continue to lessen
• More income will lead people to be less likely to abandon or compromise their leisure (p.14)

In such a society, “the major problem of governance … is a tension between leisure and civic duties of engaging in collective decision-making and democratic politics” (p.14). He proposes that in a post-work leisure-based society, governance should shift from a representative democracy to “dialogically deliberative democracy” (p.14). 

With this striking vision in place, Matusov transitions to the other chapters. 

Chapter 2, “Necessities-Based Society and Technological Education,” argues that since the emergence of Homo Sapiens, we have been in a necessities-based society, and thus instrumentality and technology have been pushed forward (p.21). This leads us to instrumentalist pedagogy, specifically pedagogy in which teachers lead students to preset curricular endpoints (p.38). But, Matusov argues, such preset endpoints are problematic. Drawing on Bakhtin, he argues that

• “Meaning exists in a relationship between a person asking an interesting question, who is genuinely searching for an answer, and another person replying, who is taking that question seriously” (p.38). This doesn’t obtain when one of those people is a teacher who is intending to lead the student to an answer (p.38).
• ”Meaning-making by students cannot be exhausted either in their depth or their diversity of connections” — a teacher cannot anticipate all possible questions (p.39).
• ”Meaning lives in a dialogue of the one asking and the one replying and not in some self-contained statements” (p.39). Truths are not self-contained, even the truth that 2+2=4. For instance, “If we add two drops of water to two drops of water, we will get only one drop of water and not 4” (p.39).
• “Solving any problem or question is working with/transforming this problem until the puzzlement it creates dissolves”; “Working with the question or problem is the core of the meaning-making process” (p.40). 

Thus, he says, “any attempt by the teacher to make the students arrive at preset curricular endpoint leads to meaninglessness and shallow understanding by the students” (p.40). 

In Chapter 3, “Inherent Alienation of Labor and Work,” Matusov declares, “I will evaluate the value of labor: Whether it fits human nature or not” (p.47). Contra Engels, who claimed that “labour created man himself,” Matusov has “concluded that labor/work — both creative and routinized — is antithetical to human nature” and that “any labor inherently creates alienation” (pp.47-48). He adds: “The core of human alienation is labor itself and not capitalism or exploitation, although they contribute to it as well” (p.48, his emphasis). 

Matusov draws on Arendt to define labor as meeting the biological necessities for self-preservation, while work is “an activity of durable tool making” with a clear beginning and end (p.55). “In contrast to labor, work is based on the violation of nature, in which the worker interrupts nature in order to obtain and shape raw materials for people’s needs and wants” (p.55). Thinking of ourselves as workers is a form of instrumentalism (p.56). Arendt, he points out, “concluded that labor/work is not the true human nature (and, thus, the definition of humans) but rather its oppression” (p.59). Matusov adds, “Capitalism is just a particular way of organizing labor and work. Capitalism may contribute additional forms of alienation, but alienation itself is not rooted in capitalism per se. Arguably, based on the historical preference of human migration, this particular way of organization set by capitalism is the most preferable one, compared to socialism, feudalism, and traditional societies” (p.60). 

He further argues that “agentic behavior is more common in work-based societies than in labor-based communities,” loosely equating work-based with literate societies and labor-based with traditional communities (p.65). Quoting Bakhtin, he argues that “On the positive side of the human dialogue under capitalism, people are often thrown into contact by the forces of the marketplace breaking up the previously existing isolation of the labor-based worlds” (p.66). “In contrast to labor-based societies, capitalism also promotes the social testing of ideas, although limited to the outcome of the market forces” (p.66, citing Groys). 

In Chapter 4, “Changes in the Economy: Technological Unemployment and Creative Authorial Labor,” Matusov considers the effects of automatization on the economy. He points out that Marx expected that “technological unemployment” would be addressed “through a reduction of working hours in Communism” (p.76). But Matusov asks, “Why would everyone work when the necessity of work shrinks?” (p.97). Marxists envisioned a New Human whose social consciousness would be sensitive to societal needs; Marx’s follower Gorz doubts this and suggests forced labor (p.97). Matusov instead argues that full employment will disappear. And this means more leisure.

In Chapter 5, “Genuine Leisure: ‘Eat to Live, Don’t Live to Eat’,” Matusov considers: “What would happen if people did not need to labor and work for their survival and well-being?” (p.109). He provides a set of speculations that I won’t rehash here.

In Chapter 6, “Necessities in a Leisure-Based Society: Economy, Politics, and Social Obligations,” Matusov says that “genuine leisure cannot escape necessity” (p.155), considering areas of necessity: “economy, politics, and social obligations” (p.156). He proposes this principle for the economy: “Maximizing economic means (i.e., basic income) for self-realization for each and every one that the society can afford” (p.166). 

He also discusses deliberation in such a society, arguing that “every agreement is an artifact of ignoring differences and mis-/non-understanding”; “Authentic dialogue cannot fully guide decision-making because authentic dialogue does not have a beginning or end, is unfinalizable, involves temporary suspension of responsibility (i.e., freedom of speech, freedom of ideas), and resists urgencies” (p.174). That contrasts with “decision-making about action,” which “is urgent, limited in time, saturated with ethic responsibility … and finalized” (p.174). He adds, “Dialogue and action have dramatically different realms or, as Bakhtin might say, they have qualitatively different chromosomes” (p.175). 

In Chapter 7, “The Cultural Value of Leisure: Contra and Pro,” Matusov considers critiques of leisure. I’ll skip this chapter.

Chapter 8, “Education in a Leisure-Based Society,” argues that in a leisure-based society, “non-instrumental, ontological, intrinsic education will take priority over instrumental education” (p.225). I’ll skip to this interesting quote: “Of course, the main difference between a New Leisure Person and the New Soviet Man (as it was in the Soviet evtopia) is that becoming a New Leisure Person will be a choice of every person in a leisure-based society in contrast to the societal obligation as it was in the Soviet Union” (p.243). 

In Chapter 9, “Students and Teachers as Authors in a Bakhtinian Critical Dialogue,” Matusov returns to the question: does 2+2 always equal 4? Discussing a case in which he threw a “good” student into a panic by suggesting that it doesn’t, Matusov considers the question of genuine understanding. “Genuine understanding is bottomless (Bakhtin, 1986). It belongs to all of its participants” (p.263). “Meaning is situated in the ephemeral and unique dialogic relationship between an asked question of a person’s genuine interest and a serious response to it” (p.276). 

Finally, we get to Chapter 10: “Conclusion: Organization of Education in a Post-work Leisure-Based Society.” Here, Matusov attempts to imagine organization of education in such a society. 

Overall, I found the book to be immensely interesting. This is despite the fact that I don’t see a post-work society emerging anytime soon, if at all. Yes, we’re being told that automation can take over more and more jobs, and that UBI is a real possibility. But counterbalance those changes against the enormous changes we are seeing in the global economy — and the global ecology. Still, as a meditation on work and labor, and our relationship to it, and its relationship to education, this book was very useful to me. If you’re similarly interested in education and dialogism, definitely pick it up.