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Container Technologies
ZOË SOFIA
This paper goes beyond critiques of western philosophical notions of space as pas-
sive, feminine, and unintelligent by reconfiguring containment as an (inter-)active
process. The author draws on work in the history of technology, on a cybernetic epis-
temology that emphasizes the interdependence of organism and environment, and on
intersubjectivist psychoanalytic theories of the maternal provision. A more unex-
pected ally is found in Heidegger, whose writings on holding and supply are read in
ways that contribute to the development of an urgently required philosophy of con-
tainer technologies.
Since the birth of early modern science, Nature has been imagined in the
west as a Big Mother full of treasures (material, land, knowledge) to be plun-
dered and re-sourced. Through world-spanning technological and industrial
enterprise, another “Super Mother” has been created in the matrix of mobile
resources. We greedy metropoles (and many others besides) want a facilitating
environment that smoothly provides year-round access to seasonal foods; we
want 24-hour access to hot water, gas, supermarkets, banking services, etc.; and
we want technologies that help access other goods and services, such as cable
TV, phones, fax, mobile phones, and e-mail (though these latter also have
the effect of turning their supposed “users” into mobile resources themselves,
accessible almost anywhere, any time). Yet in the midst of all this abundant
supply, homelessness is rising both for humans and the non-humans whose
habitats are destroyed or polluted. The specter of resourcelessness looms ever
larger on the horizon as we reach the limits of a planet that had once been
imagined as an infinite container of resources, now revealed as a finite resource
itself. In such a context, focusing on questions of containment and supply in
thinking about technology can help draw our attention to the assumptions we
make about supply in our own lived world, and to larger questions about sus-
taining the planetary “facilitating environment” and avoiding an exhaustion
of its supplies, including supplies of future biological diversity in the gene pool.
Hypatia vol. 15, no. 2 (Spring 2000) © by Zoë Sofia
Hypatia182
This paper outlines elements of a framework and several directions for
a feminist approach to the history and philosophy of technology centered
around containers and supply, or, more generally, re-sourcing. Artifacts for
containment and supply are not only readily interpreted as metaphorically
feminine; they are also historically associated with women’s traditional labors.
And just as women have traditionally been neglected in history and philoso-
phy in general, so, as historian of technology Lewis Mumford observed in the
1930s, the utensils and apparatus typically associated with women have been
overlooked in the history and philosophy of technology. So far it has been
largely up to feminist social studies of technology to rectify this imbalance (for
example, Cockburn and Fürst-Dilic 1994, Cockburn and Ormrod 1993, Wajc-
man 1991); it is hoped my contribution might encourage more theoretical
work and historical studies on these topics.
To help unsettle habitual assumptions that space is merely an unintelligent
container, or containers dumb spaces, the introductory section activates ideas
from the epistemologist Gregory Bateson, whose cybernetic ecology stresses
the interdependence and dynamic co-evolution of organism and habitat, and
from the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who depicts the infant as an entity
emerging from a maternally facilitated environment. Then, with the aid of his-
torian Mumford, I survey container technologies in my own domestic lifeworld
and argue that neglect of containers and containment functions is not only the
result of anti-maternal bias in western thought, but is encouraged by the un-
obtrusiveness of containers and utensils, traces of whose productive roles are
not necessarily evident in the final product. Finally I turn to Martin Heidegger,
whose later writings on technology (in the 1950s and 1960s) offer some key
insights into the importance of containment and supply in the late modern
period.
SMART CONTEXTS, OR “NO ENVIRONMENT, NO ENTITY”
The unit of survival is organism plus environment
(Bateson 1972, 483).
Bateson’s intellectual contributions from the 1930s to the 1970s spanned
anthropological studies, cybernetics, psychology and family therapy, biology,
and communications. His epistemological perspective on the unit of survi-
val, developed in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), is a cybernetic one based
around a notion of the immanence of mind and subjectivity. It is concerned
with a subject or organism whose survivability, agency, receptivity, and intel-
ligence extend “beyond its skin” (one of Bateson’s repeated phrases). The
organism cannot be considered apart from the habitat that houses it—a point
made in a current save-the-koala campaign slogan “No tree, no me”—and “the
organism which destroys its environment destroys itself” (1972, 483). Mean-
Zoë Sofia 183
ing circulates through organism/environment in the form of transformations,
translations, and transmutations of difference (that is, information, “the differ-
ence which makes a difference” [1972, 315–17]). Thus: “The individual mind
is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and
messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual
mind is only a subsystem” (1972, 461). In this perspective, best summarized in
Bateson’s lecture “Form, Substance, and Difference” (1972, 448–65), intelli-
gence is not confined to the deliberations of the intending ego or cogito, but can
be found in the changing patterns of mutual adaptation and co-adaptation un-
dergone within and by the organism-environment ensemble (1972, 460–61).
The environment itself is a bearer of intelligence (see also Bateson 1979).
This Batesonian notion of cybernetic intelligence can be contrasted with
a popular notion of cybernetics as top-down digitally mediated control if we
compare the prototype “smart house” with the GaBe house. The smart house
(as discussed by Berg 1994) is wired and electronically programmable for con-
trol of the things many men are interested in: information flow and control
of security, lights, entertainment, communications, and garbage disposal. By
contrast, the GaBe self-cleaning house—designed over 30 years ago by a wom-
an architect Frances GaBe (Zimmerman 1983, Wajcman 1991, 102)—makes
clever use of container technologies to minimize the domestic drudgery still
required for the so-called “smart” house, whose programmable washing ma-
chine still has to be manually loaded and unloaded, and the washing dried,
folded, etc. The GaBe house has specialized cupboards using water, steam, and
air and a series of pipes and sprinklers for cleaning, allowing dirty dishes to be
cleaned and left in cabinets where they are ready for next use, clothes to be
washed, dried, and left hanging in situ, and the floors to be cleaned automati-
cally. Whereas the wired house seems smart because of digitally programma-
ble components, the GaBe house’s intelligence is immanent in the way it is
adapted to minimizing drudgery: its “smartness” is emergent in the dynamic
mutual adaptability of environment to organism, organism to environment,
home and homemaker.
Resonating strongly with Bateson’s point about the unit of survival, or the
“no tree, no me” relation, is the provocation by the object relations psychoana-
lyst Winnicott:
There is no such thing as an infant. (Winnicott 1965, 39n)
Or, as U.S. psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has helpfully expanded it:
There is no such thing as an infant [apart from the maternal
provision]. (Ogden 1992, 620)
In other words, aside from its facilitating maternal context, the infant is not.
This is not simply physically true—humans are born very immature—it is also
a statement about ontology: without the (m)other’s activity in creating a “fa-
Hypatia184
cilitating environment” for the nurture, emergence, and exploration of the
self, the person cannot come into being. For Winnicott and more recent “in-
tersubjectivists” (such as Stern 1985), the baby is seen as part of its environ-
ment—the maternal provision. It leaves its primal container technology (the
womb) to enter an extra-uterine matrix, a space where, all going smoothly, its
needs are unobtrusively supplied by what it experiences as an “environment
mother.” It ruthlessly exploits this seemingly personless entity whom it only
gradually comes to know in a relationship of mutual love and concern.
Ogden’s review of Winnicottian approaches highlights the important early
personality mechanism of projective identification, in which “aspects of the self
are not simply projected onto the psychic representation of the object (as in
projection), but ‘into’ the object” (Ogden 1992, 617), setting up a dialectic of
container and contained that in W. R. Bion’s words “makes it possible for . . .
[the infant] to investigate his own feelings in a personality powerful enough
to contain them” (Bion 1959, 314). Ideally, the mother both identifies with
the infant (through Winnicott’s “primary maternal preoccupation” and Stern’s
“affect attunement” [Stern 1985, 138–61]), yet is sufficiently separate to serve
as the container and interpreter for its experience, “thereby making her pres-
ence felt, but not noticed” (Ogden 1992, 620).
In this view, the infant’s subjectivity is immanent within and emergent
from the context of intersubjective containment:
Paradoxically, the subjectivity of the individual presupposes
the existence of two subjects who together create an intersub-
jectivity through which the infant is created as an individual
subject. The infant as subject is present from the beginning
although the subjectivity exists largely within the context of
the psychological-interpersonal (containing/contained) dimen-
sion of the relationship of the infant and mother (Ogden 1992,
619).
Other spaces experienced by the infant are the inner world of fantasy and
outer world of sociotechnical reality, bits of which become caught up as “tran-
sitional objects” in a third space, called “potential space” by Winnicott (1971,
107). Being able to play safely in this potential space, negotiating between
inner and outer worlds and self and (m)other, is an essential part of infantile
development, and moreover, Winnicott argues, it is the foundation for later
creative experiencing and cultural production which plays (or works) on the
borders of fantasy and reality.1
In the intersubjectivist model of subject formation, the self is understood as
an entity given shape through various dynamic relationships of containment
that both construct and occur in spaces that are interpersonal, imaginative,
real, active, the products of conscious efforts as well as unconscious or auto-
Zoë Sofia 185
matic labors. How might these insights be applied to container technologies?
The following inventory suggests some possible directions:
•Facilitating environment: an adaptive intelligence is at work to ensure
smooth functioning; space and container technologies may not be as
dumb or as static as we traditionally assume.
•Containment: is not just about what holds or houses us, but what we put
our stuff into, and thereby identify with; what of ourselves we can and
cannot contain.
•Primary maternal preoccupation and attunement: this lets infant and care-
taker get in sync with each other; its corresponding technological phe-
nomenon concerns the degree of adaptation of the environment/space/
container to us; the more a technological object is adapted to respond
to or even anticipate our own wishes and capacities the more “user-
friendly” it seems.
•Ruthlessness of infant: just as we don’t notice or acknowledge the active
giving of the (m)other, so too do we take for granted containers and the
resources they supply; they are merely spaces to get stuff out of or put
stuff into.
•Toy or tool as transitional object: from this we might understand that the
tool is never a purely material object, but always has its partial origin in
the inner world, which is to say that it is always meaningful, part of a
narrative or set of human purposes.
•Potential space: corresponding to the infant’s play space—an imagina-
tive space between inner and outer worlds—are work spaces for discov-
ery and invention: the workshop, the lab, the studio, the library, the
study. Hence one might transform Winnicott’s “There is no such thing
as an infant” into “There is no such thing as a discovery/invention
[apart from the potential space].”
THE TECHNICS OF THE UNOBTRUSIVE
The technological forms associated both with traditional labors of women,
and with metaphors for female organs of storage, transformation, and supply,
have been and continue to be vital to technics and human development, but
are regularly overlooked in histories and analyses of technologies. Like noisy
and disruptive boys in class, aggressive tools and dynamic machines capture
more attention than the quietly receptive and transformative “feminine” ele-
ments of container technologies. This is the perspective outlined by Lewis
Mumford in the following quotes, the first from his account in Technics and
Human Development (1966) of the emergence of settled agricultural commu-
nities:
Hypatia186
Many scholars who have no difficulty in recognising that tools
are mechanical counterfeits of the muscles and limbs of the
male body—that the hammer is a fist, the spear a lengthened
arm, the pincers the human fingers—seem prudishly inhibited
against the notion that woman’s body is also capable of extrapo-
lation. They recoil from the notion that the womb is a protec-
tive container and the breast a pitcher of milk: for that rea-
son they fail to give full significance to the appearance of a large
variety of containers precisely at the moment . . . that woman
was beginning to play a more distinctive role as food-provider
and effective ruler than she had in earlier foraging and hunt-
ing economies. The tool and the utensil, like the sexes them-
selves, perform complementary functions. One manipulates,
assaults; the other remains in place, to hold and protect and
preserve. . . .
Cooking, milking, dyeing, tanning, brewing, gardening are,
historically, female occupations: all derive from handling the
vital processes of fertilization, growth, and decay, or the life-
arresting processes of sterilization and preservation. All these
functions necessarily enlarge the role of containers: indeed are
inconceivable without baskets, pots, bins, vats, barns. . . .
Protection, storage, enclosure, accumulation, continuity—
these contributions of neolithic culture largely stem from wom-
an and woman’s vocations. In our current preoccupations with
speed and motion and spatial extension, we tend to devaluate
all these stabilising processes: even our containers, from the
drinking cup to the recorder tape, are meant to be as transitory
as the materials they contain or the functions they serve. (1966,
140–41)
Mumford had earlier made similar points about the devaluation yet con-
tinuing importance of containers in Technics and Civilization (1962 [first pub-
lished 1934]), in which he distinguishes machines and tools from technolo-
gies of containment and supply, categorized as utensils (like baskets or pots),
apparatus (such as dye vats, brick kilns), utilities (reservoirs, aqueducts, roads,
buildings) and the modern power utility (railroad tracks, electric transmission
lines):
[S]ome of the most effective adaptations of the environment
came, not from the invention of machines, but from the equally
admirable invention of utensils, apparatus, and utilities. . . . But
since people’s attention is directed most easily to the noisier
and more active parts of the environment, the rôle of the util-
Zoë Sofia 187
ity and the apparatus has been neglected. . . . [B]oth [tool and
utensil] have played an enormous part in the development of
the modern environment; and at no stage in history can the two
means of adaptation be split apart. Every technological com-
plex includes both: not least our modern one (1962, 12–14).
It is worth noting here that since the female body provides our first shel-
tering container and source of supply, containers tend to be interpreted as ge-
nerically feminine, as they are by Mumford. But although I am also interested
in exploring the feminine and maternal dimensions of container technologies,
it is important to remember that men’s bodies as well as women’s comprise
many natural “container technologies” besides sex-specific organs, including
skin, mouth, stomach, bladder, bowel, blood vessels; even the penis is an ex-
pandable container of sorts, and eyes and ears are experienced as receptive or-
gans. Actual container technologies are associated with men as well as women
(indeed some men may be particularly interested in technologies of contain-
ment as compensations for their own relative deficiency in the reproductive
container department).
Mumford’s laments about the neglect of utilities, utensils, and apparatus—
which he refers to generally as “utensils,” and which I am generally calling
“container technologies”—in the history of technology can also be made to
some extent about the history and philosophy of technology, where the pro-
totype tool on which philosophers meditate is not usually a cup or bowl but
typically some kind of probe or stick. Two important exceptions are Martin
Heidegger (discussed below) and Don Ihde. Ihde’s phenomenological pro-
gram for interpreting varieties of human–technology–world relationships in-
cludes containment as one of its four basic categories (1990). In what Ihde calls
“background relations,” the technology functions as a shelter, cocoon, or a
world; it can also be a cultural “atmosphere,” such as nuclear fear (1990, 112–
15). This category includes a huge range of technologies and relations, from
intimately wearable containers like clothes, shoes, or condoms, to walk-in
partly-automated spaces like houses, cinemas, shopping malls, or cities, floating
or submersible containers like boats or submarines, nuclear reactor contain-
ment vessels, as well as the virtual worlds of computer/video games.
If Mumford is right that utensils or apparatus and machines or tools have
each been “enormously important” then an analysis of technology which em-
phasized the utensils/containers side could be a useful corrective to approaches
like Ihde’s which finely differentiate amongst tools and machines, but lump all
the utensils and spaces together as background. And if it is so that “at no stage
in history can the two means of adaptation be split apart,” it might be possible
to investigate not only containers, but also hybrids of tool and utensil, as well
as the container-like aspects or functions of a range of technologies and tech-
nological ensembles, including those (over-)readily interpreted as masculine
Hypatia188
or phallic. Examples here include the skyscraper, so obviously phallic but from
the inside a “womb with a view”; the car, advertised in terms that emphasize
on the one hand its phallic/excremental “grunt,” and on the other its womby
comfort and storage space; and the computer, which is basically a storage tech-
nology for data, yet which has often been represented as a kind of flying ve-
hicle, even before widespread networking allowed internet “surfing.”
Why are container technologies relatively neglected in histories of tech-
nologies? Mumford suggests there is a prudish embarrassment about naming or
interpreting technologies in the feminine, and a bias towards technologies
that are dynamic and somehow masculine. One might propose this neglect has
less to do with modesty than with a misogynistic metaphysics that has repre-
sented space as a passive, neutral receptacle (Plato, Timeaus [1971]), and the
mother as a personless nutritive vessel (Aristotle, The Generation of Animals
[1979]). The problem with this representation, as Irigaray has pointed out (Iri-
garay 1985; see also Grosz 1995, Best 1995), is man’s failure to grow up and
acknowledge indebtedness to the spatial/maternal environment and the labors
of those who sustain this facilitating space. These labors are almost always
considered “menial” because they do not produce some dynamic and heroic-
ally discovered object to be wondered at, but reproduce an unobtrusively and
incrementally ordered space which can be taken for granted as a background
for other activities.
This is a persuasive line of critique, but it is not the full story. The problem
is not just bad metaphysics or misogyny but the structure of production and
reproduction itself. The container is a structurally necessary but frequently
unacknowledgeable precondition of becoming. For example, when you eat a
cake, you might wonder about the recipe and ingredients, but you do not usu-
ally think about the sieve, bowls, or beaters which operated on the raw mate-
rials, or the oven in which it was cooked, or the power supply to that oven. At
the practical level of tool use, if even thrusting, dynamic, pounding objects like
the hammer, as Heidegger has famously described it, tend to “withdraw” from
the user’s awareness (Heidegger 1962a, 98), how much more readily can con-
tainers withdraw from attention, exploited but not noticed: the humble jars or
plastic bags where nails are stored, the battered tool box where the hammer is
kept, not to mention the shed or workshop where the activity goes on. To keep
utensils, apparatus, and utilities in mind is difficult because these kinds of tech-
nological objects are designed to be unobtrusive and, like the environment
mother, “make their presence felt, but not noticed” (to paraphrase Ogden
1992, 620). Thus, the analyst of container technologies must constantly work
against the grain of the objects and spaces themselves—not to mention the
ingrained social habit of taking for granted mum’s space-maintaining labors—
to bring to the foreground that which is designed to be the background.
Working with the idea that our relations to containers are something like
Zoë Sofia 189
our relations to the environment mother, we could speculatively interpret
Mumford’s categories of container technologies as follows:
•The utensil: the generic container, a basket or bowl, perhaps corresponds
to the mother as a container into which we dump our excess stuff, and
which we come to consider as an extension of ourselves.
•Apparatus: the specialized container, like an oven or a vat, in which
something may be created or transformed. The apparatus, as well as the
specialized space that houses it (the kitchen, the lab, the workshop),
could be interpreted as equivalents of the potential space where inner
and outer worlds are negotiated in the course of discovery/invention.
•Utilities: these can include buildings (from humble cottages to huge
environment-controlled spaces like shopping malls or airport termi-
nals) as well as various channels for dynamic flows (like pipes, cables,
reservoirs). These technologies reproduce something like the “environ-
ment mother” who works unobtrusively to ensure “smooth function-
ing” and continued supply to the infant whose bodily states and feelings
she regulates.
FOREGROUNDING CONTAINERS: A DOMESTIC SURVEY
To add to my understanding of the role of container technologies and the
containment dimensions of a range of technologies in my own lifeworld, I
conducted a survey of the kitchen/dining/living area of the shelter technology
I inhabit, from the vantage of a “machine for sitting in” at my dining table.
Containers in the kitchen included sauce bottles, salt and pepper shakers, pots
and pans, vases, sinks, dish-rack, cups, glasses, bowls; drawers and cupboards
(themselves containers with shelves for holding other containers and appara-
tus); a cloth tube stuffed with plastic shopping bags, and the garbage bin, lined
with one of these bags. Then there were apparatus with specialized container
functions for heating or preserving foods, like an electric kettle, the oven, the
microwave, and the refrigerator, with its own set of containers inside. Some
containers are strategically inefficient: sieves, colanders, sink drain covers, pa-
per coffee filters. Towels and dishcloths are also kinds of containers for liquids.
This traditionally “feminine” domain of domestic equipment was not devoid
of tools or machines used to perform sadistic actions on plant, animal, and
mineral matter—implements for chopping, whipping, skewering, grinding,
shredding, mashing, liquefying, etc.
The container technologies at the living room end included some comfort-
able body-holding technologies (the largest of which concealed a fold-out ap-
paratus for sleeping) and a table with a letter rack, files, and envelopes. Books,
photographs and albums, telephone directories, the television, the stereo,
Hypatia190
cassettes and CDs: all these media technologies, I decided on reflection, had
their container-like aspects. Working analogously to the holding functions of
memory, and with some similarity to the kind of poetics of space Bachelard
identifies with the miniature, which “deploys to the dimensions of a universe”
and where “large is contained in small” (Bachelard 1969, 157), these elec-
tronic and print media are storage technologies for other spaces and experi-
ences. A CD or tape can open up a whole concert or an aural landscape of
feelings; a book can disclose another world. My handbag and satchel slouched
in a corner near the laptop. Velcroed and zipped into its nylon case, this virtual
storage technology works in dimensions unperceivable by me. I have a projec-
tive identification with this small dense gray box, an indispensable prosthetic
brain in which (via keyboard and mouse) I have embedded much of my pro-
fessional life.
Behind the scenes of living and kitchen/dining areas, and essential for mak-
ing the apparatus functional, were the utilities: the gas pipes and valves, the
electricity conduits, the plumbing—all so many containers for channeling dy-
namic flows and ensuring supply, unobtrusively linking this domicile to vast
grids of energetic and institutional power (so long as I keep paying the bills).
One point revealed by this domestic survey is the variety of types of con-
tainers, even within the home. Some of my equipment is close to the “classic”
container or utensil, the basic bowl-shaped holding vessel. But containment
can also be performed by flat surfaces and wire racks, as well as by silicon-based
storage devices like the CD or computer. Some of the containing technologies
are machines or include mechanisms, like the extending table or the fold-out
sofa bed. The food processor is basically a bowl with a rotating blade driven by
an electric machine, a combination of “static” bowl and “dynamic” machine-
driven bladed tool.
Mumford’s distinction between “dynamic” tools and machines versus “stat-
ic” containers or utensils is not one that can be ultimately sustained. If, in his
words, “The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the
degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of
the operator: the tool lends itself to manipulation, the machine to automatic
action” (1962, 10), then the container technology, even in its most basic form,
has something machinic about it. Unlike the tool, which needs manipulation
to perform its function, the container can perform its holding-function auto-
matically: a jar can simply sit there, full, on the shelf and be working to capac-
ity. The distinction between tool or machine and utensil or apparatus hangs
on the dynamic/static distinction, but it could be debated whether holding or
containing is simply to be considered as a passively inhering property of a
shaped space, or whether containing is rather to be thought of as a form of
action in itself.2 I favor the latter interpretation, following intersubjectivist
accounts of the subject formed in a space whose holding and supplying are
Zoë Sofia 191
understood as the result of maternal labors, actions requiring effort and care.
As we shall learn from Heidegger’s analysis of a container technology in the
next section, containing is not as simple a function as we might first think.
HEIDEGGER AND THE JUG/THING
A significant counter-example to the many historians and philosophers
who neglect the containment aspect of technology is Martin Heidegger, who
paid quite a lot of attention to location, things, spaces, containers, and tech-
nologies of holding and supply.
His essay on “The Thing” (1971c [first published 1962b]) begins with a
discussion of nearness and distance in the modern age and includes wonderful
meditations on a jug, some of which are relevant for a more general analysis of
container technologies. First, Heidegger takes pains to argue that the jug for
him is not a mere object of vision or thought, but a thing in itself which has
been created through a process of making, so that “as a vessel [it] stands on its
own as self-supporting” (1971c, 167). The jug’s character as a thing “resides in
its being qua vessel” (1971c, 169), that is, its capacity as a container. Heidegger
inquires into the holding function of the jug, arguing that it is not the
impermeable sides and bottom of the jug which do the holding. When we fill
it we pour into its emptiness, and “The emptiness, the void, is what does the
vessel’s holding. The empty space, the nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as
holding vessel” (1971c, 169). The maker of the jug does not so much shape the
material as shape this void.
Posing the question “How does the jug’s void hold?” (1971c, 171), Hei-
degger answers that holding is active and ambiguously two-folded, comprising
the actions of taking and keeping. Moreover, this dual activity of holding as
taking and keeping only comes to fulfillment via a third action, “the outpour-
ing,” whereby the container’s contents gush out: “The taking of what is poured
in, and the keeping of what was poured belong together. But their unity is
determined by the outpouring for which the jug is fitted as a jug” (1971c, 171–
72). Noting that the word “gush” had as its earliest meaning “to offer in sac-
rifice,” Heidegger distinguishes a generous, sacrificial, and sacred gushing from
“mere pouring in and pouring out” or the “mere filling and decanting” of liquor
in a bar (1971c, 173).3 The outpouring he valorizes is by contrast a gift: “And
in the poured gift the jug presences as jug. The gift gathers what belongs to
giving: the two-fold containing, the container, the void, and the outpouring
as donation” (1971c, 173–74). The outpoured gift is thereby interpreted as a
gathering together of the various dimensions of containment Heidegger has
discussed.
What can Heidegger’s ideas about the jug as a vessel contribute to the proj-
ect of analyzing and interpreting container technologies?
Hypatia192
Firstly, it is significant that Heidegger does not assume holding is passive; for
him it is a complex action.
Secondly, it is interesting that Heidegger’s analysis of this container tech-
nology should ultimately celebrate spilling out. This shifts the emphasis from
holding to supply. (In the light of Mumford’s remarks about the relations be-
tween female organs and container technologies, it is tempting to interpret
Heidegger’s emphasis on sacrificial and generous outpouring as a kind of hom-
age to the maternal, whose breaking birth waters and overfull breasts are pro-
totypes of life-giving gushings.)
Thirdly, bearing in mind how the container’s functions of taking and keep-
ing are fulfilled in “the outpouring”—or, more generically, supply—we might
interpret a holding vessel like a jug or urn as a technology of re-sourcing: it can
be filled from a source, then itself becomes a source of what it has kept and
preserved. Note that this function of basic container technologies involves
not only the spatial dimensions I am emphasizing here, but also entails tem-
porality: the container takes in during times of abundance, and it keeps and
preserves its contents over time. This was, as Mumford (1966) fully appreci-
ates, the most powerful discovery of the neolithic, when container technolo-
gies proliferated as means to even out natural fluctuations in supplies of food,
materials, water, and so to free up more time for other cultural pursuits.
Fourthly, it is important to note some of the limits of Heidegger’s jug ex-
ample for a more general analysis of containers. Not all containers are designed
to be impermeable or like the jug capable of outpouring: some are for slow
leakage, some for soaking up drips, others for what we hope will be permanent
containing. An extended analysis of containers would have therefore to exam-
ine “incontinence”—various deliberate (as in a colander or coffee filter), cat-
astrophic (like the Titanic or Chernobyl), or merely embarrassing (!) failures
of containment.
The jug is a container technology that has its being as a piece of equipment
in domains of equipmentality such as the home, the church, the restaurant, or
bar. But these sites are themselves varieties of container technologies, contain-
ers which constitute (or co-constitute) environments and locations in them-
selves. This order of container technologies is thematized in Heidegger’s 1954
essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1971a), whose examples include houses,
ships, temples, a peasant hut, an old bridge. It begins with an exegesis of how
the notion of “dwelling” is at the root of German words for building (bauen)
and existing (bin). The sense of dwelling as a basic, habitual, and inhabited
condition of human life tends to recede in normal notions of building (bauen)
as a kind of productive activity (1971a, 147). Heidegger wants to bring to the
fore the sense of humans as dwellers and building as a letting-dwell. Dwelling
means “to remain, to stay in a place” (1971a, 146) and also, in Heidegger’s ex-
position, “to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for”: “Real sparing is
Zoë Sofia 193
something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its
own nature, when we return it specifically to its being, when we ‘free’ it in the
real sense of the word into a preserve of peace” (1971a, 149).
There is a notable resonance between this idea of a safe preserve for humans
or other entities to become themselves, and the intersubjectivist account of
the maternal function as one of actively containing an emergent subject and
letting it play safely in potential space, so it can become who it is. The em-
phasis in both instances is not on the singular entity (the subject, the thing,
the organism), but on belongingness to and interactions in an actively con-
taining and preserving environment shared with entities, both human and
non-human: “dwelling itself is always a staying with things” (1971a, 151). In
parallel with Heidegger’s notion of holding as both taking and keeping, his
notion of making room for involves both admitting and installing: “The lo-
cation admits the fourfold and it installs the fourfold. The two—making room
in the sense of admitting and in the sense of installing—belong together. As a
double space-making, the location is a shelter for the fourfold or, by the same
token, a house” (1971a, 158).
In “The Thing” essay, had Heidegger wanted a really good example of a
container technology for outpouring, he could have chosen a bucket. But the
choice of a jug, like the chalice in the earlier essay “The Question Concerning
Technology” (Heidegger 1977b), first published in 1954, emphasizes a con-
tainer that might be used for ritual libations. This is a way for Heidegger to
bring in reference to a sense of the sacred in the gathering of elements into
artifacts as “Things.” In various essays Heidegger writes of “the fourfold,” the
union of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, within which humans dwell,
and which in his interpretations are seen to come together through things
and spaces like the jug, the bridge, the hut, or the chalice. Although I am not
comfortable with some of the religious overtones of this notion, the ecologi-
cally-minded part of me does appreciate the necessity of a concept something
like that of the fourfold as a way of thinking about how even everyday objects
are condensations of many factors which come together in a specific context
or network and have no existence or “standing” outside that context. So I have
personally translated Heidegger’s fourfold into a shorthand way for thinking
about the way things are a gathering together of many elements, forces, pur-
poses, and dimensions, both human and extra-human. This is the essential
point of the analysis Heidegger makes in “The Thing,” where he deploys an old
German meaning of “Thing” as a gathering (1971c, 174–77). Things do not
simply represent such a gathering, as might signs or tokens: they only exist as
that gathering of materials, that particular location and shaping and conjunc-
tion of space(s), that historical and cultural set of projects and purposes which
the thing serves and of which it is an outcome. Or as Bruno Latour pithily ex-
presses it: “Every entity is an event” (1993, 81).
Hypatia194
The key motif for me here is emergence: the thing emerges in a “nearness” or
rather a process of “nearing” that gathers remote elements into itself; thus a
local and specific object is also a manifestation of its macro-context, a part of
the world’s worlding (1971c, 177–81). Doreen Massey makes a similar point
about the sense of place in globalized cultures: “places are processes, too” she
writes, and any particular place is a “meeting place,” a gathering and manifesta-
tion of local and global social, economic, and communications relations (Mas-
sey 1993, 239). Thus the uniqueness of a place is defined less in terms of some
“authentic” history of a single, inevitably fictionalized and homogenized local
community, than by “the fact that each place is a distinct mixture of wider and
more local social relations” (1993, 240).
There is a significant parallel between Heidegger’s notion of allowing the
thing room to emerge as part of the world in its relation of nearness, and the
notion of the emergent subject in Winnicottian and intersubjectivist psychol-
ogy. Elsewhere I would also like to draw out the connections between these
ideas and the notion of the contingent character of the technoscientific object
as an entity emergent from an actor-network.4 The thing, the emergent sub-
ject, or the sociotechnical actor (Latour 1993, 1994) are to be understood in
their specificity, characterized not in terms of the entity’s peculiar properties
examined in isolation, but rather as spatially and temporally contingent mani-
festations that are part of a whole environment, field, or network.
Thus we could add to the conjugations of Winnicott’s dictum “There is no
such thing as an infant” a Heideggerian inflection:
There is no such thing as a thing [apart from the fourfold];
as well as an actor-network theory variant:
There is no such thing as an actor (human or non-human)
[apart from the network];
and perhaps also a geographer’s transformation:
There is no such thing as a locality [apart from its globality].
MACROCONTAINMENT: THE STANDING-RESERVE
The global ordering of containment and supply in the modern techno-
scientific era is a key theme in Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning
Technology.” As part of his effort to show the limits of modern instrumental
notions of causality, Heidegger conducts an Aristotelian causal analysis of the
making of a container technology similar to the jug: the sacramental chalice.
The artisan making the chalice is involved in a practice of techne, a way of
revealing the world in a creative and reverential “bringing forth” of the thing,
that brings together the four causes (1977b, 6–12). Heidegger contrasts this
Zoë Sofia 195
to the modern modes of aggressive use of resources and mass scale production
and supply (1977b, 14). In contrast to the artisan-dominated modes of pro-
duction in antiquity or pre-modern Europe, where art and technique came to-
gether in techne, stands the modern epoch with its large power plants, air-
planes, nuclear reactors, and industrialized science. Heidegger’s analysis of this
epoch in “The Question Concerning Technology” and related essays (especial-
ly “The Age of the World Picture” [1977a, first published 1950] and “Science
and Reflection” [1977d, first published 1954]) draws connections between the
exploitation of the Earth as a calculable resource, the demands of profit-driven
development, the character of modern research, apparatus-dependent science,
and the mathematization or “informatization” of the world. “Bringing forth”
has been reduced to something like imposing upon and ripping out, via an
aggressive technoscientific “challenging-forth” of the world to reveal itself in
the form of resources and information for consumption, the process Heidegger
calls Herausforderung (1977b, 14). Now the Earth or a river is revealed as a
source of extractable resources (such as ore or hydroelectricity) whose extent
and yield are already mapped and calculated in advance (1977b, 21).
The outcome of this challenging-forth is a macro-technology of re-sourc-
ing that Heidegger calls the Bestand. This “standing–reserve” is a mobilizable
stockpile of resources available for instant supply: “Everywhere everything is
ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so
that it may be on call for a further ordering” (1977b, 17). The plane on the
runway, ready for take-off, epitomizes this on-call orderability of resources: the
plane might look like an autonomous machine, but it only exists “to ensure
the possibility of transportation” (1977b, 17). Another image might be rows
of stacked large containers ready equally for transport by road, rail, or sea. In
this modern formation, making resources available predominates over appre-
ciating the unique qualities of the thing. The object loses its qualities as the
Gegenstand—that which resists and stands against—and the machine loses its
standing as an autonomous tool, dissolved into the Bestand, where it is just
another “completely unautonomous” element in the abstract and global grid
of the resourced world (1977b, 17).
So we might add another Heideggerian variant to the Winnicottian conju-
gations:
There’s no such thing as a technology [apart from the standing–
reserve].
Popular culture celebrates each new machine or commodity as a revolu-
tionary wonder. But it is easy for the macro-apparatus of supply (the Bestand )
to keep supplying new tools/toys out of the resources on hand to it. What
is harder to alter, and what continues to give contemporary lives and inven-
tions their particular stamp, is the macro-apparatus itself and the logics of re-
sourcing and supply that order it. Heidegger names as Gestell (enframing) the
Hypatia196
dangerous modern technological mindset that calls on the world to reveal it-
self as available resource. One danger of this framework, as Michael Zimmer-
man explains, is that it turns everything, even ourselves, into the same: neither
thing, object or subject, but raw material, standing–reserve, human resource:
“While humanity itself can never be transformed completely into standing–
reserve, technological humanity has become in effect the most important raw
material in a process which no longer makes basic ontological distinctions
among different kinds of entities” (Zimmerman 1990, 215–16).
Heidegger’s description of how the standing–reserve is created by challeng-
ing the world to make itself available as a pile of mobile resources implies
processes that not only involve “dynamic” machines, such as bulldozers and
drills, for extracting and unlocking resources, but also utensils, apparatus, and
utilities for storage and distribution of these unlocked treasures:
That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in na-
ture is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is trans-
formed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and
what is distributed is switched about ever anew. (1977b, 16)
The quote could almost equally well apply to the decoding, recoding,
storage, and distribution of information over computer networks as it does to
Heidegger’s example of a power plant on the Rhine and its attendant web of
distributor lines. But aside from such world-spanning utilities as the internet
or the power grid—each a network carrying dynamic flows (of energy or in-
formation)—there are many other technologies involved in the distribution
and switching about of resources, from wagons to coal trains, trucks to cargo
ships, and roads, railways, and ports, not to mention the Mother Shop of the
suburban shopping mall (Sofia 1996), the humble supermarket trolley, or the
ubiquitous plastic shopping bag.
The Bestand might be created through the process of mathematically efficient
calculation and ordering of unlocked resources, but what it also and importantly
achieves is the objective of securing abundant supply. As much as this objec-
tive answers our primal demands for an environment-mother smoothly and
unobtrusively to supply our every need, it also fits neatly with consumer society
and profit-driven development. Processes of containment and supply, and the
utensils, apparatus, and utilities that help extract, store, and distribute re-
sources from the standing–reserve, are not relics of pre-modernity but con-
tinue to define a fundamental aspect of what technology is in the late modern
epoch: it is about supply, securing access, rapidly making resources available for
distribution and consumption.
The list of “conjugations” of Winnicott I have been building now includes
the following:
There is no such thing as a thing [apart from the fourfold];
Zoë Sofia 197
There’s no such thing as a technology [apart from the standing–
reserve].
These two ways of interpreting artifacts are usually contrasted by Heideg-
gerians, with the Thing and the fourfold being appraised as richer and more
open ways to apprehend our being with things, while technological resources
and the Bestand are held as impoverished ways of revealing, fed by an an-
thropocentric instrumental rationality in the service of power and greed. But
my emphasis here is on the similarities: both the jug/Thing and the standing–
reserve have to do with gathering, containment, and supply. The artisanal
Thing (the jug, the chalice) appears a better choice through which to appre-
hend the gathering of entities and elements it “stays” and is “stayed by” in the
fourfold, not only because of the reverential sense of mutual indebtedness of
humans and non-humans it invokes, but also because Heidegger conveniently
elides the messy and unpleasant aspects that sustain supply even for the ar-
tisanal mode of production.
Heidegger’s discussion of causality in the relation to the chalice (1977b, 6–
13) leaves out the question of where the silver for making it came from. Yet the
appearance of materials within the smithy’s workshop—the ore, the coal for
heating and smelting it, the apparatus and tools used for refining and working
it—is only possible through a prior set of techniques and technologies for ex-
tracting, moving, and storing resources, for securing or coercing human labor
power (for example, the slave miners of antiquity), and for tunneling, digging,
gathering, carrying, storing, trading, shipping, and delivering. Heidegger’s eli-
sion of this activity of extraction, transport, and provisioning in respect to an
artisanal mode of production allows it to be more dramatically contrasted with
modern intensities of macro-containment and mega-supply. However, my em-
phasis here is on the dependence of both modes on resource supply, a depen-
dence that becomes elevated to a governing principle in the modern age. I
would suggest, moreover, that not only sacred things in ritual use, but any mo-
bile resource of the high-tech standing–reserve might also be apprehended in
terms of its connections, if not with a cosmic fourfold, then at least with a
global multifold of sociotechnical being. Indeed, it is often the task of material
semioticians of technology in the academy (like Donna Haraway and actor-
network theorists), and of environmentalist and consumer groups in society at
large, to unravel contemporary technofacts into their local and global net-
works of actors, relations, and effects (not always intentioned or desirable).
CONCLUSION: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS . . .
In this paper I have (with Mumford’s help) inventoried some of the con-
tainer technologies significant in technological history and in my own domes-
tic lifeworld, and gathered up some theoretical resources which could be de-
Hypatia198
veloped in a more sustained analysis and interpretation of the unobtrusive
technics of containers and containment. The perspectives of Bateson and
Winnicott (and the actor-network theorists, not discussed here) can contrib-
ute to this project with their emphasis on the background or context contain-
ing the evolving or emergent entity. I have argued that neglect of containers
and containment functions is not only the result of anti-maternal bias in west-
ern thought, but is encouraged by the unobtrusiveness of containers, traces of
whose productive roles are not necessarily evident in the final product. And
yet, as I have suggested by way of both Mumford and Heidegger, the functions
of containers (utensils, apparatus, utilities) to ensure supply loom large in the
modern technics that mobilizes resources to be on call as standing–reserve.
The container technologies project is conceived of as a corrective to phallic
biases in the interpretation of technology and as a way of getting beyond cri-
tique of traditional western notions of space as passive, feminine, and unintel-
ligent, and towards exploring and developing more recent ideas about what
counts as smartness, and where it is located, in an entity-environment com-
plex. Unless we pay better attention to questions of containment and supply,
we will misrecognize the technological character of the everyday metropolitan
lifeworld, which is reliant on large utility grids and includes many tool-uten-
sil, machine-container hybrids (the phallic womb skyscraper, the bladed bowl
food processor). Although I hope the idea that some technologies are meta-
phorically or functionally feminine might increase feminist interest in studies
of technology and help dislodge the idea that technology is intrinsically mas-
culine, I do not intend to enshrine a framework that poses the tool or machine
as masculine, phallic, and “bad” against the redemptive utensil or container
as inherently feminine, maternal, or “good.” Of more interest is Mumford’s
point that tool and utensil are inseparable means of technological adaptation.
The dynamic machines for penetrating secrets and unlocking resources have
helped set up a world-spanning grid of storage and distribution, containment
and supply: both “means of adaptation” are intimately interconnected in the
late modern technological complex.
Winnicott’s provocation “There’s no such thing as an infant” has become
for me an injunction to learn to think of emergent entities as contained in a
facilitating environment. Let me end by gathering together the various “con-
jugations” I have made of this idea (plus a couple I have only been able to hint
at here), presenting them not so much as a conclusion but as a basis for further
inquiry:
•There is no such thing as an infant [apart from the maternal provision]
•There is no such thing as an organism [apart from the environment
(Bateson)]
•There is no such thing as an actor [apart from the network]
•There is no such thing as a discovery/invention [apart from the potential
space: lab, studio, study, etc.]
Zoë Sofia 199
•There is no such thing as a tool [apart from the workshop, domain of
equipmentality (Heidegger)]
•There is no such thing as a thing [apart from the fourfold (Heidegger)]
•There is no such thing as a technology [apart from the standing–reserve
(Heidegger)]
NOTES
I would like to thank the editors, especially Rachel Jones, for their very helpful com-
ments and their forebearance, as well as for the kind ways they looked after me at the
Warwick conference (when I was temporarily on crutches). Thanks also to the people
who have asked questions at spoken presentations of various versions of this paper at
Warwick and at the Australian National University, University of Melbourne, and the
University of Western Sydney, and to the readers whose comments and critiques were
very useful. I would also like to acknowledge my colleague Dr. Anna Gibbs for intro-
ducing me to the work of Ogden and Stern.
1. The significance of this potential space to language, poetics, aesthetics, and
philosophy has been explored in Julia Kristeva’s work around the notion of the chora.
See Kristeva (1981, 1984).
2. For further discussion of the relation between containers and machines, in-
cluding the subordination of machines to the purposes of containment, see Sofoulis
(1999).
3. Of course someone interested in container technologies per se would not be
obliged to make the same evaluations. Technologies of “mere filling and decanting”
would not be of lesser interest than those of pouring and gushing, and in comparing and
contrasting them we could specify different kinds and purposes of containers, different
patterns of relations between filling and spilling.
4. On actor-network theory, see Bijker and Law (1992), Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch
(1987), and Pickering (1995).
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