Containers All the Way Down

Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.

– Lao Tzu

We put things in pockets, bottles, boxes, and barrels — containers of every kind, serving every purpose, in every size: from small cosmetic jars to vast cargo ships. The actual ability to contain doesn't always matter. We turn emotions into containers when we are bursting with anger or filled with pride. We talk about events that happened in the past or will happen in the future as though language had intuited relativity before physics. Containers pervade our life, its basic unit, the cell, being itself a semi-permeable container.

Containment, the sense of something held within a boundary, runs through human experience. Could it be not merely a property of artefacts, nor only a favored turn of speech, but a more fundamental relation?

This series of essays will follow containment from different vantage points, suggesting that its presence is no accident, and that, wide as its reach already appears, it may still be narrower than its potential.

Life Containers

Cells define themselves as a unity in space by their membrane. The membrane holds molecules together so they can participate in reactions. Some of these reactions produce that very boundary that makes the reactions possible. Life is circularity and self-reference.

The boundary brings both the cell and its environment into existence. And it creates asymmetry.

The cell membrane admits nutrients and expels waste. It is selective. Certain things are allowed only in one direction, in or out.

The organizational closure of cells gives them autonomy. Once they distinguish themselves from the environment, they can distinguish things in the environment. They become sense-makers. And get preferences and norms. Bacteria swim towards an area with a higher concentration of nutrients.

Cells organize themselves into larger containers. Some of these, like blood vessels, bladders, and stomachs, have physical boundaries; others, like the immune system, have organizational boundaries, where the network distinguishes those who sustain the collective self from those who threaten it.

The autonomy of the cells is reduced by the multicellular containers they build. Organisms maintain their boundaries, which again distinguish them from their environment, producing a range of phenomena, from simple individuation to selfhood.

Organisms and the environment shape each other. One part of the environment is often remade into a container to hold another part that organisms want kept in place. It can be for protection, like birds building nests for their eggs, or for food storage, like the small holes squirrels dig in the ground for their nuts, or it can serve multiple purposes, like the dams beavers create. And then there is the diversity of containers humans build, from pots and cradles to silos and planes.

A Human History of Holding

Now, when we move from place to place, we can't do without containers: bags, backpacks, and suitcases. But that wasn't always the case. Back in time, nomadic hunter-gatherers moved a lot but avoided bulky containers. To be more mobile, yes, but there was also another reason: most of what was taken was consumed soon after. It was the shift to more sedentary, agricultural lifeways that increased surplus and led to large, durable storage.

In the beginning, nature provided both matter and form: the first containers were gourds and shells. Later, people learned to work with different materials and developed tools and skills to shape them as they wished — baskets from grass, reed, or rush; bowls and boxes from wood; wineskins, water bladders, and parfleche containers from animal organs.

When the art of pottery emerged, it amplified the variety of container forms, sizes and functions. This innovation allowed storing food surpluses and reduced the time spent on foraging. The development of containment technologies enabled various ways of accumulating and transporting resources and led to more complex societies.

The first glass vessels appeared around 1500 BCE in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and centuries later Phoenicia became famed for its glassmaking. These early glass containers were used for perfumes, not for wine. Wine continued to be stored in ceramic vessels then, and for many centuries after. Glass required high-temperature furnaces and great skill to produce, making it far rarer and more demanding than clay.

The development of containers and trade reinforced each other. The Greeks shipped wine, olive oil, and grain across the Mediterranean in sealed vases, the famous amphorae. The pointed base allowed amphorae to be placed firmly in sand ballast or wooden frames. Then there was a secondary support system with straw or tree branches around the base and ropes around the necks. The evolution of the design of ship storage areas and that of amphorae shaped each other.

Amphorae production exploded in Roman times. As Rome grew into the largest city in the world, the demand for olive oil increased. The present-day reminder of this peak in trade and consumption is an actual physical peak, Monte Testaccio in Rome. This is a heap of 580,000 cubic meters (760,000 cu yd) made out of remains of an estimated number of 53 million amphorae.

In Medieval times, the high-volume transport of liquids and dry goods over long sea voyages made the wooden barrel the dominant container for liquid goods. The design of the barrels was a response to the need for a durable, leak-proof container that could withstand rough handling and long transit times. The use of standardized barrels, which could be rolled and stacked easily, also increased the efficiency of the loading and unloading processes.

Then the container innovation in trade slowed down, and that became a big problem during the Industrial Revolution. The increased volume and the diversity of industrial trade created immense logistical challenges. Ports were a chaotic mix of different package sizes, leading to slow turnaround times, high labor costs, and frequent cargo theft or damage. These inefficiencies were a major drag on global commerce. It took more than a century to find the solution.

Yet, if trade containers were in a bad period, there was some advancement in other containment technologies. A notable example is canning.

Food canning was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Nicolas Appert. In 1795, the French government offered a prize of 12,000 francs for a method to preserve food to support military operations throughout the year. Appert presented his innovation in 1806, but the Bureau of Arts and Manufactures of the Ministry of the Interior gave it to him a few years later, under the condition that he “open-source” his innovation. This was shortly followed by the invention of tin cans by another Frenchman, Philippe de Girard.

There is no better way of finishing this brief history of holding than with Malcom McLean's invention of the modern shipping container in 1956. While loading wheeled containers on ships was practiced already in 1920s, the novelty was in not loading the chassis, only the container, later leading to standardization. It dramatically reduced the shipping costs, changed ports, ships and other means of transport. Although globalization emerged from many factors, very few had an impact as big as that of the McLean's intermodal container.

Metaphoric Containers

All languages are full of containment words. In English, in ranks top six in frequency. And then there are the derivatives into, inside, within and similar for out. Common are also the actions related to containers, such as hold, pack, load, pour, and the states full, empty, open, closed, and stuffed.

Containment pervades perception and thinking. The container schema is so powerful that we use it in all kinds of non-spacial situations. According to Lakoff and Johnson, it's part of the image schemata, which are prelinguistic. In Philosophy In The Flesh and Metaphors We Live By, they demonstrate how many of our conceptual metaphors use containment.

We see words as containers of ideas and meaning. Arguments are containers that may have holes and not hold water. Eyes can be filled with anger, passion. Months, years and decades are containers of events. Love is a container since we fall in and out of love. And so is depression, and here even with the addition characteristic of depth and the notion that the deeper your are in a depression, the more time it will take to get out of it. Life is a container that can be full, empty or filled with certain types of events and experiences.

Our image schemata shape not only our mental life but also the theories of its disorders. In Wilfred Bion's containment theory, the mother or another caregiver is a container of the child's overwhelming emotions and anxieties. Similar roles assumes the therapist later in life. Bion's theory was developed in his book Learning from Experience from 1962, but the contours of containment can be seen in the works he was influenced by, including Freud's notion of drive and affect, structured according to the body's surface and openings.

Overall, containment is a popular metaphor in psychoanalysis, as Bent Rosenbaum and David Garfield show. They find the containers appearing in patients' language in three dimensions: effective-perceptual, fantasy, and socio-intercative. It is similar, they admit, to the bio-psycho-social model, proposed by George Engel in 1977. Such models seem to overflow the container of psychoanalysis and get a trans-disciplinary status and recognition. That's not so strange, considering that Engel claimed it had roots in the general system theory. It seems to neatly map to Luhmann's social systems theory, too. Luhmann’s system taxonomy includes living, psychic and social systems, all of them being self-producing containers. This self-production is based on the same principles of autopoiesis, the paradigmatic example and theoretical origin being the smallest life container, the living cell.

And since biological, psychic and social are so closely related, it is not surprising that if containers do such a good job of explaining psychic disorders, they can serve well for social disorders too. That's what the containment theory of Walter Reckless shows. In A New Theory of Deliquency and Crime, published just a year before Bion's Learning from Experience, Reckless explores tensions between young persons’ inner and outer containment. The boundaries can be broken from inside, as a result of family conflicts, or from the outside — the "pulls" of delinquent peers and subcultures. Often these forces work in combination.

Cognitive, social and psychological sciences are not the only ones busy with human emotions, relations and disorders; that is also the realm of literary art, and it got in that business first.

Containers there can be good and associated with stability, or bad and associated with social claustrophobia and totalitarian regimes. They can also be insidious by tolerating and even stimulating subversion, only to show that they can contain it and come out stronger.

The civilization order is a container, which “cannot hold” anymore and “things fall apart.” Yeats signals systemic failure. John Ehrenfeld sees in The Second Coming a description of a complex system, with the “center” as its attractor and that attractor is a container “that encloses a complex system and holds it together while enabling it to keep exhibiting a more or less stable set of behaviors.”

While Yeats’ center cannot hold the tensions and the world collapses, some containers use tensions to reestablish themselves. In the Greenblattian model of subversion and containment, art, literature, and cultural practices can undermine established social, political, or religious authority. They may introduce doubt, irony, or alternative perspectives that threaten dominant ideologies. But the ideologies find ways to contain them, ultimately reinforcing the existing order. The subversion is often staged in such a way by the existing order that it can be contained and used for affirmation. Carnivals in medieval Europe are a popular such case. Similar to Shakespearean plays. Subversion is displayed, but the order survives, stronger for having allowed doubt.

Using physical containers such as towers to symbolize patriarchal and ideological imprisonment is a popular method in Gothic literature but it started earlier, probably already with Jane Eyre, once seen through the lens of The Madwoman in the Attic, a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bertha's attic is a symbol of silenced nonconformity.

If gothic literature uses containers to show the confinement of women in society, in dystopian literature what is confined is the whole society. The container there is not an attic or a tower. Often it is an authoritarian state, containing and controlling all aspects of citizen's lives. In 1984, the Party is a container of people's minds through language and surveillance. In The Handmaid's Tale, the state of Gilead is a container for state-mandated reproduction through enforced, ritualized use of women's bodies.

Containment in Philosophy and Logic

Plato introduces the concept of Khôra in Timaeus. Khôra is formless receptacle, where the sensible thing comes into being out of the eternal ones. Since Khôra is neither, he describes it as a “third kind.” It is an enduring substratum, unlike the things we perceive like water which can turn into steam. Khôra has different usages and interpretations, first by Aristotle, and more recently by Heidegger and Derrida.

Aristotle takes an empirical approach and defines the place (topos) of a thing as the motionless boundary of whatever body contains it. The place of wine is the amphora that contains it, so long as the amphora does not move. When the wine is in a boat floating down a river, its place is neither the amphora nor the boat, but the river, defined by its motionless riverbanks.

For Aristotle, containment is a transitive relation: if a person is in a house and the house is in a town, then both the house and the town contain that person. The universe itself does not have a place because it is not contained by anything.

Several centuries after Aristotle articulated his ideas about the essence of things and where they are placed, in India, the concept of śūnyatā emerges, and, in contrast, it is about the intrinsic lack of essence and place. Śūnyatā means “emptiness.” All entities are empty of intrinsic nature; that is why they are sometimes likened to bubbles.

A related metaphor is Indra’s net, which has a jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all the others. Each part contains the whole.

Śūnyatā is a central concept in Mahāyāna Buddhism. It denies inherent essence and emphasizes dependent co-arising. In Western philosophy and logic, a similar primacy of relations over substances is characteristic of the thought of C. S. Peirce. This stance runs against the mainstream, as does his dissatisfaction with symbolic logic, which relies on arbitrary mappings. To deal with both issues, he developed a notation that illustrates logical relations: the Existential Graphs.

Containments are central in Peirce’s Existential Graphs. He calls them “cuts.” Cuts can be nested but not intersected, which is an important difference from set theory.

In Laws of Form, published in 1969, George Spencer-Brown brings an entirely new logic and notation, the Calculus of Indications. He introduces one sign, the mark, to represent the fundamental cognitive operation, distinction. The mark shows how something emerges from nothing, and is always related to the observer, who makes and indicates the distinction. Importantly, the mark is a container, and the only relation between marks is the one of containment.

The Calculus of Indication of George Spencer-Brown has influenced a few prominent theories in biology, social science, cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.

Using the calculus of indications, in the 70s, Varela found a way to mathematically express the notions of autopoiesis and autonomy. Self-reference is key there. In Laws of Form, self-reference is already introduced through the concept of re-entry, which brings oscillation in the form. To extend the arithmetic and algebra for self-reference, Varela adds a separate mark for self-reference. The extended calculus was first explained in 1974 in the paper Calculus of Self-reference and elaborated a few years later in Principles of Biological Autonomy.

In his last book, The Embodied Mind, co-authored with Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson, Varela refers to śūnyatā in relation to the absence of a pre-given world. Living systems, self-asserting their autonomy, enact their world. This view integrates Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism with the phenomenally of perception of Merleau-Ponty and the theory of operational closure to initiate the enactive school of cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Laws of Form and the theory of autopoiesis not only influenced biology and cognitive science, but also the social sciences. The most prominent is the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, mentioned earlier. For Luhmann, living, psychic and social systems are autopoietic systems. Social systems are produced by the distinction between them and their environment, realised by a self-referential network of communications. In this way, the system contains the communications that produce it. External communications can pervade that container, but, just like perturbations of living systems, not as instructions but re-encoded according to the system’s internal logic.

In a different way, containment is central in Peter Sloterdijk’s theory, presented in his magnum opus, the Spheres trilogy. Sloterdijk emphasizes co-existence, so containment is in the form “in-with.” Containers can be intimate (the focus of the first volume, Bubbles), world-encompassing macro-containers giving coherence to collective life (Globes) or the contemporary co-isolated yet interconnected spheres (Foams).

Back to the Peirce and Spencer-Brown lineage, in Boundary logic, containment is not just a first-class citizen; it is the only relation. Containers there are with semi-permeable boundaries, just like the living cells. There will be more about it in another essay.

In this first post of the series, I have tried to trace containment from life’s self-creation to its other-creations: from tools for storing to tools for thought. For lack of knowledge or space, many examples were left out, even significant ones such as Noah’s Ark, or the way satisfaction is tied to fullness, as in “I am content.” Still, I hope what this essay contains was enough to reveal how deeply containers pervade our lives.