Containers: A Proposition for a Preposition

Food Case Probably Containing a Preserved Pigeon, Ancient Egypt ca. 1550–1479 B.C, 20 x 11 x 10,5 cm, wood plaster and bitumen, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (https://www.metmuseum.org/de/art/collection/search/545678) Public Domain.
Containing Matter
“Let us not reify containers.”1 Archaeologist John Robb begins his short article Contained within history with this statement. His approach may seem a little curious, given the key role of containers as material artefacts in history, archaeology and art history. Human-sized Greek pithoi provide insights into the material culture of Greek Antiquity – the Cynic philosopher Diogenes allegedly lived in one. Cassoni tell us a lot about the intersection of gender, privacy and visibility in Renaissance Italy,2 while Central African minkisi act as spiritual batteries to be charged and discharged with divine energy. Mythologies all over the world see containers as objects with special powers, be it to contain good or evil, to preserve or to transform. Containers, especially those crafted from clay, have a unique relationship with the human body and its power to create new life. Hence, the uterus is often seen as the ur-container. Philosopher Zoë Sofia linked neglect of the container in philosophical discourse to its connotation of the female and of supposedly female spaces: the domestic and private spheres, in contrast to the public and supposedly political exterior.3
Sofia’s plea in 2000 for more attention to care infrastructures, be it people or pipes, was heard 25 years later: recent media and art studies increasingly prioritize structures and the politics of care, particularly in light of the pandemic and the climate catastrophe. More ground and less figure, to use a common art historical term and a distinction used frequently by media theorist Marshall McLuhan.
The claim that containers should not be reified is a recurring theme in the field of Container Studies. Sofia uses Martin Heidegger’s musings on the jug to establish the container as a relational technology or operation rather than merely an object: first of all, the container creates a space within a space. It encloses and envelops what is contained within it. It gives form and short-term stability to otherwise amorphous contents (such as liquids, grain or money). Furthermore – and this may be the most important to Heidegger and Sofia – containers act as relationships or “prepositions”4 between the interior and the exterior, contents and their destination, and fullness and emptiness: “Like prepositions, containers are a relational or enabling technology.”5 The jug pours and thus connects, and in pouring it creates a void to be refilled. A jug is therefore nothing more than a vehicle for the operation of pouring and filling, of dispensing and receiving contents: “holding presupposes vacancy.”6 This mediation between inside and outside, between contents and surroundings, calls for a paradox structure: each container or vessel designed to hold must have an opening, which in turn carries the inherent risk of a leak, a drip or a spill. Media theorist John Durham Peters argues that the only containers without holes are those designed to be broken, such as “time capsules, piñatas, eggshells, and tombs.”7 Consequently, containers occupy a space in which they are not present; this not-being-there is an essential part of their existence. The space they inhabit is shown to be relational and constantly in motion rather than stable. Containers also allow for mobility and conservation, thus expanding the lifeworld and spaces of those who use them. As art historian Bettina Uppenkamp has described, late-medieval chests were dual-purpose tools used as furniture (to hold belongings) and as luggage (to transport belongings). Their depiction in illuminated manuscripts show a link between their form and their surroundings: chests in the public space are closed to protect the content from unauthorized access; in the private space, they are open to display the content. Their spatial design is dictated by their surroundings.
As structures capable of producing power imbalances, containers require a critical analysis of how these power imbalances are distributed. In a recent publication, Sofia herself, along with media scholars Marie Luise Angerer, Ingrid Richardson and Hannah Schmedes, applied and expanded Sofia’s ideas, rethinking containers from a not-being perspecrive, examing the holes and leaks that define them.8 The analysis is based on the proposed similarity of containers, the semantics around space, materiality and infrastructures – often dismissed as the passive background from which active objects emerge – and finally, on a gendered imagination. Again, given the highly scalable nature of containers, their material-semiotic assemblage allows us to think from the margins, the marginalized, the holes, and the not-being, as well as the container’s inherent ability to generate space and time.
Containing Time
While this notion of relationality may hold for space, how do containers function when it comes to time? Robb states: “Containers play with time, slowing down or speeding up processes.”9 By creating diverse environments, they can manipulate temporal relations, stretching or diminishing the internal lifespan of their contents in contrast to their external surroundings. Time and with it processes of growing, ripening and decaying differ greatly in different environments, that is, containers. By neutralizing external factors such as seasons, weather and daylight, containers grant people more time and greater independence from the natural world. Author Ursula K. LeGuin exemplifies this in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Situated in somewhat prehistoric scenery, she contrasts the lives (and stories) of hunters and gatherers and, of course, the role played by the bag. Containers, or recipients as she calls them, might well be the “first cultural device.”10 They allow people to choose and structure their time more actively:
“If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you – even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give a little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home?”11
Le Guin seems to exemplify McLuhan’s claim that certain media act as extensions of our physical bodies. Functions once intrinsic to the body – holding and transforming – can now be externalized and inhabit different scales. From the stomach to the handheld bag to the grain silo, the size of the container dictates the relationship between people, time, wealth, and ultimately power. A stomach full of oats will sustain a person for hours, a bagful for days, while a silo can feed an entire population for years. Although these examples are more domestic in nature – food and liquids – the concept of the container is highly scalable. It applies to objects, architectures, institutions, and even to digital data sets.
Storage and with it the accumulation of goods makes us aware of the relationship between time and space. It is, with Durham Peters, “one of the most complex legacies of civilization because of its ability to multiply power and extend time. Any long-term storage requires stability in space.”12 Containers or, more precisely, containing is an operation capable of expanding space and, by extension, time.
As a transversal material-semiotic assemblage, the container serves as a lens for the historical analysis of space and time. From the container perspective, these metahistorical categories are revealed as relational rather than absolute and can furthermore be examined for power imbalances of gender, race and class.
Maja-Lisa Müller is a lecturer in the Department of Historical Visual Studies and Art History at Bielefeld University. Her research focuses on the interplay between visuality, materiality and mediality, as well as on images as epistemic objects. She is a member of the executive board of the Center for Theory in Historical Research at Bielefeld University and an editorial member of ZfM – Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. In 2025 she published her dissertation on Renaissance Intarsia under the title “Gespaltene Bilder. Techniken, Materialitäten und Medien der Intarsie”. Currently she is working on projects regarding container technologies and myco-processes.

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- John Robb, “Contained within history,” History and Anthropology 29, no. 1 (2018), 32-36. [↩]
- Adrian W.B. Randolph, Touching Objects: Intimate Experiences of Italian Renaissance Art. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2014; Bettina Uppenkamp, “Können Möbel Medien sein? Überlegungen zu den italienischen Hochzeitstruhen der Renaissance,” in Möbel als Medien. Beiträge zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Dinge, ed. Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Klaus Engelhorn. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011, 47-67. [↩]
- Zoë Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000), 181-201. [↩]
- Robb, “Contained,” 32. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds. Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 140. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Marie-Luise Angerer et al. (eds.), Containment. Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking. Lüneburg: meson press, 2024. [↩]
- Robb, “Contained,” 33. [↩]
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. London: Ignota Press, 2019, 37. [↩]
- Ibid., 36. [↩]
- Durham Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 144. [↩]
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Maja-Lisa Müller (April 28, 2026). Containers: A Proposition for a Preposition. Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved May 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/165bj

