Supple Solids: A Deep History of Soft Containers

Research on technology has long prioritized tools over containers, privileging action, agency, and intervention—traits culturally coded as masculine—over receptivity, support, and relational capacity. This bias reflects a deep-rooted tendency to associate value with instrumental power while rendering invisible the conditions that enable such power. This course traces the overlooked history of container technologies with a special focus on “supple solids”: materials such as bark, leather, felt, fiber, and skin, whose loose physical structure allows them to absorb, adapt, and enclose. They are shaped not by carving or casting but by scraping, knotting, sewing, or twining. Soft containers such as bags and slings are wearable and portable in ways that hard containers are not. They integrate with bodily movement, or enfold and protect the body, and, in this way, become part of how bodies inhabit social worlds. At the center of this technological repertoire is the human body itself, whose skin and hollow viscera form the primordial container that shapes early experiences of interiority, flow, and difference. Much older than pottery, soft containers are central to how humans came to act and think the way we still do. They enable temporal planning by facilitating transport. They allow for group mobility and modularity through the gathering of resources and the storing of substances without fixing their volume or form. Their flexibility and permeability also open new ways of interacting with materials through insulation and filtering, actions of revealing and concealing, or controlled distribution of contents. Last but not least, the making of soft containers requires fine motor skills, foresight and symbolic abstraction, which are all linked to the evolution of cognitive complexity and language. By configuring relationships between “inside” and “outside”, containers also scaffold many of the metaphors we think through and live by. As a contemporary coda, we will explore plastics— synthetic materials that mimic the flexibility of supple solids and raise urgent questions about health and sustainability. Plastics recast the logic of soft containers in industrial and planetary terms, inviting us to reflect on the material afterlives of our most mundane enclosures. Ephemeral and invisible, soft containers have been central to the unfolding of human reasoning, mobility, and relational life. This course foregrounds their history to reveal how containing and supplying—rather than interference and control—lie at the heart of human intelligence. 3 credits. Satisfies the chronological requirement.