> This duality of container and containment has echoes with the relation between the thing and the network suggested in Zoë Sofia's "Container Technologies" essay, which "translated Heidegger's fourfold into a shorthand way for thinking about the way things, objects, are a *gathering* together of many elements, forces, purposes and dimensions, both human and extra-human" (Chapter 1, 32). The corollary of the idea of the thing as a gathering -- in Latour's formulation "every entity is an event" (1993, 81) -- is that a network could be understood as an unraveling of the thing into its constituent actors and factors. Whereas the thing is a network condensed, the network is a thing expanded.
Excerpt from "Containment: Holding, Filtering, Leaking" (Angerer, Richardson, Schmedes, Sofoulis)