The psychodynamic aspects of the ship's-hold experience are most accessible to present-day people, as they have points of reference from dealing with caravan interiors and car cabins. The availability of such ‘traffic’ means would not have become an indispensable, and usually enjoyable, method of movement for the considerable majority of modern individuals if the interior forms of the vehicles themselves did not adapt elementary structures of sphere formation on a small scale. The ship, like – more moderately proportioned – the car and the caravan, is the mobilized nest or the absolute house.1 From an existential perspective, the task is a mobilization of the interior – which amounts to squaring the circle of life. Because the ship simultaneously embodies the realization of the longing for being-with-oneself and evasion, it is (especially in its early modern, seaworthy form) the archetype of the resolved contradiction. It balances out the diametrically opposing strivings towards habitation and adventure. It makes symbiotic relationships possible – and yet it can be experienced like a projectile striking the unheard-of. The vehicle is experienced as a belly that holds a litter of newcomers; they will go ashore where they can, and do as they please in front of their context-free front door.
At the same time, the ship is a magical-technospheric self-expansion of the crews – like all modern container-vehicles, it is a homeostatic dream machine that can be steered through the outer element like a manipulable Great Mother. (A psychohistorically convincing history of vehicle superstition has yet to be written.) Thus ships can become mobile homelands for their crews. In recognizing ships as extensions of the country under whose flag they sail, maritime law follows an original spherological intuition: being-on-land here changes in spatio-logical and international law terms into being-on-board; central aspects of the earth's nomos, the ‘peace’ of the native space, are transferred to the floating endosphere.
The decisive function of the ship's hull, admittedly, is to push back, both in physical and in symbolic terms: because it moves through the damp element, whose displaceability aids the fulfilment of the ship's spatial demands, the floating body wins out over the resistance of its carrier. At the social level, this corresponds to the rule that human ensembles which throw themselves outwards only remain coherent if they succeed in stopping their leaks and asserting the precedence of the interior amid the unliveable element. Just as church naves2 once transferred this act of displacement to the mainland in order to be vehicles for Christian souls on the earthly sea of life, expedition ships in the outer space will have to rely all the more on their displacement space as the spatially self-disposing shelter form they have brought with them.