Despatialization – Territorial Phantoms

A landless people cannot succumb to the same fallacy that has imposed itself on almost every settled people throughout history: to understand the land itself as the container of the people and their own land as the a-priori of their life meaning or identity. This “territorial phantom” is still one of the most effective and problematic historical heirlooms because it is tied to the basic reflex of all seemingly legitimate uses of violence, national defense. It is based on the obsessive equation of place and self – the axiomatic error in territorial reasoning. Yet it is increasingly becoming exposed as an overpowering wave of transnational mobility ensures that many peoples and territories relativize their liaisons.

SoS citizens are nomadizing or de-territorializing groups who constitute themselves not only through their immunity to supporting soil. Rather, their communicative interactions function as an autogenous vessel in which participants contain themselves and stay in form while the group drifts through external landscapes.

As a portative state community SoS offers real transit spaces, places at which people convene, yet without wishing or being able to bind their identity to a locality. SoS spaces and places do not depend on a regular inhabitance or on a collective self. It is peculiar to SoS that it does not retain its visitors. An invulnerable license to change land and self remains untouched by global tendencies.

SoS has a priori no defined territory. The State may emerge anywhere geographically. SoS regions and provinces are clearly demarked as State territory.