Stasis: Charging the Space of Change Sarah Rivière
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79 Stasis: Charging the Space of Change Sarah Rivière Prologue: Alien (1979) directed by Ridley Scott outside assistance, that both express and under- Ridley Scott’s first Alien film opens with the crew of line their kindred nature to each other – while the the Nostromo, a massive and cumbersome mining alien is repeatedly confirmed as being purely alien, spaceship, being awakened from stasis by ‘mother’, the opposite of kindred, by its very lack of any such the ship’s computer, to investigate ‘a transmis- shared commonalities. sion of unknown origin’. The camera dwells on the crew as they are effectively reborn as septuplets The main action of the film takes place in the from seven interconnected stasis-pods, frail and spaceship Nostromo, whose name echoes the lost naked but for their white undergarments and the Nostoi poems of ancient Greece that reputedly tell electronic sensors that they peel away from their of the Greek heroes’ tragic attempts to return to bodies on rising. Far from Planet Earth with their their homes after the Trojan War. But the film is also searching radio calls unanswered, the crew are rounded with another Greek term, stasis (στάσις). presented as seven kindred siblings with a shared It opens with the crew being woken from stasis, yet desperate dream: to get themselves safely back and the same arrested state closes the final scene to Earth. [Fig. 1] with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) – ‘last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off’ – returning to stasis to The alien that the crew faces seems, from the resume her interrupted journey back to Earth. For physical point of view, to be everything that the crew her, stasis is blessed relief: it bestows utter phys- is not: erupting from a hatchery on an inhospitable ical, temporal, and emotional suspension where and ‘almost primordial’ planet, its blood is highly fears are annulled, the spatial extent of the long corrosive ‘molecular acid’ that raises fears for the distance home is erased, and where the flow of time integrity of the ship’s hull, and, with a skin of ‘protein becomes timeless. polysaccarides’ and cells of ‘polarized silicon’, it, unlike the crew, boasts ‘a prolonged resistance to The Alien film locates the space of stasis in the adverse environmental conditions’.1 It is also alien ‘safe’ removal from engagement offered by futuristic to the crew in its mode of survival: unlike them it stasis-pods of technological arrest. These trans- does not rely either on technology or teamwork parent, encapsulated, coffin-like spaces present for its continued life, but it is, instead, the ultimate us with the complete dislocation of their inhabit- lone predator as it picks off its prey, one by one. ants from the onward flow of time. But as this article But it is the crew’s common humanity, their common looks back in time to the ancient Greeks it becomes human frailties and shared reliance on technology, clear that, for them, a stasis was a very different their common contractual commitment to the same matter: a powerfully charged state of inter-kindred commercial company, their shared isolation from all drama measured by restraint, stasis at that time 19 Spaces of Conflict | Autumn / Winter 2016 | 79–94 80 involved the lively exchange of forces between the culture, we seem to find it everywhere’.2 Not only active and vital parties to a system. Thus, in the was stasis in ancient Greece widely applied as case of the film Alien, the space of stasis would the term for civil conflict,3 the same term also had exist not in the pure isolation of sealed stasis-pods an active life in, to mention just a few, pathology, but in the lively space between the members of the physics, boxing, and rhetoric.4 When looking at the Nostromo’s crew. frequency of use of the word across many disci- plines, as well as the precision with which it was And so, according to an ancient Greek under- used within each discipline at that time, one soon standing, the film’s space of stasis would manifest becomes aware that stasis in ancient Greece occu- itself at the round table of the ship’s mess, in the pied a cultural space that boasted a breadth and ship’s corridors, its bridge and medical bay, and depth that have been lost to us today. even in its landing craft: in short, in the ship’s public space where the film’s inter-crew conflicts – from Today the word stasis has, of course, survived from light-hearted jostling to outright hostility – are played antiquity and is still used in contemporary English, out, and where the members of the crew constitute for example, in science fiction where stasis-pods themselves, revealing and defining their charac- or fields enable a total artificial disconnection from ters within the film through such exchanges. This, the onward flow of time, or in pathology, psychoa- the spaceship’s public space of stasis, is neatly nalysis, or palaeontology,5 where a stasis refers to a juxtaposed in the film with its parallel space of war: state of stagnation in a flow of bodily fluids or semi- the ship’s massive, abandoned, and labyrinthine fluids, sexual energies, or evolutionary development bowels and shafts, where the crew’s merciless war respectively.6 Indeed, stasis today is mostly used as with the alien takes place. a relatively pejorative term to describe conditions where forms of unwanted blockage or stagnation Introduction either arise or are created. This understanding is When surveying the landscape of meaning of a word naturally echoed in current architectural discourse in contemporary use, one soon becomes aware where stasis is used, for example, by Greg Lynn as of multiple echoes of past meanings upon which a term of opposition to dynamism in architectural current understandings depend. We use language work,7 linking it to words like inert, traditional and to depict, describe, and negotiate our world, but it is static, or by Markus Miessen as a term for a lack of not always the closeness of a word to its meaning, interaction.8 But although he uses the term stasis but often it is the shadows of accumulation of in this way, the thesis set out by Miessen in his meaning or the points of slippage, dislocation, or 2010 book The Nightmare of Participation reveals loss between words and their meaning that have apparent points of resonance with the concept of the greatest power to extend our knowledge into stasis as understood in ancient Greece. Referring new understandings. Stasis is a word which, rather to the agonistic theory of the Belgian political theo- than growing culturally richer over time, instead rist Chantal Mouffe, Miessen calls for a ‘conflictual reveals itself as impoverished today when viewed model’ of achieving consensus, where conflict against its abundant past. It is this past that I will becomes understood as ‘an enabler, a producer address below. of a productive environment rather than as direct, physical violence.’9 In ancient Greece stasis was As pointed out by Otto Alvin Loeb Dieter in his recognised as just such an enabler, but one that 1950 text Stasis on the roots of stasis in rhetoric, also set out precise demands of relationship, ‘when we look for stasis in ancient thought and moderation, and reconciliation, while holding the 81 Fig. 1: Screenshot by the author from the film Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. London: Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. The crew of the Nostromo are woken from stasis by the spaceship’s computer to face the alien. 82 promise of new, energetic onward movement for all was being used to discuss,’ which raises the ques- parties post-stasis. tion as to whether the current impoverishment of meaning of the word stasis, once valued as a word This links to contemporary political philosophy, that enabled a high level of cultural engagement with where awareness of the need to accommodate the a precise form of conflictual interaction, limits our conflict inherent within a system is discussed, for own ability to discuss the particular set of problems example, in the work of Jacques Rancière, Giorgio with which it was once associated.14 For the shifting Agamben, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek. Indeed meanings of words create more powerful disloca- in his recent book Agamben calls for a new theory tions in cultural understanding over time than their of civil war directly referencing stasis in antiquity as etymological roots can reveal. Architectural histo- a source of knowledge in this area.10 In discourse rian Adrian Forty advises that ‘to find the meaning by scholars of classical history the role of stasis of a word at any one time is to know the available in ancient Greece has been addressed in some possibilities: meanings cannot be identified the way depth, but with the emphasis being laid on stasis as one looks up a word in a dictionary.’15 This article civil strife between political factions escalating into sets up a series of direct encounters with a range outright civil war,11 although Nicole Loraux’s work on of past possibilities of meaning enabled by the word stasis in the Athenian state broadens the discourse stasis as it was used in ancient Greek culture, with to include stasis in a range of expressions such as the aim of reaching a broader understanding of this between the family and the state.12 specific constellation of processes and forces, and its implications on the spaces and systems from In this article I have specifically chosen not to which it arose.16 delve further into the state of stasis as civil war, but to concentrate instead on the active and frequent If understood as a term that merely denotes stag- use of the word stasis in ancient Greece in medi- nation then stasis would have limited relevance to cine, literature, and participatory politics; i.e.