The Art of Surrender (review)

The Art of Surrender explores the cultural process through which the end of conflict is accomplished when one side capitulates to another after a period of armed struggle. Using textual materials and visual representations of surrender, Robin Wagner-Pacifici demonstrates the centrality of surprisingly complex systems of meaning. Through in-depth analysis of the handing over of the city of Breda during the Thirty Years War (1625), the end of the American Civil War at Appomattox (1865) and the Japanese submission in Tokyo Bay (1945) she shows that the surrender is about far more than just "giving up" or even saying "we give up" in a recognizable and diplomatically acceptable way. This is an event in which signals are sent about identity and dignity, sovereignty and autonomy, beginnings and endings, forgiveness and endurance, witnessing and suffering. Such communicative gestures can be intended or unintended, contemporaneous with the military defeat or a subsequent reflection upon it. Indeed Wagner-Pacifici's book weights the second term in each of these binaries. Those meanings that are accidental, unplanned, spontaneous or "given off" in Goffman's sense seem to be the most telling for sociological analysis. So are later representations in art, literature and the collective memory. These speak to the surrender as a moment of problematic cultural reordering rather than simply military conquest and defeat. As such it is an episode requiring deft performative skills, one often marked by coded ambivalences and complicities that can be traced through the careful reading of political documents, the works of artists and photographers, autobiographies and letters.

Most obviously there is a thematic fit with Wagner-Pacifici's long running interest in violent confrontations and especially the ambivalent and polyvalent ways that these run their course and leave a stain on the collective imagination. Whether she is looking at the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or the MOVE siege in Philadelphia, the story has always been one of traumatic events that refuse any clean cultural resolution or interpretation. In her analyses these episodes are shown to be haunted by the ghosts of unfulfilled possibility, incompleteness and existential anxiety. The closure never comes. It should also be noted that The Art of Surrender fits into a more general theoretical movement in Wagner-Pacifici's work away from a structuralist and institutional analysis of culture, and towards hermeneutics and humanism. Hence we encounter an exquisite and refined sensibility at work in this volume, one that seems at times almost melancholic in orientation. This is most evident when the author picks up on the little things that would simply pass by most observers, seen but not noticed. The enigmatic folded paper blown in the wind at the bottom of a Velazquez; the curious repetitions in Al Gore's concession speech to George W. Bush after the 2000 election; the distracted meanderings of General Grant's conversation with General Lee as they meet face to face to agree the terms of surrender; the peculiarly casual demeanor of the sailors crowding the decks of the USS Missouri at a turning point in history. These appear in The Art of Surrender more as accidental and poignant tokens of the human condition, less as dedicated signifiers of anything in particular. They are markers of our irreversible movement through time. Finally we should note that this book is about a particular kind of situation or encounter, and in this sense it continues the tradition established in the author's earlier study of "the standoff." This is an important move which enables Wagner-Pacifici to shift cultural sociology towards the territory of symbolic interactionism without reverting to methodological individualism or defining "a situation" restrictively in terms of the face-to-face encounter. This is a relational sociology not an essentialist one, and moreover it shows that the deep structure of the situation is one underpinned by a symbolic order, even if this is fragile and provisional. Situations are like texts. They might be populated by active bodies and agile minds but she insists they...