The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End

by Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Overview

How do we know when a war ends? For many, the resolution of a conflict comes not with the last traces of smoke left on the battlefield, but with the formal ceremonies of surrender: possession and repossession, the signing of treaties, and the pomp and circumstance that mark them. Historically, most conflicts have ended with such rituals. But, as Robin Wagner-Pacifici reveals in The Art of Surrender, they should not be seen as merely a matter of giving up. They also offer ways of holding back and signal early fault lines that give rise to later undoings and conflicts.

The Art of Surrender explores these ritual concessions as acts of warfare, performances of submission, demonstrations of power, and representations of shifting, unstable worlds. Wagner-Pacifici analyzes three significant military surrenders in the history of warfare—the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century, the American Civil War, and World War II—through the use of period documents and forms, maps, literature, witness accounts, photographs, and paintings that were left as proof of victory and defeat. In her analyses of such archival material and iconic works of art, she considers the limits of sovereignty at conflict's end, showing how the ways we concede loss can be as important as the ways we claim victory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226869797
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/01/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is professor of sociology at Swarthmore College. She is the author of three previous books, including The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama and Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

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The Art of Surrender
DECOMPOSING SOVEREIGNTY AT CONFLICT'S END

By Robin Wagner-Pacifici The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2005
The University of Chicago
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-86979-7


Chapter One The Problem of Surrender

Therefore no no, for I resign to thee. Now, mark me how I will undo myself. I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths ... Long may'st thou live in Richard's seat to sit, And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit! ... What more remains? -William Shakespeare, Richard II, 4.1.202-22

Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velázquez [Las Meninas], the representation as it were of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us. And, indeed, representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being. But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation-of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject-which is the same- has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form. -Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

In viewing the shot, the reader had to look over the shoulders of the German civilians in order to see the bodies, creating a layering between the shot's foreground (where the Germans were standing) and the background (where the victims and liberators stood). The effect was magnified by the middle of the shot, where a seemingly impassable white space kept the groups at a distance from each other. -"German civilians view corpses at Buchenwald, April 16, 1945," in Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye

THE END

We begin with a consideration of ending. All endings are difficult, whether endings of wars or meetings or relationships. Endings are actions that terminate actions; thus they do double duty as markers and unmakers. The philosopher J. L. Austin briefly considered the verbal formulas that end actions or events and noted their slide from markers to "performatives." "There is a transition," he wrote, "from the word ??? at the end of a novel to the expression 'message ends' at the end of a signal message, to the expression 'with that I conclude my case' as said by Counsel in a law court. These, we may say, are cases of marking the action by the word, where eventually the use of the word comes to be the action of 'ending' (a difficult act to perform, being the cessation of acting, or to make explicit in other ways, of course)."

Endings are difficult practically and conceptually. And surrenders are quite particular and paradoxical forms of ending. They depend on a resistant cooperation and mutuality. They draw on an authority in the very process of undoing that authority. They raise a series of questions. For example, what does it mean to be a subject who says "I surrender," or to be a recipient of the statement "I surrender," or to be a witness to an interchange of surrender? What happens to the subjecthood of the surrendering self, the surrendering army, the surrendering sovereign, and the surrendering state as they surrender their selves to others? And what, analytically, does it take to grasp these social entities performing and interacting in such a moment of extremis?

Surrenders are never quite what they seem. They may be part relinquishment of power and identity, part exchange (handing over), part termination of conflict or resistance, part degradation ceremony, or part salvage operation. For all the variations on modalities of surrender (more or less emphatic asymmetry between the victor and the vanquished, more or less severe consequences incumbent on the act), surrenders entail performances of the self in a moment of existential extremis. Hinge mechanisms of the flows of power, they illuminate the adjudication of victory and defeat in social life.

Shame and social death, with their corrosive powers, hover at the edges of all surrenders, where the self must be simultaneously present and self-absenting/ abnegating. The vanquished are, after all, giving up and giving over. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes that in shame "it is as if our consciousness collapsed and, seeking to flee in all directions, were simultaneously summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at is own defacement, at the expropriation of what is most its own ... It is nothing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty."

Surrenders are thoroughly paradoxical affairs in just the way that Agamben means: the vanquished self must "present his credentials" in order to divest himself of his credentials. His sovereign self exposes and delivers up his subjected self in his own undoing. Thus, on the verge of losing his kingship and kingdom, Shakespeare's Richard II begins his surrendering soliloquy with a series of statements in the first person singular: "I resign to thee"; "I will undo myself"; "I give away my crown." He ends the speech in a hortatory and prophetic mood, signaling his undone status as he switches to the third person: "Long may'st thou live in Richard's seat to sit,/And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit!" The "I" gives way to "Richard," a king who already begins to seem a figure from the past, subject now to other rulers.

With all its paradoxes and existential extremities (another key paradox: one is both forced to surrender and allowed to surrender), the complex negotiations of surrenders reveal identities in moments of transition. Such negotiations also point to the fault lines of resignation and forced consent that underscore the realm of the "normal" to which all parties return at conflict's end. This book highlights the way such fault lines are vividly and richly illustrated in these fleeting moments of unguarded power. This is true both for individuals and for collectivities (and often simultaneously relevant at both levels, since I will show that the surrender of collectivities must be transacted through the medium of the surrender of the individual representative or proxy). The complex relational dynamics of selves surrendering to other selves must therefore be charted across an array of affectual, even sentimental, couplings. This is so even when the focus, as here, is on surrender of the military type. The flows of power, the meetings and exchanges, and the consequent merging of formerly autonomous entities in surrenders anticipate an analytical role both for force and for the erotic. In early modern nation building, for example, the exchange of women in royal marriage agreements frequently combined the sexual with political forms of surrender.

Archetypes in Action: A Word on Method

This book's goal is to illuminate a complex, evolving archetype. It is an archetype of political probity, but one that inevitably operates asymptotically to its apparent goals of permanent conflict resolution. While archetypes refer generally to origins and templates, in practice they, like genres, develop through their situational manifestations. Thus the archetypal illumination of surrender must view surrender as an evolving phenomenon. Shifts occur at the level of practices, technologies, discourses, and genres of representation with each new enactment of a surrender.

Beyond the apparently paradoxical attention to archetypal evolution, there are several obvious intellectual challenges associated with the analysis of an archetype. Perhaps the biggest challenge is generalizing across disparate historical periods, cultures, languages, and practices. How do we even know that we are talking about the "same thing" when we categorize actions from different settings under the same conceptual rubric? Can we assume certain invariants across all human societies-beyond reproduction? Although it may be safe to proceed inductively and follow the tracks of such phenomena as "conflict" across historically and culturally diverse societies, how justified are we in naming diversely configured endings of conflict "surrender" just because they resemble each other in certain aspects?

I am not the first to grapple with these conundrums of comparative analysis. Discernment of similarities and differences has posed epistemological problems for social scientists since the inceptions of the various disciplines. The hermeneutic tacking back and forth between general definitions and specific cases does a lot of the work of making the case for reasonable comparisons. But variations in language, practices, and symbolic forms make this work complicated and, inevitably, somewhat speculative. It may be that, as we shall see, it is often the clashing of two diverse definitions of the situation that makes for the most interesting cases-one party to the end of a conflict thinks he is getting a new political partner, the other thinks he is getting a loyal vassal. At another, nominal level, both parties may understand that they are participating in a "surrender." But such agreement only begins the process of meaning making.

It may seem self-evident that surrenders work only when both the victor and the vanquished participate in the same military, legal, and cultural paradigm. From the conventions of leave-taking (weapons in certain positions, exiting a besieged town in a certain manner), to the forms of interaction and exchange, to the transfers of sovereignty, successful transactions of surrender seem to rely on mutual comprehension and interpretation. Nevertheless, this mutuality is qualified by several factors: (1) Even parties operating with the same paradigm can dissimulate and fail to live up to agreements. Sometimes this may involve the signatories of the agreements themselves, and sometimes it may involve the subordinates who must carry out the orders of their signing superiors. (2) The encounter of different paradigms can promote hybridization rather than unintelligibility, eventually leading to new paradigms. (3) The bias of historical archives means that most of the material that survives a surrender reflects the victor's point of view, regardless of the paradigmatic coordination between victor and vanquished.

Given all these qualifications, the question remains: How do we recognize an action as a surrender and not as something else? Regardless of the competing paradigms "on the ground" of history, the comparative analyst must appeal to some overarching (however emergent) paradigm whereby similar actions can be recognized as such despite their different appearances. One exemplary study is that of historian Patricia Seed. In Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640, Seed compares the bases of claims and the mechanisms by which claims were pursued by the English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish forces involved in overseas conquests. There were significant differences across this group of separate, often competing, powers. The English built fences and thus "improved" the land for habitation; the French performed both religious and political-military ceremonies in which they planted crosses and carried royal standards; the Spaniards read the "Requirement" and ordered native peoples to submit to Catholicism; the Dutch "discovered" lands and claimed them through trade and mapmaking; the Portuguese engaged in trade and commerce. In each case, these practices and discourses had a bifurcated audience-native peoples who were acquiescing to or resisting (in ways both overt and covert) the acts of possession, and other European powers who were sometimes competing for the same territory. Recognition was thus complex and multivocal. This is a meticulous historical study, but on two points it is more suggestive than definitive. First, the relation between ceremonies of possession and violent encounters is not developed. Second, and most relevant here, the very question of an emergent international discourse of conquest and possession is only implicitly introduced through discussions of recognition.

My own study of surrender aims to foreground the mechanisms of recognition and its contestation, since forms of surrender do different work in different contexts. I will keep the epistemological question active as cases are examined. The theoretical apparatus is one that provides a precise framework for analyzing such adjudication.

A couple of examples may indicate the high stakes of interpretation. Participants to a siege and analysts alike might view the collective suicide of a besieged group as a form of surrender to an enemy that the group knows it cannot defeat (though the defenders deny the enemy the "gift" of themselves as subjects or slaves). Some might view this action as a form of resistance or martyrdom rather than a form of surrender. Some might contest the very terms "suicide" and "surrender." Yael Zerubavel has traced these historically contingent recognitions and misrecognitions in the case of Masada, where in 70-73 CE a group of Jews holding out against the conquering Romans on a high plateau overlooking the Dead Sea and Judea killed each other rather than face slavery, torture, or death at the hands of the Romans. Zerubavel tracks the coming and going of paradigms of explanation and justification as the actions of the Jews are lauded or critiqued.

A more contemporary example comes from the standoff in Texas in the early 1990s between the forces of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Branch Davidians. At points this standoff appeared to be moving in the direction of a surrender of the religious group, but that movement was propulsive, intermittent, and difficult for the FBI negotiators to recognize as a surrender. The FBI maintained a literalist, quantifiable idea of surrender, as evinced in this poststandoff interview with two agents:

Jeff Jamar: We worked out a surrender plan in minute detail ... See you want a plan, you want a surrender plan because you put that in their heads. Byron Sage: If they can visualize-and you actually use those words-"Can you picture this? Can you-can you visualize-okay, you're going to come out the front door. You're going to turn left."

Meanwhile, operating within another interpretive frame, religious scholars claimed that David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians, had a very different sense of surrender, one mediated and made possible through biblical hermeneutics: "What the authorities never perceived was that Koresh's preaching was precisely such to him, the only matter of substance and means through which to work out a 'surrender.'" Both sides were theoretically searching for a gestural and discursive language through which to effect and communicate a surrender. Translation problems of an epistemological sort prevented mutual recognition-with all the tragic consequences of misrecognition.

These two examples do not just demonstrate the interpretive difficulties associated with different epistemological and ideological paradigms; they also reveal the high stakes for recognition in situations of conflict and violence. Analysts enter the historical stream at a particular bend of the river. The necessarily retrospective gaze of the analyst can seek out evidence of prior changes in typification, and it must do so on several levels simultaneously.

At one level, conventions of behavior and social organization develop and change over time. At another level changes in genres and media of representation also occur, but often in ways that are contingently coordinated with changes in the former. In studying surrender, changes in military conventions and technologies-the way wars are actually fought-may be correlated with changes in the ways wars are depicted. Peter Burke notes one such coordinated development that followed on the early seventeenth-century invention of the military drill in Europe: "Battles were becoming less like an agglomeration of single combats and more like collective actions in which groups of soldiers marched, charged or fired as one man. The new pictorial trend, in step with military developments, was to show a scene which could be read like a diagram-and was indeed influenced by the diagrams printed in books on the art of war."

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Problem of Surrender
The End
Archetypes in Action: A Word on Method
Cases of Surrender
The Archaism of Surrender
The Conditions of Surrender: Toward a Political Semiotic
Converging to Convert
The Etymology of Surrender
Etymological Coda
Surrenders as Actions in the Interstices
The Copies of Surrender
2. Witness to Surrender
Bearing Witness at Breda
What Is a Witness?
The Visual Order of the Witness
Where Is the Witness?
What Does the Witness Do?
Signatories to the Scene
Witness to a Disappearance
Looking at the Vanishing Point
Paper and Responsibility
3. The Exchanges of Surrender
The Dangers of Surrender
The Case of the Unconditional Surrender
The Nature of the Surrendering Exchange
The Objects of Exchange
Originary and Secondary Objects of Contention
A Note on the Work of Maps
Civil War Territory
The Fates of Warriors and Civilians
Transactional Objects of the Process of Surrender
Pledges, Oaths, Promises, and Pardons
Instruments and Weapons of War
Symbolic Objects of Authority and Solidarity
Tributes, Demonstrations, and Gestures
Sites of Exchange
Convergence and Divergence
4. Sovereignty and Its Afterlife
What Is Sovereignty?
Types of Sovereignty
Erotic Exchange and Vicarious Surrender
Actions of the Sovereign
Assumption and Divestment of Responsibility
The Itinerant Sovereign
How to Recognize the Sovereign
Mapping Sovereign Relations
Agency without Sovereignty
How to Represent the Sovereign
The Multiplicity of Singularity
Sovereignty at the Scene?
The Uncopied
5. The Deep Structure of Surrender
Borderline Scrutinies
Uneasy Appearances
The Political Semiotic at Conflict's End
Demonstration and Deictics
Deictic Deferrals
Performatives and Transformations
Representations
Copies and Their Inversions
Underrepresentation and the Civil War
On the Threshold of Assumptions and Divestments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This book is a fine piece of cultural sociology: smart, sound, and original. It is also particularly timely because it deals with sovereignty and surrender when the world political map and rights of self-government are matters of violent as well as political struggle. Robin Wagner-Pacifici peels away layer after layer of the arts of diplomacy, political ritual, and warfare as they come to light in critical moments of surrender.”—Chandra Mukerji, University of California, Davis

Chandra Mukerji

The Art of Surrender continues and deepens one of the more remarkable projects in the human studies: Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s political semiotics of violent confrontation in the contemporary world. Through a series of virtuoso case studies, The Art of Surrender reconceptualizes strategic political action. Demonstrating the profoundly performative qualities of politics and violence, this sparkling work takes cultural sociology where it has never gone before.”—Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University

Jeffrey C. Alexander

Robin Wagner-Pacifici shows that defeat is never simply the inability to go on fighting, but a form of social organization orchestrated by its own rules. She makes beautiful use of visual and textual evidence for three archetypal cases of the Western tradition of surrender—Breda, Appomattox, and Tokyo Bay—thereby making also an outstanding contribution on the politics of painting and photography. This is a book that would delight the ghost of Georg Simmel.”—Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

Randall Collins