1

This is an Author’s Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Museum Management and Curatorship, 29(2): 122–139 [2014] [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/ [DOI:10.1080/09647775.2014.888819].

The Museum as Assemblage: bringing forth affect at the Australian War Memorial

Emma Waterton and Jason Dittmer

Abstract: This article takes as its focus the Australian War Memorial, including its collections, the physical infrastructure of the site, its staff and the range of people who encounter it as tourists, researchers or military personnel and their families. In taking up this interest, our intention is not to diminish, ignore, or bypass the role of narrative and representation in their spaces. Rather, we aim to contribute to a more-than-representational appreciation of museums. This sort of approach redirects attention to a range of elements including lighting, sound and movement. These are typically seen as ‘background noise’ but in reality do greatly productive work in terms of engineering atmospheres and subject positions for those within its spaces. This article interrogates the way in which these elements are utilised in four areas of the museum, all of which are explored through ethnographic reflections referencing ideas of more-than-human agency, affect and the haunting virtual.

Keywords: assemblage theory; the Australian War Memorial; museum exhibitions; visitor experience; museum management participant observation

The bugler’s pure notes blare out and across sandstone walls, each engraved with sites of

Australia’s past conflicts: BURMA – MESOPOTAMIA – SOUTH AFRICA – NEW

GUINEA. The song is Last Post, the counterpart of the more famous Reveille traditionally

played at the start of the military workday. Last Post, by contrast, signals ‘job done’ – the

possibility of standing down and getting some sleep before Reveille plays again the next day.

As such, Last Post has been repurposed as a military dirge, played at funerals and here, at the

Australian War Memorial, at the end of each day where it signals the possibility of eternal rest

in the wake of duty and sacrifice.

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In the silence following the final note, the Eternal Flame burbles gently, audible only

through the natural gas bubbling up through the Reflecting Pool. The silence is brief as

officers soon begin to bark orders – the high school cadets of the Australian Army and Air

Force standing at attention in parallel lines are eager to march out in formation, - the brisk

chill of the autumn air causing their otherwise rigid limbs to shiver. With their departure, the

ensemble of temporalities produced through the playing of Last Post is dispersed: the

sacrifices of past servicemen and servicewomen haunting the site are locked away until the

next morning, and the future servicemen and servicewomen likewise return to home bases in

Adelaide and Brisbane. Remaining in place is the Eternal Flame, the perpetual present of the

nation-state.

According to the Australian War Memorial Act of 1980, the functions of the Australian

War Memorial in Canberra are ‘to maintain and develop the national memorial’, to ‘develop

and maintain […] a national collection of historical material’, ‘exhibit […] historical material

from the memorial collection’, and ‘conduct, arrange for and assist in research into matters

pertaining to Australian military history.’ Given this mandate, the Memorial can be understood

as ‘a shrine, a world-class museum, and an extensive archive..’(Australian War Memorial

2013, n.p.). Together, these bring a range of people to the site, from tourists to researchers to

family members of deceased servicemen and servicewomen.

In this article, we consider the Memorial as an assemblage of objects, the bodies of

staff and visitors, narratives, materials and more, that together shape the visitor experience. In

so doing, we draw attention to the more-than-human dimensions of museums and the ways

they might open up or close down possibilities for affective engagement. This conceptual

framing allows us to address the following questions: 1) how does the Memorial incorporate

non-human elements; 2) how do these shape experiences of visitors; and 3) how are visitors’

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levels of engagement shaped by participation in the Memorial as embodied subjects?

Ultimately, our aim is to begin a conversation about how human and non-human elements act

together within the museum context to prompt visitors to think differently.

To address this, we first review the literature on theories of assemblage and affect, both

of which offer ways into the associations between the human and non-human, particularly in

terms of their potentiality or, as we will term it, the ‘haunting virtual’. In doing so, we extend a

developing interest in the politics of affect emerging within museum studies, such as Gregory

and Witcomb (2007), Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010) and Schorch (2012). We also extend the

literature on spaces of militarism, such as Thien (2009) and Navaro-Yashin (2009). We then

outline our methods and approach before moving on to present four vignettes composed from

our fieldwork notes and diary entries written while onsite about affective interactions with and

within museums.

Assemblage, becoming and the more-than-human

This research draws from the ‘relational turn’ and the so-called ‘new materialism’ in the social

sciences, both of which share an appreciation of space as emergent from the relations among

various objects, people and environments (Massumi 2002; Dépelteau 2008; Jones 2009; Braun

and Whatmore 2010; Coole and Frost 2010). While not ignoring the role of discourse and

narrative, as articulated in earlier social constructivist accounts, this ‘turn’ goes some way

towards de-centring it. In their place, it draws attention to the ways in which the social and the

material interact in ongoing processes of reconfiguring the world (Anderson et al. 2012).

While there are many approaches available under this umbrella of ideas, we adopt assemblage

theory, specifically the variant arising from Deleuzean philosophy as interpreted by Manuel

DeLanda (2006, 2011). This has usefully been applied in science and technology studies,

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international relations and, crucially, geography – a field cognate to museum studies in a

number of ways.

Within this line of thinking, assemblages are conceived as entities composed of

heterogeneous elements irreducible to their role within the larger assemblage. These parts (and

the larger assemblage itself) have relations of exteriority, by which we mean that they can, and

often do, participate within multiple assemblages simultaneously, and therefore are not

defined by their function within a single assemblage (Anderson et al., 2012). Because of this,

and because assemblages are open systems (susceptible to new elements being introduced and

old ones departing), they are dynamic: underneath the seeming stability of the assemblage is a

continual surge and restructuring of constituent relations. Sometimes this overwhelms the

assemblage and it fundamentally changes into something new. Predicting such an event is

difficult, as while it is possible to describe the physical or discursive properties of an element

in assemblage, the relational dimension directs us to the moment of interaction – when those

properties interact with those of another element newly brought into assemblage. Properties, in

this context, are those which an entity in assemblage brings with it, with capacities –

dependent on, but irreducible to, properties – referring to the nature of affect, or an entity’s

capacity to affect or be affected (DeLanda 2006). Consequently, it is not the properties of an

element in assemblage that matter so much as its capacities – an almost infinite set, given the

range of elements with which it can interact.

In the Memorial context, this theoretical framing prompts examination not only of the

narrative elements which attempt to stabilize meaning, but also the material elements that

(re)compose it. This includes everything from the living trees in the Sculpture Garden, to the

exhibits’ electronics, to the sun which warms the Memorial’s stones, to the bodies of its

visitors and their individual reactions. These elements all have different temporalities

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associated with them: the trees lasting for decades or longer, the electronics lasting for years,

the sun rising and falling over a single day, and visitors replaced by new bodies every few

hours and vacating the site entirely at night. The interaction of these (and many other)

elements indicates a sense of the Memorial as constantly in a state of becoming, never truly

stable or totally coherent (Anderson and McFarlane 2011).

But how is this commitment to ‘becoming’ important when considering the Australian

War Memorial? To start, our purpose is to contribute to a more-than-representational

appreciation of the museum that incorporates the somatic and avoids anthropocentric framings

of the political (in that politics only involves human actors – see Connolly 2010). This points

us to a range of Memorial elements that are typically ‘background noise’, but which do greatly

productive work in terms of engineering atmospheres and the subject positions of those within

its spaces (Thrift 2008). Further, the adoption of a more-than-representational focus also

points to the ways in which those elements often confound the desire to engineer them,

producing wayward encounters and unintended consequences. This can be explicated through

reference to the ideas of more-than-human agency, affect and the haunting virtual.

More-than-human agency, affect, and the haunting virtual

‘Agency’, like ‘culture’, ‘identity’ and ‘community’, is a highly contested concept, granted

multiple different meanings from a wide variety of theoretical standpoints. Within the

humanities and social sciences, it is a term commonly associated with the work of Anthony

Giddens (1984) and his structuration theory, in which agency is theorized as the capacity to

act, with restraint from action imagined as social structure. More recently, the relational turn

has caused us to press this notion of agency a little further. For our purposes, we understand it

as the potential to make a difference, such that it comes to be envisaged as something that can

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be distributed across both the social and the material, the human and non-human (McFarlane

2011). Just as with the distinction between properties and capacities in assemblage theory, a

relational understanding of agency sees it as co-produced by a range of

bodies/objects/knowledge as they are brought into relation with one another.

The more-than-human twist on this is the recognition that objects, animals and other

material entities – excluded by the anthropocentrism of political philosophy – also have the

capacity to make a difference and thus can be said to have agency (Hobson 2007; Braun and

Whatmore 2010). These non-human agents may lack the intentionality, reflexivity and

consciousness of their human counterparts, but without their collaboration human agency is

limited. In other words, we are pushed to ask how non-human agents matter or figure in our

lives. One need only think of how useful a museum would be were a rat to chew through its

electric mains, or a structural fault to develop in the stonework as a result of subsidence.

Crucially, it is not just humans who harness this collective agency, as being in

assemblage necessarily means having the capacity to affect all the assemblage’s constituent

elements. That is to say, the human subject is not a rigid entity but something that is remade,

however minutely, by entering into assemblage. In the case of the Memorial, we might

consider the way in which the physical layout of exhibitions inspires certain unconscious

patterns of perambulation among visitors; the way one child with low blood sugar can throw a

tantrum that sets everyone in the room on edge; the way quiet rooms predispose people

entering to speak quietly, or indeed to stop conversing at all; the way a yawn by one student

will soon ripple through the entire tour group, turning the tide of interest against the docent.

It is worth remembering that our focus on the Memorial is not meant to obscure the

fact that it is itself an element in other assemblages, such as the Australian Defence Force, the

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city of Canberra, the herd of kangaroos who take over the Sculpture Garden nightly, or the war

in Afghanistan. Nor, for that matter, do we want to lose sight of the various assemblages

within, such as the individual bodies of visitors and staff or the cafe. Being enmeshed in those

assemblages necessarily leads to influxes of all sorts that rework the Memorial discursively,

institutionally and materially, just as the elements constituting the Memorial itself do. In short,

the material environment and the people within it are enmeshed in an array of influences that

operate below the level of consciousness, never determining outcomes but certainly creating

the currents in which conscious agency must swim.

The Deleuzean concept of the ‘virtual’ is also important. Rather than implying

qualities of being online or digital, the virtual in Deleuzian terms refers to potentials that are

not (or not yet) actualized, or the ‘almost’ as Thien (2005) labels them. Much like the

DeLandan notion of capabilities, virtualities are real (in that they can affect) without

necessarily ever occurring as an event. They are real, as Adey (2008) points out, because their

very futurity is contingent upon the multiplicity of relations and interactions unfolding in the

present. Drawing on Bergsonian notions of time and movement, Deleuze (1991) points to

memory as an example of virtual reality. Here, embodied habits are formed out of what

worked (or not) in the past; when you stop yourself at the last moment from grabbing a hot

saucepan, it is because the memory of previous misadventure is encoded and archived in your

nervous system.

Consequently, virtual events impact behaviour in the present through the production of

embodied habits. Given that the Memorial states its mission as ‘to assist Australians to

remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact

on Australian society’, this Bergsonian understanding of memory is worth foregrounding. The

Memorial seeks to conjure the past into the present, with the expectation that this will shape

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political behaviour in the future. However, this says very little about how the virtual

contributes to the working of the Memorial in the sense of becoming.

Given that the Memorial is not just a museum but a national shrine, we consider a

particular kind of virtual as contributing to the Memorial’s continual becoming: the haunting

virtual. As Thrift (2008, 121) puts it, everyday social practice:

... always generates the ghostly correlates of unactualised possibles, so space-times are

always accompanied by their phantoms, which rehearse ‘the active present of present

things’ (Valéry, cited in Dening 1996, 116) […] First, because nearly all spaces bear

the freight of their past. […] Second, because as many space-times have become

increasingly strung out across the globe, so the sense of the faraway as near has been

able to become increasingly prevalent [...] Third, because space-times […] generate

many of the unactualized possibles without which they cannot be sensed and

described.

While we are unaware of any literal ghostly presences at the Memorial, Thrift’s references to

the phantom of the ‘faraway as near’, the freight of the past and the ‘ghostly correlates of

unactualised possibles’ speak to the role of another kind of haunting. This is a space that

functions by bringing visitors into relation with distant battlefields and deceased servicemen

and servicewomen who ventured all for the nation-state. Coddington (2011, 750) has

specifically drawn on the concept of haunting to describe the way in which everyday practices,

such as museum practices, produce the nation-state: ‘Haunting redeploys the ghost with

activity and effectiveness in the present. The state that becomes enacted at any given time and

place draws on a specific long-term historical trajectory and context.’

Perhaps one of the more poignant ways of thinking through this type of haunting is to reflect

on its adoption by postcolonial scholars, who highlight the haunting of the present by past

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colonial practices. Here, haunting is understood to be conceptually useful ‘because of its

affective dimension, a dimension that creates a sense of the imminently important, present,

and disruptive’ (O’Riley 2007, 1). Sometimes haunting can work to territorialize the

assemblage, while under other circumstances it can be just the disruptive force to which

postcolonial theorists aspire. In either case, the virtual, displaced in space and time, surges into

the here-and-now to reshape a range of assemblages.

Tracing becomings

While a considerable body of literature concerning audiences has developed within museum

studies, there is little to date that attends specifically to the reworked concept of affect that we

have adopted here (but see Witcomb 2012 for an exception). Lighting, logistics, visitor ‘flow’

and so forth have certainly all received critical attention within this existing body of work,

especially in terms of their role in framing the user experience (see Marstine 2006; Macdonald

and Basu 2007), but the rationale for our particular focus emerges from the observation that

the highly mediated world in which we live is now also being called upon to ‘trigger and

diffuse’ affective atmospheres (Thrift 2008, 254). As we become more attuned to the ways in

which such atmospheres are being engineered, we simultaneously have to work upon ways of

tracing them methodologically. This means paying closer attention to the ways in which

museums themselves – their buildings, settings and internal fixtures, along with the

interpretative tools they employ – provoke a range of experiential and affective potentialities

that afford, in turn, all kinds of movements and feelings (after Adey 2008, 441).

Our strategy during this research was to supplement traditional social science methods

with a suite of tools capable of better capturing situated and embodied performances, or those

interactions still ‘to come’. Our fieldwork took place over six days in August 2012, during

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which time we immersed ourselves in the spaces of the Memorial. Before commencing our

observations, we spoke with a member of the Memorial staff in order to explain our intentions.

Our fieldwork was to be largely autoethnographic1, a form of complete participation that

minimised the influence of ourselves (as anything other than bodies within the same public

spaces) on the behaviour of others. As our observations would be fleeting, with total

anonymity assured, we thus decided that our identities as researchers should remain

undisclosed.

With this in mind, we used our bodies as ‘instruments of research’ in a sensory

ethnographic practice backed by participant observation (Longhurst et al. 2008, 215). We also

documented key encounters, exchanges and descriptions of the exhibits, videos, textual panels

and interactive displays in research diaries. These fieldnotes were situated, with the very act of

note-taking immediately pushing us to pay attention, intensifying our attentiveness and sense

of reflexivity (Nicholson 2012). We were interested in the messages on display and how

visitors engaged with them; the sounds, visuals and feelings used to cultivate our responses;

how people orientated themselves to the spaces and how we, in turn, adjusted our bodies in

response. There are often unspoken rules in play in museum spaces, especially those that deal

with the ‘fallen’, so we were interested,in gauging how those behavioural cues predicted (or

otherwise) the affective mood around the site.

Our autoethnographic descriptions were coupled with the collection of audio,

photographic and video recordings of key spaces within the Memorial, targeting especially

those that utilize sound, movement and sensation to focus the attention of the visitor onto a

particular narrative. Some rely on the use of technology: simulations of loud machine-gun fire,

vibrating floors, overhead torrents of air, and flashing lights were all used to interrupt our

movement. There are also spaces in the Memorial that target affect far more implicitly, calling

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on silence and stillness to stimulate a range of intensities. In all of these spaces, atmosphere,

mood and sensations seemed to tap into our visit and change our perceptions of the narratives

on display.

Re-presenting museum events

Due to the tensions inherent in any attempt to write about the more-than-representational, we

provide some of our research here in the form of vignettes in order to fall in line with

Cadman’s (2009, 461; see also Last 2012) call for ‘performative and experimental writing

styles.’ These, she argues, should ‘seek to present either something of the ephemeral nature of

everyday practice or the potential of performative writing itself.’

***

Royal Air Force (RAF)Bomber Command2

It’s 11.00am as I enter Bomber Command and catch the last moments of his story. I know already that

I’ll stay to hear it again: there’s something about his voice that draws me in. And so I find myself

standing alone in a small room with mock-metal cladding, a curved roof and a bomb bay in the floor.

A video begins to play and I am introduced to a group of airmen who are about to undertake a night

raid. Engine sounds fill the room and a large rectangular portion of the floor vibrates beneath my feet,

simulating take-off. Things go well onscreen, with the squadron’s operation proceeding as planned.

That is, until they are detected by radar; then everything changes. The small room, until then

illuminated by a dullish white light, erupts into colours that surely signify fire, flashing and shifting

from white to purple to lilac to pink to red to orange before fading to black. It utterly transforms the

experience – the colour suffuses the space and the vibrations intensify. I don’t feel like I’m inside a

crashing plane – the movement is not shocking enough. But I certainly feel haunted, especially in these

last few moments. Yes, I’m haunted by the narrative, the sounds, but more than that it is the sense of

movement that affects me. I’m dislodged. It’s kinaesthetic. And at that moment I’m more in touch with

the Memorial than ever before; literally, as I tense and flex for balance, gripping the floor a little

harder. The screen in front of me returns to black and white images of the flight crew and I’m told of

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their fate – those who survived and those who did not. Somewhere, in what seems like ‘the distance’,

their injured plane crashes, explodes and echoes; a repetitive thrum fading into the background

(Waterton and Dittmer, Field Notes, 28 August 2012).

There are many components to the Memorial, with the majority conforming to a

‘typical’ museum experience: textual panels, objects and imagery. There are parts, however,

moving beyond this. Bomber Command is one such example, deliberately designed to harness

affect as the panel affixed to its exterior makes clear: ‘This exhibition evokes some of the

sights, sounds and sensations of a Bomber Command Raid on Germany’.

INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE

With that use of the word ‘sensation’, we are invited to entangle ourselves with a narrative in

ways that engages with, yet at the same time, exceeds the cognitive. This is an invitation

reminiscent of observations made recently by Staiff (2012, 42) who, drawing on the work of

Grosz, argues that heritage is always inside our bodies. That is where we carry it, feel it and

engage with it. Bomber Command seems to have been designed with a similar assumption in

mind - prepared for our bodies, our eyes, our ears, feet, muscles and skin - with visitors asked

to apprehend and understand the history on display ‘through an atmosphere’ (to borrow from

Anderson 2009, 79).

The non-textual aspects of display become at least as important as the interpretive text

itself, with light, sound and movement utilized in ways that heighten a sense of anticipation –

they build within the visitor a sense of foreboding conditioned by our already existing

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knowledge of the Second World War. This is a night raid, after all, and our memories of

school history lessons, movies, TV shows, other museum displays and shared collective

remembrances already archived within our bodies, remind us that these missions did not

always end well. That sense of foreboding pervades the first few frames of the video and gives

rhythm to our breathing and movements as we, the viewer, wait and anticipate the ending –

who will survive, if any?

Light is crucial to this assemblage. Not only in terms of the relative darkness of the

room, which is lit only by the video and a series of lights ‘outside’ the mocked-up fuselage,

but also for its use of coloured lighting to signify fire which alters the space significantly. This

is an illuminated space which, as Edensor (2012, 1106) has argued, makes for ‘a deeply

embodied experience’. As he notes:

...light invariably produces complex relations through its interplay with its ostensible

opposite, dark, whether through an absence of darkness, multiple shades and shadows,

or a contrast between illuminated and unilluminated space (2012, 1106).

All of these possibilities are explored in Bomber Command, which moves through

shades of darkness that are inflected with different tones and hues - the room caught in a sense

of perpetual movement that only adds to the foreboding. These illuminations are relational,

too, working together with our memories, as well as the unsettling sense of real movement as

the floor tremors and shakes underfoot. In many circumstances, pulsing, glittering, colourful

lights carry the potential to trigger a range of positive expectations; but here, in the midst of an

assemblage already toned with sombre reflections, we are afforded a far more limited field for

sense and meaning-making. As Edensor (2012, 1107) remarks:

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... [a]rtificial lighting conditions environments, bestowing manifold moods or tones of

feeling that influence notions about how to operate within particular spatial and social

settings and provoke apprehensions and responses that further contribute to atmosphere.

This array of light, splashing against an otherwise darkened room, plays a key role in

the production of affect, which is simultaneously heightened as the vibrations in the floor

intensify. Those affects are loosened and circulate between people, their bodies, and the

materiality of the room itself.

Of course, Bomber Command changes as new visitors enter into its assemblage. For

example, while many visitors to Bomber Command captured by our observations appeared to

ponder the movement, crouching to feel the vibrations with their fingertips, some were less

inclined and wandered into the ‘fuselage’ for only a matter of moments. At least as interesting

as the particular ways in which each of us were affected by the display, is the range of

affective capacities it affords, with materiality, as Beyes and Steyaert (2012, 52) have argued,

turned into ‘a sensed-sensing energy with multiple centres’. Thus, as much as we might try to

produce or predict the affective and emotional qualities of this space, they are always in a

process of co-production and becoming.

***

Dust off

I’m back in the Vietnam War3 Gallery, waiting for ‘Dust Off’, one of the gallery’s light and sound

installations. There’s a school group gathered nearby, perhaps fifteen early teens all dressed in

uniforms of pressed, grey trousers and smart, red blazers. Their teacher briefs them excitedly on what

they are about to see. The lights dim. Black and white footage is projected onto two walls behind the

15

Iroquois and a haze of sound fills the gallery. We’re listening to radio chatter – original recordings –

that play amidst machine-gun fire, the blur of rotor-blades and the distant sounds of tropical rain. It’s

loud – really, really loud. I know that things don’t end well: I know that the helicopter comes under

attack as it attempts to evacuate an injured soldier; I know that the radio traffic we’re listening to

captures the words of those who didn’t make it; and I know that we’ll hear in the voices of those at the

other end of that communication the realization that they’re gone. The students watch in silence. As the

video draws to a close we’re left to deal with the fact that the evacuation was profoundly unsuccessful.

The lights ‘go up’ and I see the school group standing just to my left: they barely move and remain

quiet; suspended in their silence. Their teacher shuffles over and gathers them close. I read on his face,

in his gestures, concern, uncertainty, so I pay attention to his address. He apologises: this was not the

video he had intended them to see. He had meant for them to watch the victorious ‘Helibourne

Assault’. Instead, they were confronted with the voices – those real voices. I watch as they turn and

leave the gallery, far more muted now than they were when they entered (Waterton and Dittmer, Field

Notes, 29 August 2012).

Two light and sound installations located within the Vietnam War Gallery are

considered a highlight of the broader Conflicts 1945 to Today galleries, which opened in 2008.

Both revolve around a refurbished Bell UH-1B Iroquois A2–1019, an icon of the war which

today dominates the Gallery in ways that extend beyond its sheer size4.

INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE

Though played less frequently than its counterpart, our observations of Dust Off piqued our

interest the most. Perhaps this is because the very words –‘Vietnam War’ – are already bridled

with conflict and dissonance, so much so that we are momentarily caught in an atmosphere

oozing with judgement before we begin. There is, to borrow from Bissell (2010: 282), a

‘virtual field of expectancy’ at play here that holds the body ‘in restless suspense’, amidst the

sounds of authentic radio chatter. It was this ‘field of expectancy’ that was ruptured – hard –

16

during our visit when the school group was invited to view the ‘wrong’ installation. Here, ‘the

virtual’, which points to any number of potentialities that may or may not exceed expectation,

was brought into sharp relief as we watched this small group react with surprise to a

potentiality that far exceeded their expectations.

Whilst falling within the larger realm of potential (Massumi 2002), our observations

point to something that occurred outside of those envisaged by at least some of those affected.

For the teacher who forms a central part of our vignette, for example, this was an event that

had its potentiality interrupted forcefully, bringing forth a range of equally unanticipated

affects, triggered, perhaps, by the original recordings’ tacit reminder of the brutality of war.

That this was always a possibility is not, of course, under dispute. After all, these recordings

are a deliberate inclusion within the Memorial, planned and developed by curators and

designers to engage with a range of audiences. But it was not the intention of this teacher to

open up his students to this particular display. Nor, given the introduction he had given them,

were they necessarily primed to anticipate being affected in the ways they were. Instead, they

appeared to be ‘thrown’ by the amplification of affect afforded by Dust Off.

Perhaps the teacher’s enthusiastic introductory speech heightened their capacity to be

affected. For the students, and certainly their teacher, those affective responses seemed touch

upon the more or ‘generative virtuality that pertains to affect’ (McCormack 2008, 418). They

did so in potentially transformative ways, opening the students, and their teacher, to their

futures by teasing at ‘a new birth, a new beginning, a new invention of [themselves], even as it

awaken[ed] dangerous memories’ (Caputo 2007, 6, cited in Anderson and Harrison 2010, 19).

We cannot know how these futures unfolded for each student, of course, for we were there for

the event only and did not have the opportunity to speak to them. That is not our point; rather,

17

we are gesturing towards possibilities, invitations to think differently, and that process of

becoming however it transpires (see Seigworth and Gregg 2010).

***

The Korean War5 Trenches

After exploring the post-World War Two galleries, I double back to the Korean War Trenches

exhibition, having been rushed through the first time by a school group behind me. This time, I’m

alone. The exhibition is a zig-zag tunnel that connects two sides of the lower gallery. It is lit by just

enough red light to make out the accoutrement of war set out in the walkway to recreate the war trench

experience. The first part of the exhibition is a wax figure seated at a radio station. Disembodied, but

clear, voices come over the radio. I am struck by how lifelike the figure and radio station are, and

emboldened by my solitude I squeeze my head between the low ceiling and the plexiglass protector and

try to get a closer look at the equipment in the corner. After a few seconds my eyes rest on the waxen

face, now only inches from my face. At this moment the voices on the ‘radio’ begin a new cycle, and I

am immediately creeped out. I quickly pull my head out of the confined space and proceed further into

the trench to clear my head.

The second part of the exhibition is a gunnery slot, looking out of the ‘trench’ and across a valley.

Computer-generated tracer fire and explosions play across the opposing hillside. Disembodied

soldiers discuss the battle unfolding before them, their voices seemingly coming from nowhere. As I

stand there, another school group comes through the tunnel, their excited chatter breaking my solitude.

Grateful for the company after my radio fright, and determined to stay in the trench this time and

observe their trench experience, I retreat to the back of the trench so as to be unobtrusive. I hear the

students continue to talk, but quietly, as they enter the trench and stop to observe/listen at the radio

station. They soon flood my part of the trench, their eyes fixated by the lights in the gunnery slot. I

quietly jot notes behind them. Three students over the span of two minutes yelp when they see me move,

having assumed I was a waxen figure (Waterton and Dittmer, Field Notes, 28 August 2012).

The Korean War Trenches are situated in a bright, modern part of the galleries and those

entering it have a sense of entering a specific space – its low ceiling and cramped confines

clearly distinguish it from the museum space outside – and consequently viewers tended to

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pause upon entering to orient themselves and comprehend how they ought to behave within.

Here a phenomenon we noted elsewhere in the Memorial was particularly salient: our own

enrolment in the museum assemblage. Wanting to observe museum-goers, but not to unnerve

them, we often stared at museum exhibitions as new people entered our space in order to allow

them to begin their own process of engaging with the room before we began to observe them.

However, as Protevi (2009) notes, humans have evolved in a way such that one body’s

focused attention on something affects others via contagion to also focus on it. While this was

originally a method of group defence from predators, this somatic relay plays out quite

differently in a museum environment, where the relative interest of various objects and

displays is mediated by performances of looking. Therefore, my ‘interest’ in specific parts of

the exhibition when people entered inevitably affected their initial moments in the space.

Other elements intrinsic to the exhibition likewise shaped behaviour in the Korean War

Trenches. Voices lowered and conversations trailed off as eyes were trained on the relatively

well-lit radio station and gunnery slot. The disembodied voices in each location tacitly called

on participants to stop and listen, to comprehend the scenario in which they were now

participating. My own experience was shaped initially by my sense of being alone with the

tinny voices over the radio, the cramped feeling of being in a tight space (not just the trench

itself, but the space behind the plexiglass), and the uncanny nature of the wax radio operator.

These sensations and relations with various elements of the techno-cultural display were

dependent on various evolutionary aspects of my body-as-assemblage, such as the revulsion of

the ‘uncanny valley’ (a well-documented aversion of humans to robots that too closely

resemble the human - Mori 1970). These sensations were also dependent on some aspects that

19

are peculiar to me – such as my height, which enabled me to get behind the plexiglass in a way

the designers likely did not anticipate and which also made me feel more cramped in the

trench than, for example, a child would (Protevi 2009). However, it would be a mistake to

consider my experience totally idiosyncratic, as the second part of the vignette makes clear.

Rather, the students coming through the trench not only picked up on its affective atmosphere

but circulated it through their modulation of voice, their rapt attention to the ‘events’

unfolding in the gunnery slot, and their instinctive jolt of fear when the tall, bearded man in

the corner (one of the authors of this paper) came to life.

The virtual humans haunting the space through the deployment of wax, speakers, and

computerized lights and sounds worked to produce embodied reactions among visitors to the

Korean War Trenches. Further, those visitors themselves (including us) became part of the

exhibition, either providing a surface for sensation or a conduit for the production of yet more

sensations - the shout of fear startling those nearby and the subsequent laughter of relief

likewise deflating the tension in the atmosphere.

***

The Roll of Honour and the Hall of Memory

The tour guide concludes his narrative, and then tells the students to fan out and find a name like theirs on the wall. Some of the students take this advice, dragging their fingers across the embossed metal letters; others seem to fixate on the poppies wedged into the cracks by the names. Still others quickly abandon the wall to talk with one another in small, quiet clumps. I watch a small group walk briskly to the edge of the reflection pool, where they pretend to throw in money. They don’t have any actual coins but they simulate the action nonetheless, with eyes closed and their backs to the pool. I move on, and enter the Hall of Memory. It is a cylindrical chamber, with a high dome that immediately draws the eye. The chamber is lit both by sunlight and a set of indirect lights that give the room a glow. In the centre of the room is the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier, surrounded by poppy wreathes from organizations as diverse as elementary schools and the Government of Fiji. Behind the tomb are four columns of different materials, stretching towards the dome. I sit on one of the benches around the outside of the room and watch. The room is cold and silent, except for the sound of footsteps ringing out. A docent stands by the door, watching for improper behaviour. Those who enter tend to stand for a moment at the foot of the tomb, and then slowly circumambulate, reading from whom all the wreaths

20

come. Once this is finished, they head back out into the sun of the Roll of Honour (Waterton and Dittmer, Field Notes, 27 August 2012).

INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE

The Roll of Honour and the Hall of Memory are perhaps the most sacred sites within the

Memorial complex. That ‘sacred’ quality is produced through the embodied performances of

those engaging with the assemblage; the performances themselves are somatic memories

embedded in ‘us’ through socialization processes over many years. When in these particular

spaces, the ambient sounds and lights of the museum are left behind, signalling a different

kind of commemoration. With the reflecting pool in the centre and the eternal flame at its far

end, the Roll of Honour can be found on elevated galleries to the left and right where the

names of Australia’s war dead are embossed in metal. The reflecting pool points up a flight of

stairs and into the Hall of Memory, a stone-walled structure that resembles a cathedral in its

verticality and materiality. It is likely unnecessary to trace the way affect serves to predispose

visitors to solemnity and respect in this space, schooled as most of us are in the sociality of

places of remembrance. This is reinforced by a process of what Thrift (2008, 231) calls

‘imitative contagion’, which is an infectious, though often unconscious, response to

atmosphere that primes us to act in certain ways (Bissell 2010), augmented by the behaviour

of proximate others: the hushing of children, truncated conversations, whispers and more.

It is worth pointing out in this context the children throwing imaginary coins in the

reflecting pool. Such behaviour shows the ingrained muscle memories that such landscapes

can trigger. Further, the associated activity of ‘making a wish’ opens up a line of flight – a

21

virtual reality that exists alongside the actual: ‘I wish that Judy would sit next to me on the bus

ride home.’ ‘I wish I weighed a bit less.’ ‘I hope I can be a soldier one day.’ Having been

conjured up by the act of throwing a coin into the fountain, some of these virtual realities may

be actualized in the near, medium or distant future. Becoming ‘in place’ activates specific

somatic routines that in turn enable certain assemblages to emerge.

For instance, the Roll of Honour, like similar phenomena such as the Thiepval

Memorial to the Missing (France), or the Armed Forces Memorial in the National Memorial

Arboretum (UK), promises to commemorate each individual as a liberal subject (i.e., an

individual with political agency) while also subsuming them into the larger nation via the

device of the ‘war dead’ (Hyndman 2003). Similarly, the Tomb of the Unknown Australian

Soldier serves to metonymically conflate the male body with that of the nation (Sharp 1996).

INSERT FIGURE 4 HERE

Inglis (1999) documents the debates over the decision to repatriate the remains of the

unknown Australian soldier in intriguing detail, connecting them both to wider trends in

memorialization worldwide (for comparative purposes, see the Canadian case detailed in

Greenberg 2008; Szpunar 2010), but also to the desire of the Australian War Memorial to

increase attendance through the incorporation of a sacred nationalist site to which pilgrims

might travel. Relevant here is Inglis’s emphasis on the importance of the body being

unidentifiable beyond its nationality. In this, the material qualities of the body, in assemblage

with the limited medical technologies at the end of World War One available to identify

human remains, produce an emergent category – the Unknown Soldier, whose body becomes

invested with the sacred such that it is a holy relic.

22

This process of enchantment calls forth the virtual; it is no longer the Unknown Soldier

who is present in the Hall of Memory but Australia itself, a body politic conjured into being by

the collective performance of assemblage (Dittmer forthcoming). As Inglis (1999) notes, there

was a brief period after World War One in which the Unknown Soldiers of all nations received

medals of honour from allied nations without regard for what the actual soldiers may or may

not have done. Instead, they stood in for the valour of the nation itself. Further, were the

Unknown Australian Soldier to be identified, as was the case for the Unknown Soldier from

the Vietnam War in the United States, he would be disinterred and buried normally. The

enchantment would be dispelled.

Conclusion

In this article we have sought to consider the Australian War Memorial as an assemblage,

thereby directing attention to the affects produced through the enrolment of the unique human

bodies of visitors alongside other material and discursive elements. The technological

apparatus deployed within the Memorial in an attempt to engineer particular affective

responses is impressive, ranging from the construction of movie-quality sets that visitors pass

through, to the staging of simulated helicopter missions, to the re-interment of actual human

remains from World War One. Such efforts perform crucial work, not only in the Memorial

but also in broader Australian culture. By orienting human bodies in similar ways, the

Memorial contributes to the circulation of affects that reorder the bodies of visitors, laying

down what Connolly (2002) refers to as a ‘somatic marker’ that shapes future political action.

Our first vignette, from RAF Bomber Command, illustrated the way in which a range

of sensory stimuli – from light effects to a thrumming deck – can open up the human body to

23

particular narratives and give them heightened salience. Our second vignette, Dust Off,

illustrates the role of what Connolly (2010) refers to as force fields – asynchronous temporal

rhythms animating the political event – in producing unexpected outcomes. The coding of the

helicopter exhibition embedded an alternating pattern in the display which the teacher did not

discern in advance, leading to an awkward encounter for both him and his students. They had

opened their bodies up to the thrilling experience of war (the flashing lights, the rush of the

helicopter’s downdraft) only to receive a grim reminder of war’s cost.

The third vignette similarly considers the impact of virtual humans on the assemblage

– whether the voices of long-dead soldiers, as in Dust Off, or the wax figure of the radio

operator and his disembodied comrades in the Korean War Trenches. These hauntings call the

past into the present for the purpose of demonstrating ‘how it felt to be there’, but they also

affect living bodies through their proximity. Their uncanny bodies, or paradoxically, their

completely disembodied nature, can overwhelm the somatic filters of consciousness and

produce an overt emotional response. The final vignette reminds us that affect is not all about

lights, sounds, and movement. Rather, stillness and quiet contribute to the production of the

body politic (Protevi 2009) – whether that body politic belongs to the temporary community

moving around the Tomb or the larger body politic that is Australia. The virtual bodies called

forth in all the exhibitions haunt this space, their anachronism transformed through

enchantment into a timeless entity – the nation.

This engagement with literatures that address assemblage theory and the politics of

affect has important, and specific, implications for museum studies. That emotions, affects and

sensations are mobilized within museum contexts is, of course, nothing new. This is an

assumption that has become increasingly familiar in recent times, circulating not only in the

academic literature but also the policy sphere, where there have been strident calls to more

24

firmly foreground issues of lived experience and engagement. What is currently lacking from

much that agitates for museums as affective spaces is an adequate framework for thinking

through how affects might be historicised, engineered, transferred and bodily felt within

processes of excessive and cumulative composition – how, in other words, are they produced

and why does that process of production matter?

In a move towards conceptualizing such a framework, we have sought to piece

together an account of how designed museum spaces, exhibitions, landscapes, lighting, sound

and visiting subjects, along with the predictive power that some of these are afforded, work

together in the here-and-now to produce a range of possibilities. While these expressive

resonances will, for the most part, be predetermined (or at least predicted) by previous

decisions made with regard to narrative, lighting, sound and other forms of display, there

nonetheless remains an element of the unforeseeable or emergent at play when it comes to the

triggering of emotions and affect (see Adey 2008). This indeterminacy stems from the nearly

infinite number of interactions that can occur between elements of an open system like the

Australian War Memorial. New visitors, multivalent exhibits, and unique ways of proceeding

through the War Memorial – all of these open up new possibilities for becoming something

different.. Each element of the assemblage reshapes the possibility space, and curators have a

crucial role in sculpting this possibility space in ways that are likely to produce ethical

outcomes, while likewise accepting the possibility of aberrant outcomes.

More conceptually important, however, is our engagement with more-than-human

elements, or as Latham et al. (2009, 62) put it, our attunement to ‘physical stuff’ such that it is

incorporated as ‘lively participants’. This is a move to extend the discursive analyses that have

tended to dominate the field, easing the grip of representational approaches which, while

bringing to the fore a needed emphasis on discourse, ideology and marginalization, have

25

tended to downplay the productive and actualizing work of the more-than-human and more-

than-representational. At its heart, this work prompts those with an interest in ‘the museum’ to

conceptualise it in far broader terms than we may have thus far. It also prompts us to rethink

our methods so as to better capture ‘things’ like lived experience, atmosphere, sensation and

affect, even while using traditional techniques.

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Figure Captions:

Figure 1: Bomber Command

Figure 2: The Dust Off

Figure 3: The Roll of Honour

Figure 4: The Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier in the Hall of Memory

1 Kathryn Besio describes auto-ethnography as a qualitative research method that relies on participant observations and a self-referential mode of writing. Its name essentially refers to a melding of ethnography and autobiography,in which the researcher and their ‘situatedness’ is directly represented (Besio 2009).

2 Bomber Command was a division of Britain’s Royal Air Force that oversaw the operations of the RAF’s bomber forces.

3 Australia’s military was involved in the Vietnam War for over a decade, first committing troops 1962 and remaining active until their eventual withdrawal in 1975. Almost 60,000 Australians served in Vietnam in a war still considered to be Australia’s longest engagement in warfare (Doyle at al. 2002).

4 See http://www.awm.gov.au/visit/post-1945-galleries/iroquois/ (page consulted 20 March 2013).

5 The Australian military formed part of a United Nations multinational force formed to defend South Korea from military invasion from communist North Korea. Australia’s involvement lasted from 1950 until 1953.