"The Secret Lives of Seahorses" is Decadent and Depraved

Donna Haraway, in her illuminating essay on Carl Akeley's African Hall, has given a compelling account of American taxidermy in the early twentieth century as a craft for producing normative representations.  Akeley's taxidermy, she argues, created displays which naturalized things like racial hierarchy and the sexual division of labor and were performative of a manhood which realized itself in the killing and reproduction of "the Other, the natural self."

It was with this essay in mind that I read the following explanatory placard at the Monterey Bay Aquarium this morning, inside the widely advertised and highly popular exhibit entitled The Secret Lives of Seahorses:

Dwarf Seahorse

Caballito Enano

Loyal Couples Have That Special Glow

When it's time to mate, these tiny seahorses

glisten as if they'd been sprinkled with

glitter.  Look carefully at the swaying

seagrass to find faithful couples.  You might

See them with tails entwined as they circle

and sway in an underwater ballet.

This particular placard flanked a small tank full of tiny, grayish seahorses, which was situated in the "Getting Together" division of the exhibit - the others being "Growing Up", "Giving Birth," and "Devoted Dads."

Another in the same section, next to a slightly larger tank of somewhat more imposing animals, read:

Pacific Seahorse

Caballito Pacifico

These Latin Lovers Tango By Moonlight

In the afterglow of a California sunset, these

seahorses twirl and tango beneath the waves.

Couples rendezvous each night during the

breeding season to dance and renew their

bond.

From both tanks, the dominant feature of the "Getting Together" section is easily visible: a 5'X7' movie screen on which is projected a continuous, computer-animated sequence of two seahorses (which appear only in silhouette) performing their courtship dance and, it is implied, actually mating.  In front are some benches which are permanently occupied by enthralled children, who watch this sterile, graceful softcore scene unfold.  The representation of the participants as blank, black silhouettes adds to the air of the pornographic - it would scarcely be more lewd if each fish had a hovering blue dot over its alien little genitals.

The subsequent sections, "Giving Birth" and "Devoted Dads" are both exclusively dedicated to the representation of that widely noted seahorse anomaly, male pregnancy.  There are tanks of baby seahorses, videos of male seahorses giving birth to the babies, and four foot tall, highly detailed model of a male seahorse with a tiny baby's head emerging tentatively from his distended midriff.

The placards throughout the exhibit display about the same level of biological acumen and scientific detail as the transcribed examples above, which is to say, none.  Nowhere in this exhibit will you find a scrap of information about the evolutionary history of the seahorse, its relation to other taxonomic groups, its most general dietary and habitat requirements, its global range, lifespan, social organization, or any of the other basic data that one would have found in, say, an exhibit in the New York Natural History Museum in 1926, or the London Natural History Museum in 1890 - let alone any specific information about any of the extremely bizarre and striking species which are exhibited.  One can deduce from the Pacific Seahorse's placard that it occurs off the coast of California - but that is about all.  Biology is conspicous in its absence.

Instead, all the informational placards trade in the sort of narrative apparent in the two I quoted above - that is, maudlin and cliche-ridden redactions of what may or may not be an actually observed behavior which have no commerce at all with academic biology, but rather collectively ostend a totemic drama of sexuality and reproduction.

A naive (and my initial) reading of this state of affairs might be that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has given itself over, cynically or not, to the general perception that observing animals in captivity is an activity mainly interesting to small children, and are designing their exhibits accordingly.  And this may well be how the exhibit's designers explain their actions to themselves; but this is insufficient to account for the ostentatious and repetitive presentation of a singular sexual narrative which eschews with remarkable consistency the dominant paradigm which is most obviously accessible to situate it in some kind of context which naturalizes its singularity, i.e. evolutionary biology.

Whether The Secret Lives of Seahorses is for children or adults is a question which, it turns out, is rendered somewhat moot by this very narrative.  As one progresses through the four stages of the exhibit, one learns that the life of seahorses is one permeated by a sterilized sexuality in which eroticism is replaced with grace and the messy exigencies of love, sex, and childbirth with self-evident, transparent, biologically determined relations of perfect, satisfying fidelity.  The trauma of puberty is elided by the seamless transition from "Growing Up" to "Getting Together."  The latter presents a vision of courtship which instantly and effortlessly results in a totally sufficient monogamy; moreover, this state of connubial bliss subsists primarily in graceful dances of which coitus is apparently a byproduct, one step among many.  From the moment in which the female "entrusts" her eggs to her partner, we enter "Giving Birth" and "Devoted Dads," both of which project a beatific vision of an a-Oedipal family in which all conceivable function inhere in the Father.  In the end, it doesn't matter if the interpretive text is for children or adults, since there is no substantive difference between childhood, adolescence, motherhood, fatherhood - all are merely stages in the chromatic development of an infinitely recapitulated and allegedly androgynous, totipotent patriarchy.

In the 1980s, Haraway saw with admirable clarity that the Akeley African Hall as a normative performance of early twentieth century visions of masculinity, organiscist realism, the natural family.  How we are to interpret the performance which is The Secret Lives of Seahorses may well be more obvious in fifty years.  For now, I can only speculate that perhaps we are dealing with a development homologous to the metamorphosis of the Cold War pulp novel into the symbological novel.  Stripped of the transparent political determinations of anti-Soviet ideology, authors of ideological fiction turned inwards and began, eventually, to produce symbology.  Likewise, I wonder if institutions of public education in natural history, into which the complications introduced by people like Haraway into the representation of animals, living or stuffed, are finally permeating, are not involved in the production of a new natural history which, in retrospect, will be every bit as idiotic, reprehensible and retrogressive as symbology.