Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Recently, M. Norton Wise has pointed to the similarities of modes of explanation in science and history by calling attention to the status of model organisms in the life sciences.[22] Much as standardized mice stand for humans in studies of the general mechanisms of cancer, so “exemplar narratives in history aim at the universal through the particular.” In place of anxiously searching for historical causal explanations and reproducing a limited understanding of how scientific research is actually practiced, Wise urged historians to embrace their typical methodology of taking “the individual case as representative of larger developments, even though it can never be abstracted from its specific circumstances.” As Georges Canguilhem noted, biologists historically made use of different organisms to research different properties they were interested in: “the dog for the conditioned reflex; the mouse for the vitamins and maternal behavior; the frog, ‘biology’s Job’, for reflexes; the drosophila for heredity; the horse for blood circulation.”[23] Throughout this book, in an analogy to that mode of reasoning, I have used wheat to study fascist mass mobilizations and the formation of a corporatist regime; potatoes to follow the growth of the infrastructural power of a fascist state; pigs to understand the design of a rooted-in-the-soil national community; coffee, rubber, and cotton to explore fascist colonial labor regimes; and sheep to investigate interconnected genocides and white settlement expansion. Such selection is not neutral, and other historical technoscientific things would certainly allow for different explorations. As model organisms are not abstract entities and their actual existence in the real world often leads scientists into unforeseen phenomena, so the intense tinkering with concrete historical technoscientific things led the historical research into unexpected paths. This is illustrated by the unanticipated connected histories of the three fascist empires that become evident when one follows the historical trajectories of Karakul sheep from Halle to South West Africa and the Ukraine, and from Libya to Angola. The weaving of Thing histories seems, in fact, an adequate narrative technique with which to make sense of practices aimed at producing fascist collectives through the scientific production of things.

Historians of science and technology, by producing dense narratives that assert the thingness of their objects of interest, ignore Heidegger’s jeremiad, undermining his grand nostalgic narrative of a world currently populated with objects and forgetful of things. In a similar way, this book delves into the apparent paradox that at the Nazi harvest celebration peasants (Bauern) were reminded that cultivation (bauen) of the German soil with organisms produced through breeding (zuchten)—my technoscientific things—also meant to dwell (bauen). The German national community was to come into being through the cultivation of wart-resistant potatoes and the breeding of bodenständig pigs. Yes, this book also takes technoscientific organisms as Heideggerian things. But it makes clear that the dwelling they put in place was a very unpleasant one. It was a nasty fascist dwelling. The scientifically bred things mobilized national populations for food production, forming armies in times of peace that replaced democratic practices of political participation, erected organic mammoth state structures eliminating any dissent, made violent colonial labor regimes seem reasonable, and exulted over genocidal imperial settlements. I would thus like to insist here on the importance for historians of science and technology of going beyond the recognition of the thingness of apparently thin technoscientific objects. We are used to think about the alleged violence the degeneration of things into objects entails, but we should be equally aware of the violence associated with certain things. Things, as gatherings, may seem inclusive, but, as fascist things remind us, they can be dangerously exclusionary as well. Another, more fundamental tension exists beyond the Heideggerian one between objects and things: a tension between things, between the different worlds different things sustain.

Index

Action Française, 43

Adametz, Leopold, 197

Adorno, Theodor, 12

Agronomy Institute, 56, 64

Alder, Ken, 238

Alentejo, 43–46, 51, 52, 57, 59, 60

Allen, Michael Thad, 6

Animal Breeding Institute, University of Göttingen, 107, 112, 113, 120–124, 133

Animal Breeding Law, 117, 122

Animal Experiment Station of Humpata, 220

Anstalt für Tierzucht und Milchwirtschaft der Universität Jena, 112

Appel, Otto, 75, 79, 84, 96

Ardito (wheat strain), 33–35, 39–42, 55–59, 240

Arditi (storm troops), 40, 42

Arendt, Hanna, 6

Auschwitz, 144, 161–167, 240

Autarky, 13, 17, 21, 25, 42, 64, 133, 156

Backe, Herbert, 82, 123, 130, 135

Badoglio, Pietro, 144, 209

Balbo, Italo, 210, 211

Barrès, Maurice, 44

Bastos, Cristiana, 224, 225

Battoli, Antonino, 24