Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Differences are erased in ahistorical analyses limited to signaling the occurrence of biopolitics. One has to engage with the actual history of technoscientific organisms in order to understand the different nature of the newly formed social collectives. As a case in point, as this book details, animal performance records developed by academic breeders were being used in the 1930s in New Deal America and in Nazi Germany to make decisions about pig breeding, but while these practices led to leaner animals in the United States, they led to fatter ones in Germany. Leaner American hogs increased the market value of farmers’ produce through their higher protein content, thus avoiding the growing competition with cheap fats from vegetable origin. American standards measured the value of animals in a capitalist society, saving farmers from the Depression. Fatter German animals were to contribute to the Nazi autarky effort by reducing the need to import vegetable oils and by producing fat from national sources. German standards measured the contribution of animals to the national community. And pigs were not only expected to cover the German national fat deficit; they also had to be fed on potatoes and beets from the national soil. They had to be bodenständig (rooted in the soil)—a major concept guiding animal breeders in the Nazi regime, “Blood and Soil” ideologues, and Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who infamously asserted that rootedness in the soil distinguished the German Volk from uprooted Jewry.[74] In the years after World War I, scientists’ new standards allowed fascist ideologues to imagine a national community thriving on the productivity of the national soil and settling new territories—a bodenständig community. After seizing power in 1933, the Nazis would put in place a mammoth state structure—the Reichsnährstand—to see to it that only animals and plants complying with bodenständig standards were to be reproduced. Pigs not contributing to the feeding of the national body through the national soil were to be eliminated, as in fact progressively happened in the Nazi years. Only fat bodenständig pigs were fascist pigs, and they were the only ones that deserved to be part of the new fascist collective.

Fascist Ontology and the Structure of the Book

This book is more concerned with the historical importance of organisms for fascist regimes than with the alleged specific characteristics of doing science under fascism. Fascism is not taken as a pre-given context in which some scientists operated, but as a historical context to which scientists’ practices and objects contributed; the argument is less about fascist epistemology than about fascist ontology.

Such a formulation is a direct reference to the alleged recent ontological turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the increased interest in studying the being of entities (ontology) at the expense of inquiring about modes of knowing entities (epistemology).[75] STS scholars, building on their sensitivity toward the multiple ways that science and technology bring new things into being, seem particularly well equipped to follow the entanglements between humans and nonhumans producing new social collectives. The literature is now full of boundary objects, assemblages, and biosocialities, all signaling such entanglements and the variable ontologies, multiple natures, or multiverse thus formed.[76] In contrast to older studies that showed how pre-given social contexts shaped scientific objects, we have a myriad of ontological investigations focused on world-making practices.[77] The above-mentioned remarks by Canguilhem on the continuity between knowing and creation, already suggest that the strict separation between epistemology and ontology is hard to maintain; an overlapping that characterizes Canguilhem’s work and that one finds in many of the works forming the canon in history of science.[78] The very same notion of technoscience, pointing at knowledge production more as a mode of intervention than as revelation or discovery, leads to a conflation of epistemology and ontology.[79]

The simple point here is to take the arguments about the generative power of science and technology and apply it to the formation of fascist collectives, counting pigs and sheep among their members.[80] I parallel the modernist design of a fascist organic collective with the world-making processes one lately finds described in STS literature. Mass mobilizations, new state structures, organic communities, and imperial expansionism—important parts of the fascist world—were imagined and enacted through the breeders’ new organisms: wheat, potatoes, pigs, sheep, coffee, rubber, and cotton. The study of the making and growing of such organisms can thus been described as a study in fascist ontology.