Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has recently revisited Canguilhem’s work and has disclosed far-reaching consequences of Canguilhem’s apparently limited considerations on the object of history of science.[10] Canguilhem’s recognition that “there can be no history of truth that is exclusively a history of truth, nor a history of science that is exclusively a history of science” demands, according to Rheinberger, a focus on the social and technological concerns from which the sciences arise.[11] Canguilhem’s discussion of Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine is particularly illuminating in this respect in that it invokes “the demiurgic dream dreamed by all industrial societies in the mid-nineteenth century, the period when the sciences, thanks to the applications of them, became a social force.”[12] The claim thus goes beyond accepting that one must know the social and economic contexts to understand the history of science. One should also recognize the creative power of the experimental sciences and their ability to blur the distinction between knowledge and creation: new things are brought into existence changing those contexts; they constitute a “social force” in themselves. That was what Canguilhem hinted at when connecting the production of new strains of wheat with the rise of fascism in the French countryside. But only in that early pamphlet did he specify the concrete ways in which scientific and technological things changed major political contexts.

This book recovers that early engagement by Canguilhem and aims at understanding how new strains of wheat and potatoes, new pig breeds, and artificially inseminated sheep contributed in significant ways to materialize fascist ideology. These organisms are taken as “technoscientific thick things” that, in contrast to the thin scientific objects isolated from society of traditional accounts, bond science, technology, and politics together in a continuum.[13] This is not a study about what happened to scientists under fascism, but one that, by following the historical trajectories of technoscientific things, reveals how new forms of life intervened in the formation and the expansion of fascist regimes. It doesn’t take fascism as the historical context in which certain scientific undertakings have place, preferring instead to focus on the ways technoscientific organisms became constitutive of fascism.[14]

Fascism as Alternative Modernity