Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Now, the problem is inclusive constitutions were also being performed at Albert Speer’s Imperial Place of Things. The things assembled there were also human and non-human, but instead of contributing to a more democratic society the collective involved by the long earth wall was fascist. The aim at the Bückeberg was to gather the constituents of the German Volk as envisioned by the Nazis. The inclusiveness of things also meant the exclusion of many humans—including “rootless” Jews, who allegedly were not able to establish the same relations with German soil. Nazi thingplaces were, to be sure, no parliaments, and thing talk has thus no inherent democratic virtues—a point that current scholars would have no difficulty admitting, but a point they haven’t noticed. Scientific standardized organisms, such as all the animals and plants discussed in this book, were designed as things embodying fascism. More than that, they helped fascists make the case that their reveries could be realized, putting aside liberal ways of organizing collective life. New strains that made Italy or Portugal self-sufficient in wheat for the first time in its history, even if for only a short period, constituted a powerful demonstration that it was possible to form a national community feeding itself on the produce of the national soil. Kok-sagyz plants coming out of Auschwitz to transform Ukrainian landscapes promised a European New Order in which “inferior races” would produce cash crops that would supply German industry. Nothing could be more distant from the promotion of democratic assemblies of things.

When invoking the notion of ‘thing’, we are engaging Nazis in their own terms. This is no coincidence, for it seems fair to acknowledge that an important part of the current “thing talk” comes from the application of Martin Heidegger’s concept of ‘Ding’ to scientific things.[11] Peter Sloterdijk’s phrase “Dasein ist Design,” suggesting that Heidegger’s “Being in the World” is no more than a question about the design one should use to build the house of Being, summarizes the trend.[12] In view of the increasing toxicity of Heidegger, confirmed by the recent publication of his black notebooks and his openly anti-Semitic positions, it is, to say the least, prudent to be reflexive on the use of the concept.[13]

In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger famously discusses how “people think of the bridge as primarily and properly as merely a bridge,” tending to ignore that the bridge is a “thing,” “a gathering”: “It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the earth.”[14] Closer to the themes of the present book, Heidegger also invokes in that same text the thingness of a farmhouse in the Black Forest built “to let earth and sky, divinities and mortals enter.” Its location in the mountain slope, the hallowed places of the childbed, the community table, the “tree of the dead,” they were all “designed for different generations under one roof.” Here Heidegger plays with the German etymology of the word ‘bauen’, which besides “building” also means “cultivating” and “dwelling.” The crucial point, for Heidegger, is to acknowledge that both activities of building and cultivating referred originally to dwelling, “the manner in which mortals are on earth.” ‘Bauen’, in the sense “dwelling,” discloses the truth of Being, allegedly opposed to the abandonment of Being performed by technology. Dwelling gathers under the same roof the different generations as well as earth and sky and divinities, while building in modern times would be guided by no more than practical concerns, the poor realm of engineering.