Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

According to Heidegger’s investigations, breeding (zuchten), the main object of this book, didn’t belong to the semantic field of cultivating (bauen), meaning instead the “overpowering of life by machination.”[15] Whereas cultivation (bauen), if one had present the notion of dwelling, invoked caring, preserving, and nurturing, breeding (zuchten) pointed at “planned calculation.”[16] We recently discovered that Heidegger hideously asserted that it was no surprise that Jews, “with their marked gift for calculation,” lived longer than any other people under the principle of race, “in which life is brought under the form of what can be bred.”[17] In other words, Heidegger was suggesting that Jews were responsible for all the evils that fall upon them. Jews, as a calculative nomadic race, could not, according to Heidegger, be rooted in the soil, for they didn’t know how to dwell, they were all about machination and breeding. If, in Heidegger’s poetic language, calculation and breeding didn’t “let the divinities and mortals” enter, in the brutal language of Richard Darré it was enough to say that Jews didn’t raise pigs. Apparently, Heidegger despaired that the Nazis, contrary to their initial promises that justified his early enthusiasm for the regime, had also succumbed to the “hex cast by technology… direct[ing] everything toward calculation, utility, breeding, manageability, and regulation.”[18] Breeding new organisms, damming rivers, the Four-Year Plan, Auschwitz, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just illustrations of a deeper phenomenon of “total mobilization as a consequence of the original abandonment of Being,” an abandonment that degraded things into objects.[19] The claim from Heidegger’s Black Forest hut for man as shepherd of Being, made indistinguishable Roosevelt and Hitler, Americanization and the Holocaust.[20]

Fascists were aware of the thingness of technoscientific artifacts such as Ardito wheat, bodenständig pigs, and Karakul sheep. As the Harvest Festival at the Imperial Place of Things emphasizes, engaging with thing talk when talking about fascists means to engage with a historical actors’ category, a gesture that resonates with the move by cultural historians of fascism of the 1990s of taking fascist talk seriously so as to better understand fascism. Heidegger rhetorically asked “Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the essence of dwelling and building?”[21] Well, standards such as the animal performance records or the tuber sprout tests made it practicable to identify what kind of thing one was dealing with—for example, was it a pig that could thrive only on imported feed and demanded international markets, or one that could thrive on potatoes and contribute to a bodenständig national community?

My aim in this book has been to achieve a better understanding of how fascist societies came into being and how they expanded. Instead of putting science under the overarching category of modernity, under which it doesn’t matter much if one is talking of fascism, democracy, or communism (an indifference characteristic of Heidegger’s texts), I have insisted on using the explanatory power of historical narratives of technoscientific things to explore the nature of concrete political regimes.