Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

A significant point that comes out of the history of breeders’ practices is the problematic relationship between science and technology in different contexts for the historical actors in question.[64] The gives and take (intermediated by market dynamics) between scientific experts equipped with the modern tools of genetics and practical breeders basing their decisions in allegedly traditional modes of classification has been particular prominent in the literature.[65] All the organisms I deal with in this book were domesticated animals and plants, and I will follow the processes through which they became scientific objects, mainly through the extended use of recording practices by academic breeders, and how these processes contributed to their industrialization. In the case of Karakul sheep, the blurring of the scientific and the technical was more evident. As sheep were being standardized for the production of fur coats, scientists also used them to illuminate more general properties in development genetics: they were simultaneously industrialized organisms and model organisms. The notion of technoscientific organisms tries to capture all these nuances: technologies of organism production that were changed through scientific practices, or science-based technologies; scientific practices that built on non-academic breeding techniques, or technology-based sciences; and plants and animals that were both industrialized and model organisms, or technoscience.

This book draws heavily on previous histories of the breeding of plants and animals in taking seriously the “complex interplay of social and biological considerations in organismal design.”[66] But, again, it insists that it is not enough to talk of a generic process of modernizing life production, because to do so misses the particular forms modernity assumed in different historical contexts. Pure lines and hybridization demanded recording practices first associated with seed companies and later with state-funded agricultural experiment stations. The need for a meticulous track of progeny, central to the new science of heredity, has thus been rightly associated with such general trends as bureaucratization, standardization, industrialization, and commercialization—in one word, modernization.[67] Less noticed are the alternative modernities that standardized forms of life have helped constitute. To put it bluntly, it would be misleading to treat as residual effects the contributions of breeders’ creatures to capitalist relations of American liberal democracy, to sustaining communist forms of production in Soviet Russia, or, as this book argues, to informing fascist sociability across Europe.[68] If above I called attention to the somewhat naive accounts of science and technology in general historians’ discussions of modernity, here I am pointing at the need to complicate the notions of modernity used by historians of science and technology. A persistent notion that permeates most narratives is that the rise of Mendelian genetics in the early twentieth century went hand in hand with the industrialization and commodification of organisms, leading to corporate or state control of life—something that alienated people in general and peasants in particular.[69] In such grand narratives, concrete political regimes are minor details of a more general process of modernization. This reminder is particularly important in a text dealing with fascism. Adorno and Horkheimer had famously equated capitalism and fascism through their analysis of instrumental reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment.[70] In California the two exiled philosophers from Hitler’s regime not only denounced the totalitarian dimensions of the Enlightenment tradition, scandalously perceiving in the French revolution a precursor to Nazism; they also urged intellectuals to uncover how fascism was present at the heart of Western democracies, including the United States. Since then, scholars inspired by critical theory have been justifiably eager to denounce the dangers associated with biopolitics in democratic societies.[71] But it is not because both fascist and liberal democratic regimes undertook biopolitics that they became indistinguishable. It is not because both standardized life that they became identical.[72] The thesis I put forth in this book is actually the opposite: that the increasing ability to tinker with plant and animal life—my extended version of biopolitics—enabled the materialization of different political projects, alternative modernities, good and bad, fascism being clearly among the bad ones.[73]