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]
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.
64
Whereas Diane Paul and Barbara Kimmelman have famously demonstrated the importance of agricultural concerns of plant breeders for the introduction of Mendelian theory in the US, Jonathan Harwood, Paolo Palladino, Thomas Wieland, and Christophe Bonneuil have all explored the complicated relations between Mendelian genetics and industrializing organisms. See Jonathan Harwood, “Introduction to the special issue on biology and agriculture,”
65
See Deborah Fitzgerald,
66
Edmund Russell,
67
This is particularly evident in Phillip Thurtle’s book
68
Fitzgerald,
69
This is characteristic not only of histories of plant and animal breeding but also of critical studies of science more generally. For a good critique of such grand narratives, see Dominic Berry, “The plant breeding industry after pure line theory: Lessons from the National Institute of Agricultural Botany,”
70
Max Horkeimer and Theodor W. Adorno,
71
See Giorgio Agamben,
72
This has been argued by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose in their criticism of the generic use of the concept of biopower by followers of Hardt and Negri and followers of Giorgio Agamben in their article “Biopower today.” The history of eugenics, with its sensitivity to different national tendencies, might suggest a similar argument. Nevertheless, I would like to contend that most of the comparative studies offered by historians of eugenics tend to explain differences of practices in terms of fixed different national cultural contexts instead of exploring how science and culture co-evolve, as I try to do here. The traditional contrast between negative and positive eugenics, following religious fault lines identifying the first with Protestant northern countries and the second with Catholic southern countries, certainly doesn’t apply to plant and animal breeders. When tinkering with domesticated plants and animals, all breeders dealt with in this book were hard-liners, eliminating with no mercy the less interesting varieties. See Marius Turda, ed.,
73
In Peter Sloterdijk’s formulation (
74
On Bodenständigkeit and its importance in Heidegger’s philosophy, see Charles R. Bambach,