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.
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.
Recently, M. Norton Wise has pointed to the similarities of modes of explanation in science and history by calling attention to the status of model organisms in the life sciences.[22] Much as standardized mice stand for humans in studies of the general mechanisms of cancer, so “exemplar narratives in history aim at the universal through the particular.” In place of anxiously searching for historical causal explanations and reproducing a limited understanding of how scientific research is actually practiced, Wise urged historians to embrace their typical methodology of taking “the individual case as representative of larger developments, even though it can never be abstracted from its specific circumstances.” As Georges Canguilhem noted, biologists historically made use of different organisms to research different properties they were interested in: “the dog for the conditioned reflex; the mouse for the vitamins and maternal behavior; the frog, ‘biology’s Job’, for reflexes; the drosophila for heredity; the horse for blood circulation.”[23] Throughout this book, in an analogy to that mode of reasoning, I have used wheat to study fascist mass mobilizations and the formation of a corporatist regime; potatoes to follow the growth of the infrastructural power of a fascist state; pigs to understand the design of a rooted-in-the-soil national community; coffee, rubber, and cotton to explore fascist colonial labor regimes; and sheep to investigate interconnected genocides and white settlement expansion. Such selection is not neutral, and other historical technoscientific things would certainly allow for different explorations. As model organisms are not abstract entities and their actual existence in the real world often leads scientists into unforeseen phenomena, so the intense tinkering with concrete historical technoscientific things led the historical research into unexpected paths. This is illustrated by the unanticipated connected histories of the three fascist empires that become evident when one follows the historical trajectories of Karakul sheep from Halle to South West Africa and the Ukraine, and from Libya to Angola. The weaving of Thing histories seems, in fact, an adequate narrative technique with which to make sense of practices aimed at producing fascist collectives through the scientific production of things.
11
On this transition, see Tresch, “Technological world-pictures.” For other sources and references of the ‘thing’ talk in studies of material culture in anthropology, see Soraya de Chadarevian, “Things and the archives of recent sciences,”
12
Bruno Latour, “Spheres and networks: Two ways of reinterpreting globalization,”
14
Martin Heidegger, “Building, dwelling, thinking,” in
15
Martin Heidegger,
18
Martin Heidegger,
20
See Richard Rorty, “Heidegger and the atomic bomb,” in
22
M. Norton Wise, “Science as history,” in