The Wheatsheaf Talks are an annual series, and take place in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub - a favourite of 1930s writers such as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas - at 25 Rathbone Place, W1T 1DG. Talks are open to all Consortium students.

This year’s series of talks is being organised by Consortium students Ben Dawson and Matt Wraith, and consider the fate of ‘the organism’ in recent social theory.

Organics: Between Biology and Politics in Contemporary Social Theory

The conception of society as a single living organism is ancient and found in a variety of cultures. From the early Stoics’ connections of pneuma (life force) and oikeiosis (belonging/sociality) to the mechanists and vitalists whose science framed the political debates of the Glorious Revolution, theories of organic life have implicitly and often explicitly carried morally and politically normative associations. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘organic relations’ came to be seen as an antidote to the ills of industrialisation and the call for an ‘organic society’ was made by an extraordinarily diverse range of thinkers. In recent years, organic and biological concepts have crept back into cultural theory and begun breeding there exponentially. Insights, discoveries, and models drawn from the life sciences have inflected political, social and cultural thought and have variously been used as means of conceiving, exemplifying, analogising, grounding, expanding, regenerating and metamorphosing cultural and political processes. But these new theories differ from the organic social models of the past in many important ways.

Contemporary revitalisations of the relation between biological and social processes resist reductive or essentialist biologism. These theories focus not so much on the human organism and other drearily hierarchical central nervous systems, but draw instead on the rhizomatic structure of certain grasses, on viruses, or single cells.

Older theories arguing for an ‘Organic Society’ tended to be anti-modern, anti-industrial, anti-urban. Today, it is the modern, industrial or post-industrial, technologically connected urban collective that most adequately approaches the complexity of the organism. The organic was once valued for its simplicity, now it is seen as a paradigm of complexity.

The aim of this lecture series, and of the discussions we hope will emerge from and grow around it, is to consider the fate of the organism in recent social theory and tap the wide stream of thought that flows from the meeting of these two tributaries.

Wednesday 17 October 2007, 7pm
John Dupré (Professor of Philosophy of Science, Exeter)
Professor Dupré specialises in the relationships between of science, metaphysics, and social theory, and on the limitations of socio-biology. He will be speaking on the statement ‘There is no such thing as society’.

Tuesday 20 November 2007, 7pm:
Michael King (Professor of Law, Reading)
Professor King is a leading expert on the increasingly influential work Niklas Luhmann. His paper, ‘The Autopoiesis of Social Systems’ will focus on Luhmann’s uses of biology in his theorisations of autopoietic systems.

Spring Term (Date TBC)
John Marks (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Nottingham)
John Marks has written extensively on the work of Gilles Deleuze. He is a member of the Science, Technology, and Culture Research Group at Nottingham, and will be speaking on biology, twentieth-century French thought and cybernetics.