The Wheatsheaf lecture series ‘Organics’, organised by Matthew Wraith and Ben Dawson will be continuing this term. The lectures in their various ways investigate contemporary conceptions within the biological sciences of what an organism is, does, and can become and how these have inflected the ancient use of the notion of the organic as a structuing metaphor or aspirational model for society, culture and the built environment as a whole. These will both be in the Wheatsheaf pub 25 Rathbone place W1T 1DG:

Wednesday 23rd January, 7pm
Neil Leach - The Organic in Contemporary Architectural Design

Neil Leach is an architect and theorist. He is teaching now at Brighton University and has been closely involved with both the AA and the London Consortium in the past. His books include The anaesthetics of Architecture, Camouflage and most recently Forget Heidegger. His talk at the Wheatsheaf will be on how concepts central to biology like ‘morphogenesis’ and ‘emergence’, together with the biologically informed writings of theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda have colonised architectural theory and prized the idea of the organic away from its traditional assocations with the Organic Movement in Twentieth Century Architecture.

Tuesday 19th February, 7pm
John Marks - Symbiosis and virtulisation - The Mind of Society

John Marks is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Nottingham and a member of the Science, Technology and Cultures research group. His work focuses on the possible ways in which the human body and brain might be transformed, mediated theoretically through a reading of French thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, along with a more recent interest in the cultural and intellectual impact of molecular biology as a discipline.

His talk will be on the French biologist, geologist, and jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere, focusing on some of the ways in which this idea has re-appeared in recent French writing on the Internet, cyberspace, cybernetics and biology.