Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1desires rather than needs is that it is an argument for focusing on sociallyconstitutive incentives rather than seeing actions as primarily determined byneeds. This does not imply a denial of the existence of more absolute needs,but needs can be satisfied in different ways, and this represents an action fieldfor societal and cultural change in which desires are essential.The driving force in development of any society or any development atall, is the desiring-machine: The metaphor of the desiring-machine, carriesthe idea of productive desire, which recombines the capitalist divisionbetween labour and production on one hand and needs and consumption onthe other. The Schizoanalysis insists that even though desire and labouractually are the one and same productive power, under capitalism both ofthem operate under different regimes, which again usually are studied bydifferent disciplines: political economy and psychoanalysis. AlthoughDeleuze and Guattari disregard the division between the two disciplines, theymaintain the distinction between the two regimes which they refer to asdesiring-production (corresponding to libido) and social-production(corresponding to labor).The truth of the matter is that social-production is purely andsimply desiring-productions under determinate conditions. Wemaintain that the social field immediately invested by desire,and that libido has no need of any meditation or sublimation,any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invadeand invest the productive forces and the relations ofproduction. There is only desire and the social, and nothingelse. 42This necessity of understanding individual socio-spatial practices as drivenby desires, and not needs, is also addressed in Rob Shields’ discussions ofLefebvre’s writings on socio-spatial dialectics, for instance in his discussionof how Lefebvre’s philosophy of needs and desires is built around thequestion of how people produce themselves. 43 In his Métaphilosophie from1965 Lefebvre introduced poësis as a broadening of the Marxian concepts ofproduction, praxis and alienation: the poësis is a link between alienation andpraxis, and includes not only activities oriented to the realisation of politicaltheory, but also the realisation of self, similar to Sartre’s concentration onprojects. Lefebvre describes poësis as “the experience and creation of humannature: the realisation of the self, including the creation of the city, the idea of42 Deleuze & Guattari 1983, p.29.43 Shields, Rob 1999: Lefebvre, Love and struggle: spatial dialectics, London, Routledge. pp 135-40.35