Written by Amy Williamson, title design by Luna Jezzard.
‘Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.’
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)
Pornography of the contemporary is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure. It is vast, interconnected, non-linear, and without hierarchal structure. This has only been furthered by the conception of the internet in creating a burgeoning industry of availability living within networks of images. Building from the works of Deleuze and Guattari, porn can be understood as a space where desire operates rhizomatically.
A rhizome, as both the plant stem and the post-structuralist conception within philosophy, is a stem that sends out roots through which it retains the ability to grow new shoots upwards. Deleuze and Guattari use this botanical imagery to depict a network of multiplicity that operates in perpetual transformation, in the social, the political, and the pornographic. Traditionally, Western philosophy suggests a linear progression of knowledge, wanting to get to the bottom of things through a model of arborescent thinking and branching from there. Arborescence is that which has an ordering, defined structure, its primary image being a tree as the branches start from the trunk and move outwards. In contrast, the rhizome is posited as a bendy root system which has no starting point, in complete flux.
Rhizomes, unlike trees, do not have higher keys; they do not refer back to any centre. Every single branch in a tree must refer back to a single point. In a rhizome, there is no such point of origin, from any spot, in any direction. Potatoes grow in a rhizomatic fashion just as much as porn. In the digital world, it is a sprawling network of roots, denying singularity. Rhizomes are not bound in the lambasted and scandalised which treats desire as an appendix that is poised to rupture.
The current debate surrounding pornography in philosophical enquiry is regarding its moral status. A value-neutral description of a pornographic representation combines two key points: it has a certain intention or function to arouse its audience sexually, and it has a specific content of explicit representations of sexual material. An application of Deleuzian concepts into the social issue of pornography, namely whether it is moral and/or ethical, looks to bludgeon the discussion entirely in search of breaking away from fixed binaries of right/wrong and good/bad, because of this constant process of disintegration and development. Porn has continually been shown to regrow in new forms, segmentary lines, and territorialisations. Though it is tempting to regard porn as only having one, rudimentary purpose, that being to arouse, pornography has categorically been shown to use the shock of sex to critique religious and political authority, especially within the 1500–1800s.
Whilst feminist philosophers rightly highlight the moral dangers of modern pornography in systematically eroticising aspects of gender inequality and the damaging effects this has on the consumer, its violation of social and moral laws provides a basis for another disposition: aversion, awe, et cetera. A network of desires in which porn, as a rhizomatic network, is a realm where sexuality is continually in the process of emerging, fluctuating, always creating new forms, expressions, and relationships. Dissemination of sexual imagery which wishes to explore fetish, transgression, and sex outwith the normative seeks to reveal this creative becoming that would stray from the anxiety of the arborescent.
Porn experiences aborification despite its existence within a rhizome, as not everything functions as a rhizome—Pornhub being just one example. Pornhub follows controlled mechanisms and a hierarchal structure. Desire is made anew in the rhizome only to be clawed at through mechanisms such as capitalism (conducive to the growth and proliferation of Pornhub) which seek to distort and reterritorialise desire by siphoning it back into commodification and constraint. It is the broader ecosystem of porn that functions as a decentralised network of distribution. Even if a rhizome is fractured or shattered at a single point, it will regenerate at another point, old or new. Even if Pornhub were to be deleted from the internet, this disruption would not eliminate the risk of encountering systems that reestablish a similar authority around a central symbol or those that reconstitute a subject through imposed meanings.
Pornography, viewed through the rhizome metaphor, reveals its ubiquity as both a cultural and digital phenomenon, where no single source can disrupt its network. It transcends traditional morality and ideology, instead functioning as a desiring-machine that perpetuates a fetishistic exchange within a realm of constant interconnection and flux. Inside this digital landscape, pornography expands its territory through deterritorialisation, extending its lines of flight to the point of invisibility.
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