The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age (review)

Fra Dana. ON THE WINDOW SEAT (Self-portrait). N.d. Oil on canvas. 16"x 19". Fra Dana Collection, Montana Museum of Art & Culture, Univ. of Montana.

With its intellectual breadth, theoretical rigor, and inventive interpretations, Neil Campbell's The Rhizomatic West will soon become a foundational text in the emerging field of postwestern studies. In the broadest and most radical sense, it boldly reconceptualizes traditional notions of western space and culture, attempting to "decentralize and dislocate the ways it [the US West] has so often been considered, even among so-called revisionist writers and scholars" (41). In addition, Campbell uses this new postwestern perspective to interpret a fascinating series of western cultural texts, ranging from Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns and Chris Eyre's indigenous films to Douglas Coupland's Generation X novels, Robert Frank's western photography, and Calexico, an alternative Latin musical group. Extending far beyond the details of these particular readings, The Rhizomatic West develops an entire new hermeneutic model for reinterpreting a "labyrinthine West that refuses to be any single thing" (300).

At its core, The Rhizomatic West confronts an unresolved "anomaly in western studies" that derives from the tension between two distinct ways of understanding the relationship between place and culture (1). While traditional accounts of the West generally define this relationship in terms of roots, bordered regions, and geometric grids that ground an authentic, unified, and fixed sense of place and cultural identity, Campbell's new postwestern paradigm reconceptualizes this relationship as a complex network of routes, deterritorializing lines of flight, transnational diasporas, and hybrid border crossings that reconfigure western culture as a "traveling or mobile discourse" (1).

Drawing specifically on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the rhizome—a complex, nonlinear, nonhierarchical, multidimensional, anti-Hegelian model of thought—Campbell argues that the American West is better understood "not as a single region but as a mutating multiplicity" (9). Less a region than a transnational crossroads "defined by complex connectivity, multidimensionality, and imagination," this New West, or Postwest, has been represented and explained by insiders and by outsiders who "contest" and "unravel" the traditional West to "open a space" for new ways of imagining it (3, 14). These outsiders are more willing to imagine beyond the West's gridded spaces and cultural practices and are better attuned to how western culture and history have developed through mobile, transnational conversations between western and other cultural traditions.

While some may find The Rhizomatic West to be a bit overtheorized, repetitive, and reductionistic, I find these first two flaws to be intellectually justifiable. Given the comprehensive, groundbreaking nature of the book, Campbell rightfully develops his theoretical paradigm rigorously and exhaustively. It is the third criticism, however, that I find most problematic. Campbell indeed makes fascinating new connections between works as diverse as Rosalind Krauss's essay on grids in modern art, Rem Koolhaas's analysis of Manhattan's delirious grid system, and the gridded western spaces created by the 1785 Land Ordinance—not to mention various kinds of conceptual and cultural "grids." It is less clear, however, that Campbell adequately notes the subtle differences between how these diverse grid systems have been used in various locations. For example, Manhattan's gridded culture of congestion differs significantly from Salt Lake City's gridded culture of sprawl—let alone Krauss's analysis of abstract modernist paintings. Similar conflations of disparate theoretical and cultural texts are occasionally found in Campbell's book. Nevertheless, The Rhizomatic West will indubitably inspire a new generation of postwestern scholars who will work out its finer details as they heed its call to "expand the 'architecture' of western studies as a truly critical regionalism seeking constantly new directions and offshoots" (301). Campbell's sprawling, rhizomatic tour de force is nothing if not expansive in the best sense of the word.