Rethinking the World (part 1)

I buy a ton of what Onuf is saying (or perhaps more accurately, a ton of what I understand Onuf to be saying, which may be a decidedly smaller sample from the population *statistics! winky face*). Therefore, there are large swaths of this book that I will not comment on via this blog post. Here's a first thought (I'll probably post more follow up materials tomorrow morning--I'm embarrassingly still processing the latter part of the book!).

Besides being irritated at Onuf's appreciation of some of Clifford Geertz's work, which (although I have obviously not read it all) I cannot say I share, I find Onuf's discussion of culture in chapter 3 to revert back to the structuralism he criticizes in earlier chapters. Take for instance the statement: "to the extent that a guilt culture, like that of the West, creates a conspicuous public place for rights, the point is not just that such rules need not be internalized, but that the response to their violation is…" (p. 123). I need not to finish the quote. My point is that Onuf ends up treating culture as a static category (just like Geertz!… Although Geertz professes that it is not at all static, that claim does not seem to hold up against how he actually talks about "what culture does"). I also do not see Onuf's attempt to mitigate the problem caused by the way he refers to geographically/temporally/population-linked cultural attributes as sufficiently corrective ("That the Balinese favor instruction-rules, or men abstraction, are generalizations admitting to significant individual variation, and not categorical statements" p. 126). This inadequacy comes from the fact that Onuf corrects for "abstracting" diversity into broad categories. He does not show that (1) cultural "attributes" or identities, and (2) patterns of interaction among actors are co-constitutive. Can culture be anything but constructed in the same manner as "rules"? Do you find this internal contradiction to be damning?

...And a definitional issue, Onuf says: "In the introduction I define as political whatever the members of a social unit decide is important for their unit. This is implicitly a distributive view of politics (Young 1968b: 65-78). The criterion of importance must be taken to mean: whatever might be important enough that its distribution is contested" (p. 229). Can moral and/or social issues (i.e. equal protection of individuals who are not cis-gender, heterosexual) really be reduced to distributional issues (the issue of marriage benefits for homosexual couples, sure, but otherwise?)? I'm not convinced. Thus, Onuf's definition of that which constitutes "political," albeit still constructivist (in the sense that actors produce notions of distributive importance), is narrow for not including other types of political issues that are of a non-distributive character. 

(I also appreciate Onuf's discussion of Wittgenstein because, at this point, I feel I need a lens through which to interpret my first reading of some of his work.)