Richard Seymour, Lenin's Tomb
In Ferguson, Missouri,
there are 'outside agitators'. On this,
the reactionaries and liberals agree. Of
course, there are all sorts of racialised rumours flying around in the guise of
reporting about what is taking place in Ferguson. We are well used to this. We remember Katrina.
There will be time to
sift through all that. For now, I simply
want to ask a quick question: what is an 'outside agitator'? The metaphor of exteriority, of being
outside, has two salient connotations.
First, one is transgressing the spatial ordering of the state. It is states which constitute social spaces
like districts, wards, counties, etc - a process that is historically far from
racially innocent in the US. Second, one
is 'outside' the polis; one's political being as such is 'outside', one is
traitorous and disloyal. It is not just
that one travelled from one city to another - that's fine, provided the
political agenda one brings is benign for the system - but that one brought
ideas that are not only not native to the destination, but actually foreign to
the nation, the free world, civilisation itself.
Understandably, then,
this language is very common in racial situations. The 'outside agitator' mytheme reeks of good
old boy vigilantism, the commingling of race-baiting and red-baiting that was
typical of Southern countersubversion in the dying days of Jim Crow. (The enforces of apartheid were also
obsessively concerned with 'Edgy Tighters', as cartoonist Steve Bell rendered
it with superlative accuracy.) Because
racial situations unfold in heavily structured political spaces in which the
definitions and boundaries of the 'local' serve the existing forms of
dominance. And because racial situations
are defined within the 'common sense' of white supremacy which, if it is to be
seriously challenged, must be challenged from a point of view somewhere far
outside that 'common sense', a point of view almost inimical to what the
dominant ideology considers the moral and intellectual foundation of
civilisation.
Of course, this implies
that 'locals' are themselves otherwise not susceptible to radical
disturbance. Indeed, the considered
point of view of segregationists during the civil rights era was that 'their'
African Americans were either content or too dumb to rebel by themselves, and
that therefore if there was unrest it was the fault of the Jewish outsiders and
their 'freedom rides' and connections to the global red conspiracy. The obvious liberal response to this sort of
line was that injustice anywhere was a problem everywhere, that all citizens
had moral agency and a stake in freedom, that there is nothing sacrosanct about
'the local' (and appeals to it are usually reactionary), and that red-baiting
had proved itself to be an attack on all democratic forces. At least since Massive Resistance, that was
the obvious liberal response. And it
took no time at all to think it up, everyone already knew the lines.
