Omission of Blackness from the 1AC is a voting issue.

Enforcement of nothingness yet again presents us uncomfortable theoretical terrain. This nothingness, firstly, is distinct from the nothing in the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ Yet, this question spurs on its inverse: ‘why is there nothing rather than something?’ This nothingness made visible in the references of Anti-Oedipus should be conceived of as an instant, an opening into both possibility and impossibility where something should be but is not. We could envision this nothingness as a bounded and bracketed omission and a void that could pull everything into its orbit. Omission in the case of the nothingness found in Deleuze and Guattari’s book is key; it is where something could have been, but is not. Moreover, it is where something should have been but is not.

Omission in this case can and should be understood as concomitant with the violence of anti-blackness. The opening of a space for an omission to then occur, a rendering into blankness, is not the opening of multiple possibilities for integration into the structure, practice and politics of citation, but rather as nothingness, a strange echo of partus sequiter ventrem. The blank space strangely visible in the text is not an erasure, which would suggest there was something there before that had been removed, blotted out, papered over or scrubbed away. Instead we might view the blankness, the nothingness as an irresistible vacuum, a black hole. It presents us with a peculiar puncture in the fabric of thought, which could pull everything into its orbit, which could deform everything around its edges. These edges around the nothingness of the missing citation, the nothingness that Jackson is considered if we follow the logic of even an unconscious disavowal of his work.

On the side of enforcement, the bounding and bracketing are the limits of the anti-black world that press in upon what it perceives as nothing. According to the structures and strictures of liberal humanism, the being Jackson should be present, but we are faced with a situation in which this being is not. The prisoner Jackson should be present, but is not, even in their documentation. Thus, the theorist Jackson should be present, but is not. His status as a nothing in the gaze of the world, a criminal in the gaze of the prison, is held this way. Attempts to be brought into the world, into the human fold, into the world outside the prison, fail repeatedly. The various discursive apparatuses that Jackson comes up against in his text, such as the parole board, enforce his nothingness, just as the gap present in Anti-Oedipus enforces his nothingness in the sense of the theoretical world.

Connected to these problems of the enforced nothingness of the Black figure, the incarcerated figure, and the blank space where Jackson should be is the problem posed by Foucault’s claim that the prisoner is reduced to his paperwork. He writes that those caught within the carceral network are transformed into a case, a collection of documentation from parole applications, incident reports, evidence log sheets, what Foucault terms a “network of writing … a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them” (Foucault 189). Once again, to take this claim when faced with the situation of Jackson’s omission from Deleuze and Guattari’s text, questions and problems posed by their answers teem to the surface.

Just like carceral writing and documentation, systems of citational practice do work to capture and fix not only those subjects deemed worthy of authority, but also capture and fix the logic of the practice itself. Circulation and re-circulation are granted to those deemed to have the authority to midwife the reproduction of worlds around certain, specific bodies, pace Sara Ahmed. This should be extended further to reproducing the world around those whose bodies can be reduced to flesh, following Spillers, with that constant violent possibility of being reduced to documentation (64–81). Jackson’s omission and subsequent rendering into nothingness in the citational record of Anti-Oedipus comes into ironic confrontation with the network of writing. The disciplinary and control surveillance of the world, of which the carceral network and systems of citation are part, should afford Jackson documentation within the assemblage of structures, up to and including Anti-Oedipus. And yet, the absence remains. The bracketed and bounded space where ostensibly a node of the network of writing that would constitute Jackson as an object of the carceral gaze remains empty. Of course, other documents exist for Jackson, but he cannot be reduced to them.