Redaction: Sketch for a Self-Analysis

From 2008-12, I worked as a researcher, sifting through redacted documents from the War on Terror. I thought of myself as a detective, stalking the state through the black blocks of the redactions. My mission was to fill in the blanks. When I wrote, I discarded the redactions: presence interested me, not the presence of absence. As the years passed, I came to be critical of my mode of hunting. In ignoring how redactions structured the information to which I had access, I ignored the state's heavy hand, lying behind the redactions. In my later work as an artist and essayist, I tried to understand the absences of the redactions as presences, possessing a logic all of their own. "Redaction: Sketch for a self-analysis," presents a narrative analysis of my decade-long obsession with redacted documents. The essay analyzes the various modes through which I tried to understand the documents, and presents an account of what we can learn from redacted documents, not through hunting for information amid the redactions, but by examining the absence themselves. In attending to these absences, this essay suggests, we come to learn about the outlines of our present.