Skip to main content
punctum books

Redaction: Sketch for a Self-Analysis

  • Joshua Craze (author)
Chapter of: Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State(pp. 27–41)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
    Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
      Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
      Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
    • ProQuest Ebrary
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
TitleRedaction
SubtitleSketch for a Self-Analysis
ContributorJoshua Craze (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0466.1.03
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/redacted-writing-in-the-negative-space-of-the-state/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightJoshua Craze
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2024-10-27
Long abstractFrom 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.
Page rangepp. 27–41
Print length15 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • redaction
  • secrecy
  • terror
  • USA
  • form
Contributors

Joshua Craze

(author)

Joshua Craze is a writer currently completing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions about war, silence, and bureaucracy in South Sudan. His fictions, essays, and reportage have been published by n+1, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and The Baffler, among many other venues. He exhibited his “Grammar of Redaction” at the New Museum in New York in 2014; he was a UNESCO Artist Laureate in Creative Writing in the same year. He has collaborated with Jenny Holzer on two projects about redaction: a book-box (Belligerent, Ivory Press, 2017) and the catalogue essay he wrote for Jenny Holzer: War Paintings (Walther König, 2015). His other writings on redaction have been published in ASAP/Journal, Media-N, and in Archival Dissonance: Knowledge Production and Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris/Ibraaz, 2015). He has been writing a novel entitled Redacted Mind for a decade now, much excerpted, never finished, and one day, he tells himself, he will send it off to the printers.