Elision Fields: a Celebration of the Redactive ____ and __________

Bianca Blanco

Issue 37 * Spring 2016

Ever since ___ ___ erased part of a drawing by ______ ______, the redactive arts have been an important part of the postmodern scene. Beat poets ______ ______ and _____ _______ were known to use copies of the ___ ____ Times, eliminating key words in order to reveal the true _______ of its editorial policies. Similarly, _____ ______'s poetry has been long characterized by adaptations of source material from _____ _____ and ____ _____, with terms such as ______ and ______ carefully removed, often suggesting a sinister intent that had always lain beneath.

The results of all this redactive work have been not only the revelation of subtext that often goes unnoticed in the slurry of words and the slush of semantics common to run-of-the-mill communication. They have also revealed the very play and _____ inherent in the various semiotic systems involved. One of the primary problems of post-structuralist criticism, after all, has been a greater awareness of what simply isn't there. So invoked by purposeful erasure, the redactive arts force us back onto the elided role of ______, _______, and ______ communities throughout history, and the dispossessed voices of the ____ and the _____.

With the rise of the ______ industry and the _______ politics of _____________, a world has arisen in which what is expressed is expected to be a distraction from what is actually present. When a politician like ______ _____ manages to base his unexpected success on "saying what's on his ____," we see this phenomenon in effect, even when what is on the mind of said politician is a steaming pile of unmitigated ____. In this sense, _______, ________, and __________, and the public face of ___________ can be seen as parts of a whole redactive industry, and the arts are merely the logical counterformation against which elision exists as the antidote to the illusionment of neoliberal ______.

Supreme among redactive practitioners, of course, are America's ____________ services, such as the ___, the ___, and the ___. Citing national security concerns, these agencies release heavily redacted files in response to information requests, requests made possible by laws meant to make such secrecy obsolete. In this way, every redacted document released by the ___ is not, in fact, a release of information, but a commentary on and expression of the agency's contempt of the ___ and the _______ people's right to know. ____leaks and its imitators such as ______ and _______, for whom redaction is tantamount to a crime. Take the opposite tack: instead of revealing the elision through creative redaction, they fill the gaps with more information than the average _____ _____ is able to process. The effect is, ironically, the same as having left the information out: rather than drawing attention to what is wrong by drawing attention to what is missing, ____leaks and the others like it draw attention only to the fact of the wrong itself.

Thus, ____leaks acts in the same way as advertising, which uses what it does say to focus the viewer's attention on _______ emotions and responses of _____, and away from deliberative ____________. We are angry when we learn that high-level government officials have ____ to us, and we should be, but we are not sure exactly what we're angry at aside from that reality: the reality of what it is we need to do about it has also been _______.

Strong feelings, then, particularly _______ from their specific ______, become the _____ upon which we ride, looking for anything even vaguely "_________" or "____," no matter how preposterous, ostentatious, tyrannical or bad.

After a lifetime of this, anything too solid, too _______, too ______, or real, seems not just scary but the subject of self-__________. Not only can we no longer handle the truth, we can no longer even _________ it. So the ___ Nightly News can successfully redact all policy positions for a presidential race and focus only on the unimportant _________ aspects, and we will not notice because ______ would be invisible to us even if it were expressed, the black bars of recision having burned themselves into our eyes.