Redaction Reaction: The Subversive Power of █████████
At this point, we’re all familiar with the Twitter oeuvre of Donald Trump (probably more familiar than we’d like to be). But you might not remember him tweeting this:
If this seems a little more lyrical than what we’ve come to expect from Donald, that’s because it is. When reddit user Full_iced posted this doctored image in 2018, they inadvertently created a new micro-genre of poetry (now celebrated on the subreddit /othepelican):
These new and improved tweets are so enjoyable because they feel like a portal to a kinder, zanier world where the president might post gentle observational poetry instead of angry screeds of disinformation. They’re also a kind of coping mechanism, a way of finding a nugget of sanity within insanity, as some did in the wake of the election:
Outside of Twitter, selective censorship has emerged as somewhat of a trend in meme-making. An image that’s familiar to everyone (or at least those in the know) takes on a new, humorous context when letters or words get removed:
(The original image is an oft-memed scene from Kung Fu Panda in which the character Tai Lung says, “Finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle will be legendary.”)
At times, it escalates into a challenge of who can come up with the most inane redaction of the original sentence, like going from this:
To this:
To this:
Or turning something from a joke into just pure vibes:
In a way, this form of wordplay, creating new combinations of words and letters within given constraints, is a more absurdist version of techniques used by the Situationist movement more than half a century ago. French Marxist theorist Guy Debord argued against originality and inspiration — that rather than create new works of art and literature, we should disfigure, defamiliarize and recombine existing ones in order to expose them for what they were: commodity, spectacle and propaganda.
Debord called this practice détournement, and while the Situationists dissolved in 1972, détournement became a popular technique in the late 1970s and ’80s. Anti-consumerist movements like the “culture jammers” of Adbusters satirized consumer culture by making parodies of brand logos.
It’s only logical that détournement would make a comeback in our image-saturated, remix-heavy contemporary culture. It fits perfectly with the ironic, self-reflexive sensibility of younger millennials and Generation Z, which some have likened to a new form of Dadaism. In this case, memes are the new readymades: the language equivalent of sticking a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
There’s actually quite a long history of blacking out text to create found poetry, and the practice has actually become popular as an accessible form of creative writing in middle- and high-school English classes. Austin Kleon, who made a book of poems from blacked out newspaper pages, says that “It’s sort of like if the CIA did haiku.” And perhaps the popularity of redaction humor might also be a response to censorship and surveillance culture: taking a practice associated with concealing information for nefarious means and using it to humorous ends instead.
For those of us with terminal cases of wordplay brain, once you start looking for messages within tweets, ads, and memes, it’s hard to stop. Programmer Josiah Winslow has even created a website where you can “pelicanize” any tweet you want. Personally, I’ve been having fun redacting tweets from the Allegra brand account:
And while my newly redacted tweets might not be great poetry, I can at least appreciate them as examples of what the poet Kenneth Goldsmith calls “uncreative writing.” Repurposing a quote from Douglas Huebler, Goldsmith writes, “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” But we can still take away — in some cases, it can only be an improvement.
If you come up with the next great work of blackout poetry, tweet it at @beyondwordplay or email it to us at info@beyondwordplay.com.
