How performances of tactical imperceptibility—or “stealth”—have become a key political practice in digital culture as a means of escaping surveillance and tracking technologies.
In The Aesthetics of Stealth, Toni Pape proposes the first aesthetic and cultural theory of stealth, a mode of political action. The primary goal of stealth is to act efficiently while remaining imperceptible. Pape begins with the observation that the desire for stealth is a sociocultural response to digital media culture, due to digital technologies' unprecedented ability to track individual behavior. He argues that stealth operates as a cross-media aesthetic that can be observed in video games, television, and video art alike, particularly in so-called stealth video games, a genre that requires players to accomplish missions without being detected by in-game enemies.
Drawing on theories of perception, digital aesthetics, and video game studies, Pape proposes an analytical map of different modes of stealth such as “sneaking stealth,” “social stealth,” or “magical stealth.” The author's findings are brought into dialogue with research in the fields of software studies, surveillance studies, and political theory to establish the political importance of stealth. While stealth is a resistance to pervasive sensing and tracking, Pape also shows that the principles of stealth politics are closely connected to urgent concerns like (cyber)warfare and other digital practices of targeting and surveillance that operate to entrench cultural values like heteronormativity and white supremacy.
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- Title
- The Aesthetics of Stealth
- Subtitle
- Digital Culture, Video Games, and the Politics of Perception
- Publisher
- The MIT Press
- Author(s)
- Toni Pape
- Published
- 2024-10-08
- Edition
- 1
- Format
- eBook (pdf, epub, mobi)
- Pages
- 240
- Language
- English
- ISBN-10
- 0262549786
- ISBN-13
- 9780262380768
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND
- Book Homepage
- Free eBook, Errata, Code, Solutions, etc.
Cover Contents 1. Stealth Parade: Introduction, Overview, Problematization Hunted Stealth Parade Of Stealth Viruses and Stealth Voters 2. Digital Prehensions: Two Brief Genealogies of Stealth Part 1: Digital Imperceptibilities Operational Principles of Stealth Part 2: A Manifold of Prehensions 3. Stealth: A Coevolution of Technology and Culture 4. Technostealth: A Baroque Disposition The Americans Hacking the Smart City in Watch Dogs: Legion 5. The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then: An Interlude 6. Sneaking Stealth: The Tracking Shot and Relational Imperceptibility A Contemporary Tracking Shot Third-Person Point of View and Associated Milieus: Splinter Cell Stealth Democracy: True Detective Stealth in the Museum: “Guards” 7. Surveillance Stealth 1: Conspiracy Thinking and Ubiquitous War The World of Assassin’s Creed A Series of Digital Conversions Surveillance Stealth Reloaded 8. Surveillance Stealth 2: Overcoding World History and the World as Blackbox What Is History? History as Espionage 9. Magical Stealth: Queering Sourcery and Relational Ethics in Dishonored Informing Metaphysics: The Void, the Outsider, and Magic The Gameplay Design of Magical Stealth Undoing the Stratification of Code 10. Social Stealth: Camp Aesthetic, Whiteness, and Artificial Stupidity in Hitman Hitman: A World of Camp Disguises and Social Stealth Gameplay “Between 20 Percent and 40 Percent Asian”: The Stupidity of Digital Whiteness The Tactical Duplicities of Stealth Gameplay 11. Stealthy Together: Coda on Insistent Belonging Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index