Read more
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 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.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
1 Stealth Parade: Introduction, Overview, Problematization
2 Digital Prehensions: Two Brief Genealogies of Stealth
3 Stealth: A Co-evolution of Technology and Culture
4 Technostealth: A Baroque Disposition
5 The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then: An Interlude
6 Sneaking Stealth: The Tracking Shot and Relational Imperceptibility
7 Surveillance Stealth 1: Conspiracy Thinking and Ubiquitous War
8 Surveillance Stealth 2: Overcoding World History and the World as Blackbox
9 Magical Stealth: Queering Sourcery and Relational Ethics in Dishonored
10 Social Stealth: Camp Aesthetic, Whiteness, and Artificial Stupidity in Hitman
11 Stealthy Together: Coda on Insistent Belonging
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Toni Pape is a cultural theorist and media scholar at the University of Amsterdam. His previous books include Figures of Time and the coauthored Nocturnal Fabulations. He is a member of the editorial boards of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and the Immediations book series at Punctum Press.
