THE AESTHETICS OF STE : LTH) DIGITAL CULTURE, VIDEO GAMES, AND THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION

TONI P: PE

The Aesthetics of Stealth

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

The Aesthetics of Stealth

Digital Culture, Video Games, and the Politics of Perception

Toni Pape

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

This license applies only to the work in full and not to any components included with permission. Subject to such license, all rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems without permission in writing from the MIT Press.

(@) ev-nc-np |

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided com- ments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with grati- tude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans by Westchester Publishing Services. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pape, Toni, 1983- author.

Title: The aesthetics of stealth : digital culture, video games, and the politics of perception / Toni Pape.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023057596 (print) | LCCN 2023057597 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262549783 (paperback) | ISBN 9780262380775 (epub) | ISBN 9780262380768 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Secrecy. | Ethics. | Aesthetics. | Digital media.

Classification: LCC BJ1429.5 .P37 2024 (print) | LCC BJ1429.5 (ebook) | DDC 177—dc23/eng/20240214

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057596

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057597

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Contents

Stealth Parade: Introduction, Overview, Problematization 1 Digital Prehensions: Two Brief Genealogies of Stealth 15 Stealth: A Coevolution of Technology and Culture 35 Technostealth: A Baroque Disposition 45

Ap WN =

The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then: An Interlude 71 6 Sneaking Stealth: The Tracking Shot and Relational Imperceptibility 79 7 Surveillance Stealth 1: Conspiracy Thinking and Ubiquitous War 103 8 Surveillance Stealth 2: Overcoding World History and the World as Blackbox 129 9 Magical Stealth: Queering Sourcery and Relational Ethics in Dishonored 151 10 Social Stealth: Camp Aesthetic, Whiteness, and Artificial Stupidity in Hitman 171 11 Stealthy Together: Coda on Insistent Belonging 195

Acknowledgments 201 Notes 203

Works Cited 211 Index 225

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

1 Stealth Parade: Introduction, Overview, Problematization

Hunted

The TV program Hunted (Channel 4, 2015-present) turns fugitivity into a spectacular game of hide-and-seek: After a group of contestants are dropped at an unknown location with minimal equipment, they become “the hunted,” whose task it is to evade police forces and special intelligence units for several weeks. The prize for those who can manage to become untraceable to “the hunters” is £100,000. Most contestants get caught, but a few usually manage to elude the police. Hunted is a strange program, not only because it presents the police as gung-ho participants in the gamification of law enforcement or because it provides identity tourism for predominantly white Western audi- ences who would like to know what it’s like to be on the run. It also places before its contestants a complex challenge. As the contestants try to stay hidden from the hunters, they also have to perform the spectacle of the hunt for the cameras. Hunted’s odd twist consists in this double injunction for the contestants: they have to become imperceptible to an environment suffused with surveillance technology and at the same time expose this playful act of hiding to TV cameras. After all, this is reality TV. Moreover, imperceptibility and spectacle are thoroughly articulated insofar as a successful performance of untraceability within Hunted’s game of hide-and-seek garners distinction and the audience’s recognition. The complexity of this challenge consists in the fact that the form of subjectivity that is most valorized in a program like Hunted is one that can modulate its perceptibility at will and accommodate various and even contradictory requirements for perceptibility at the same time. This contrast—the spectacle of the imperceptible—is what this book calls the aesthetics of stealth.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

2 Chapter 1

Hunted’s preoccupation with being imperceptible is a crucial concern of contemporary digital culture. In this show, digital culture has become synon- ymous with the widespread, asymmetrical capture and tracking of personal data. Operating from a seemingly impenetrable London skyscraper with a glass facade, the hunters are a team of former police and intelligence officers who rely on surveillance footage, network analysis, and mapping technology to predict the fugitives’ next moves. The hunters also encourage people on social media to share hints on the participants’ whereabouts. So when the participants of Hunted try to disappear into crowds, hitch a ride from strang- ers, or go off the grid in the woods, these attempts must be understood as tactical moves for resisting capture by a digital network whose sensors reach far into public spaces and the private sphere of UK citizens. And if one’s next move can be predicted based on the digital traces that one has left in the past, then an important strategy for preventing capture is to become unpredictable by not behaving like oneself. Seen in this way, Hunted can help problematize one of the core tenets of digital culture: subversive authenticity.

In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2021, 139-140) draws parallels between reality TV and the digital culture of Big Data to show that both foster the performance of authenticity by transgression or subversion. The reason for this is that Big Data—the industrial production of enormous data sets and extraction of patterns from those data sets for the profitable purpose of predictive decision-making—needs to reliably model the behav- ior of any given individual. “Authenticity is an ethos used to evaluate social performance—to ‘authenticate’ and mold ‘good’ users—especially when they are ‘bad.’ It prescribes a certain transparency of self that makes someone’s data reliable” (Chun 2021, 144). If authenticity is what makes us transparent to an algorithm, then the problem is that people aren’t all that “authentic” all the time. Even though much of our daily behavior is habitual, and therefore regular and relatively predictable, we often leave data traces that are ambigu- ous, contradictory, or filtered by social norms, and therefore less valuable for prediction purposes. To solve this problem, Big Data must coax its users into authentic online behavior, and it does so by feeding controversy. “Contro- versy,” Chun shows, “provides the basis for predictability and works to ‘refine’ more generically determined factors. Within affectively charged zones, users presumably fall prey to confirmation bias—and thus act in historically con- sistent ways—because these are zones of belief or authenticity” (2021, 161). Following Chun, social media feed outrage because outraged users are more

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth Parade 3

likely to express what they truly believe. This allows the capture of more reli- able data points, and thus better algorithmic predictions for those users. By then gathering these users in their “affectively charged [digital] ‘neighbor- hoods,’” Big Data fosters “microsegmented conformity” (160, 159).

Chun traces this notion of subversive authenticity to reality TV where hyperbolic performances of transgression and “acting out” register as authen- tic precisely because they indicate that the person in question dares to be unabashedly themselves (Chun 2021, 149-152; see, e.g., Wood 2017). But what to make, in light of all this, of Hunted and the way in which it encour- ages its participants to not behave like themselves, to evade all attempts at data capture? To an extent, Hunted’s fantasies of fugitivity act against the predictive logic of Big Data, which draws on “subversive authenticity” to engineer “microsegmented conformity.” Even so, the program holds on to its belief in authenticity. The program does not really ask its participants to “not behave like themselves.” Rather, it asks them to not behave like their habitual—that is, predictable—selves. Indeed, to escape capture on Hunted is to shed all your personal habits and learned norms. One has to behave in a singular manner, every act an emergent singularity that cannot be projected from earlier traces. Here, an individual’s authenticity resides in their share of unpredictability, of operational opacity. One might also read Hunted in a contrarian sense and suggest that, from the hunters’ perspective, the entire program is a means of capturing that very share of singularity. How does a person behave when they are taken out of their usual environment and dis- connected from their social network? Hunted provides many answers to this question as it depicts how its participants try to escape surveillance under extreme circumstances. While most fugitives get captured, the ones of spe- cial interest, of course, are those who do manage to escape. (Hint: Going off the grid seems to be the safest bet.) Hunted makes the techniques and tactics of successful fugitives knowable and thus recursively folds them back into the system of data capture. Even the ultimate subversion—of the apparatus of capture itself—can be captured and known until, presumably, all contin- gency vanishes. Presumably.

Making up one’s mind about Hunted is complicated by the fact that it is a competition, a game. As such, the particular outcome of any given round of play—or season—is by definition open (Costikyan 2015). Games, writes Thomas Malaby, are “domain|s] of contrived contingency” (2007, 96). That is, they construct “semibounded ... arenas for contingency,” in which the

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

4 Chapter 1

players’ behavior is constrained by a contrived system of rules, but not prede- termined by it (96). Games always, and by necessity, leave a margin for cre- ative behavior, wiggle room for skillful invention. By virtue of being a game, then, Hunted must hold open a space for uncertainty and contingency, even if the odds are stacked against the fugitives. In past seasons of Hunted, there have been as many as two winning couples who managed to escape their hunters (in seasons 1, 3, and 5). In season 4, by contrast, all the fugitives were caught. One simply cannot know in advance—as reality TV competi- tions often emphasize—how the cookie crumbles. This unpredictability of the asymmetrical competition is particularly interesting in light of the con- flict that Hunted stages. As the program pits fugitives against a surveillance apparatus that tries to comprehensively capture and predict their every move, Hunted stages a conflict around the very possibility of contingency: Is it even possible in today’s digital culture to behave in ways that cannot be predicted by human-machine assemblages? Because Hunted is a game, it must at least assume that this question can be answered in the affirmative. More important than the outcome, however, is that the decision between success and failure depends on the contingencies along the way, on the how of play, its singu- lar style. The uncertainty of play is not mainly in the outcome; it is “in the path the game follows, in how players manage problems, in the surprises they hold” (Costikyan 2015, 13).

It is also due to this processual indeterminacy that games differ over time and across space (Malaby 2007, 102-105). New singular play styles may require the modification or addition of a game’s rules: an example of this is the “introduction of the shot clock in basketball after players such as Bob Cousy developed such incredible ball-handling skills as to be able to ‘dribble out’ remaining game time when their teams had the lead” (103). Or a game, like mah-jongg, may be played in many slightly different local variations. It is only by virtue of this openness that a game—including its system of rules or algorithm—can relate to its contemporary moment and thus have social importance.

This book argues that stealth is an increasingly important element of con- temporary media culture and games in particular—think, for instance, of the social deduction game and pandemic lockdown hit Among Us (Innersloth 2018)—because it speaks to a broader social preoccupation of our time that goes beyond games: the desire or need for opacity in a culture of normative transparency. This introduction provides an overview of examples to assess

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth Parade 5

the scope of stealth’s sociocultural relevance and to problematize it. Later chapters look at so-called stealth video games because their gameplay systems and representational logics most clearly articulate the problem at the heart of The Aesthetics of Stealth: how to avoid capture in a world that is brimming with sensors. Video games are particularly interesting in this context because they rely on software that simulates algorithm-based fictional worlds. The player who explores these worlds is also the planned contingency that happens to the cybernetic system of the game: video games contrive arenas in which players and software inform one another, where players can attune to the workings of digital technology, where they can learn how algorithms prehend new inputs and react to them. This book is about this how, the set of aesthetic and kinesthetic techniques that allow for an element of freedom in the midst of increasingly widespread surveillance facilitated by ubiquitous sensors and predictive algorithms that want “more of the same” (Chun 2021, 163).

In light of all this, Hunted looks a bit like a stealth game adapted for reality TV. Remarkably, its premise and rule system acknowledge the double bind at the heart of reality TV’s logic of “subversive authenticity,” the blurred line between consensual self-exposure and nonconsensual, extractive capture. In other words, the gameplay of Hunted encapsulates in a nutshell and negoti- ates the sociocultural problem of strategic transparency/opacity. To this first insightful observation, we may add a second one that concerns the proposed solution to the stated problem: in Hunted, the solution is stealth. The way out of the double bind is the tactical management of one’s perceptibility in resistance to nonconsensual data capture and algorithmic prediction. But to do this, stealth must predict the predictions. It must move with its algo- rithmic environments and occupy their negative space. In so doing, stealth allows singularities to escape the available categories. Stealth acts as an aes- thetic limit to capture. It is orchestrated contingency.

Stealth Parade

Contemporary media culture is awash with fantasies of stealth. There is a wide engagement across various media to create experiences of illicit activities successfully conducted “under the radar.” Consider the numer- ous TV series—among them Person of Interest, The Americans, Turn, and True Detective—that have in recent years presented and affirmed law enforcement agents who willfully, yet illicitly, operate undercover and beyond the rule of

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

6 Chapter 1

law. Many contemporary artists—including Lee Yong Baek, Liu Bolin, Simon Menner, Desiree Palmen, and Hito Steyerl—have engaged with aesthetic modes of imperceptibility in various ways, often to address the position of the individual in surveillance culture and to explore the potentials of strate- gic disappearance.! In gaming culture, “stealth” is a term that refers both to a play style that favors subterfuge and surreptitious action over open combat and the genre of games in which that play style is dominant. While much more will have to be said about many of the examples mentioned here, this brief overview is offered as a starting point for the arguments presented in this book: in contemporary media culture, stealth is curiously conspicuous, especially in media that engage in one way or another—aesthetically, repre- sentationally, or otherwise—with contemporary political culture.

In many of these media discourses, concerted imperceptibility by stealth is positively valued and strongly desired. To begin with, stealth provides cover and protection from potential adversaries; in other words, it is valued as rela- tively safe. Particularly under conditions of state surveillance and corporate data extraction, stealth allows the individual to defend against institutional overreach; it is thus valued as a defense mechanism. Stealth also widens one’s margin of maneuver because it allows one to operate beyond the boundaries of the officially sanctioned; this makes stealth potentializing. If, as proverb has it, the heart does not grieve over what the eye does not see, then stealth is valuable precisely because it articulates matters of perception, knowledge, and power in ways that avoid grievance for those who can elude perception. This may include the “grievance” of accountability.

The currency of stealth, however, is not limited to media culture. A series of brief examples from various social domains can indicate the wide penetra- tion of the notion, as well as the principles of stealth into culture at large. First, two very different examples from the domain of gender and sexuality. Toby Beauchamp has recently given a thorough account of transgender indi- viduals’ desire to stay under the radar in his book Going Stealth. Here, “going stealth” is the expression “used by many transgender-identified people to describe nondisclosure of transgender status”:

The term [stealth] itself invokes a sense of going undercover, of willful secrecy and concealment, perhaps even of conscious deception. The resonance of militarism in this term suggests the extent to which going stealth entails a certain complic- ity with state agencies, which demand compliance with specific legal and medical procedures and ostensibly offer in return official documentation that helps make stealth status possible. (Beauchamp 2019, 34)

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth Parade 7

The complexity of the practice is striking: while going stealth is, pragmati- cally, a matter of protecting one’s physical and mental health, as well as social belonging and participation, from various modes of violence and discrimina- tion, it also requires the at least public affirmation of a binary and biunivocal model of sex and gender, where femaleness and feminitiy (or maleness and masculinity) mutually confirm one another so that femaleness-feminity and maleness-masculinity can mutually exclude one another. The transgender individual that goes stealth aims to pass as a man or woman within this nar- row and constraining model. In the 2020 documentary Disclosure, the actress Sandra Caldwell, once a member of the house of LaBeija memorialized in Paris Is Burning (Livingston 1991), talks about how she turned away from the ballroom scene because it drew attention to her nonnormative gender:

I would never think for a moment that I was the only one. And you wanna go, and you wanna say, “Girl, ain’t we somethin’?” But, nah, you just left it alone. I wish I could’ve. Man, wouldn’t that have been good. [. . .] What I had learned from the world of the balls, you know, was being grand, and I pushed it all out, living in my new pronoun that I’ve... “stealth.” (Feder 2020)

Here, stealth is rhetorically treated as a pronoun—that is, arguably, as a matter of identification. This question regarding the relation between stealth and processes of identification will be occasionally taken up in this book. For now, though, it is important to note that going stealth is a protective strategy for the individual that can help reproduce the systemic heteronor- mative conditions of marginalization and exclusion against which the indi- vidual wishes to protect themself. “Living stealth was the way to survive,” the actress Laverne Cox confirms in the same documentary (Feder 2020). Here, as in many other of its occurrences, stealth is duplicitous—but not in the sense of “willful secrecy” or “conscious deception” that these terms can also invoke, as Beauchamp points out. The present account will explore the duplicity of stealth as a pragmatic technique for navigating the various dou- ble binds that marginalized individuals face. This relation between stealth and gender is explored further in chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9 draws on the queer theories of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kara Keeling, and José Mufioz to show that magical stealth can operate as a mode of queering the world with the express goal of undoing the metaphysical precepts that support processes of marginalization and the abjection of some existences. The second—vicious and vexing—example is the sexual practice called stealthing. It should be read as a clear departure and disjunction from the first example of “going stealth”; as an indication of the discursive malleability

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

8 Chapter 1

and indetermination of the term “stealth,” especially in terms of its social and political valuation. The legal scholar Alexandra Brodsky (2017, 183) has established that “stealthing” is a term used by perpetrators to name the practice of “nonconsensual condom removal.” In interviews with victims of stealthing, “both men and women describe having sex with male partners with penises who, during sex, removed the condom without their knowl- edge. Some realized their partner had removed the condom at the moment of repenetration; others did not realize until the partner ejaculated or, in one case, notified them the next morning” (185). From the perspective of the perpetrators, stealth is a tactic for reaffirming “male dominance” and “gender subordination” (204): “Online writers who practice or promote non- consensual condom removal root their actions in misogyny and investment in male sexual supremacy. While one can imagine a range of motivations for ‘stealthers’—increased physical pleasure, a thrill from degradation—online discussions suggest offenders and their defenders justify their actions as a natural male instinct—and natural male right. ... Men who stealth assault other men display similar rhetoric focused on a man’s ‘right’ to spread his seed—even when reproduction is not an option” (188-189).

Brodsky provides instructive (read: stomach-turning) quotations from online forums in which stealthers defend their practice. More instructive even in the context of this cultural theory of stealth are the very existence and necessity of Brodsky’s research: the legal scholar’s problem is precisely that the practice of nonconsensual condom removal is very hard to grasp in legal terms. It eludes all the available avenues for legal recourse and their defini- tions: Brodsky considers criminal law, tort law, [gender] civil rights options, and contract law, but she cannot get a legal hold on the practice. Her starting point and conclusion are that, in 2017 at least, US law could not apprehend stealthing. (Since the publication of Brodsky’s article in 2017, several coun- tries, as well as the state of California, have introduced legislation that covers stealthing.) It becomes clear that what can and cannot be perceived or appre- hended is conditioned by cultural and sociopolitical circumstances, conven- tions, and biases. More generally, then, it is not surprising that, given the biases in Western societies toward masculinity and whiteness, an inimical and assaultive instantiation of stealth—very different from practices of passing— should ally itself to a still-dominant self-conception of the “stealth-universal- white-man,” to paraphrase José Mufioz (2009, 94).? The relation between stealth and whiteness will be discussed in chapter 10. Through readings of

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth Parade 9

works by Crystal M. Fleming, Nella Larsen, Charles W. Mills, and Arun Sal- danha, chapter 10 shows how the digital mediations of stealth can reproduce whiteness as a social norm, in particular the logic by which whiteness tacti- cally disappears itself. The chapter argues that the more recent games in the Hitman series develop a camp aesthetic that allows the franchise to combine what Fleming (2018) calls the “racial stupidity” of its representational world with the “artificial stupidity” of its central game mechanic. This allows the game series to critically reflect on digital whiteness even as it reproduces it.

Of Stealth Viruses and Stealth Voters

Stealth is not only an aesthetic practice. It has also entered political dis- course. To grasp the roles that the notion of stealth plays in contemporary political culture, consider the discursive mobilization of the “stealth virus” and “stealth voters” by the administration of President Donald Trump.

Soon after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel corona- virus was described as a “stealth virus” because those who carry it are highly contagious before they show any signs of infection. In other words, it is because an infected person appears and feels healthy and thus participates in everyday activities that the virus can spread more efficiently. This is indeed a major public health issue: if people are contagious well before they show any symptoms, strategies of contact tracing and containment are bound to play catch-up. But a brief look at medical history can teach us that, in terms of stealthiness, the novel coronavirus pales in comparison to the pathogen that was originally labeled “the Stealth Virus.” The expression itself was coined around 1910, decades before this pathogen was identified and named “cyto- megalovirus (CMV),” a member of the family of herpesviruses (Griffiths 2012, ch. 1). CMV is a “stealth virus” because infected people do not show any symptoms under normal conditions—ever. Currently, “60 percent of adults in developed countries and 100 percent in developing countries” carry CMV (Griffiths 2012, prologue). Yet, as with other herpesviruses, the carriers rarely if ever experience any signs of illness. Its stealthiness is really what makes this virus so successful: CMV can spread among populations for decades with- out any individual showing any symptoms. The virus’s imperceptibility is an effect achieved through the careful evolutionary calibration of the virus to the human immune system. But then, how do we know about it? Well, the main reason why this virus is so well known today is that it is triggered or

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

10 Chapter 1

forced into action—in spite of itself, so to speak—in carriers with weakened immune systems. For instance, someone who has had an organ transplant will be given immunosuppressive drugs to prevent their body from rejecting the donor organ. But this suppression of the immune system also means that the virus’s evolutionary calibration is no longer appropriate. All of a sudden, the virus is too strong for the host’s immune system, so it starts to cause disease. In the context of this book, this is interesting because it con- firms that stealth has something to do with thresholds of perceptibility. The virus stops being “stealthy” when the threshold for its perceptibility in the host is artificially lowered by immunosuppressants. And it’s only then that the CMV’s carefully evolved stealthiness is disrupted. That is a stealth virus, and it is briefly introduced here to make the following point about the novel coronavirus: calling it a “stealth virus” may be less about articulating its precise pathology and more about making it serviceable to a political dis- course that values stealth and opacity in their own right. Indeed, when vari- ous political and social actors refer to the coronavirus as a “stealth virus” or “invisible enemy,” they pursue a number of discursive effects that weaponize the opacity of the coronavirus for the purposes of controversy.

On March 18, 2020, President Trump made a first effort to politicize the stealthiness of the coronavirus by referring to it as the “invisible enemy.” He tweeted: “T want all Americans to understand: we are at war with an invisible enemy, but that enemy is no match for the spirit and resolve of the American people...” (Trump 2020). This talking point was subsequently repeated by politicians around the world. In the early days of the pandemic, the notion of the “invisible enemy” helped justify the imposition of the first fifteen-day lockdown in the US and elsewhere. In a speech a day earlier, Trump repeat- edly mentioned the “fifteen days” of the lockdown and explicitly connected them to the “invisible enemy” (“Coronavirus Task Force Briefing Transcript” 2020). So because of the then-estimated incubation period of roughly ten to fifteen days, life as we knew it would have to be disrupted for fifteen days so everyone could protect themselves from the virus and stop it in its tracks. Even though that didn’t work as planned, the invisibility of the virus is here still discursively linked to its incubation period. It refers to the lack of trans- parent, reliable knowledge regarding a person’s pathological status right after infection.

But by the same token, it also refers to the political opacity of the virus. In the same speech, Trump said: “We have to fight that invisible enemy. I guess

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth Parade 11

‘unknown’ but we're getting to know it a lot better.” Jack Schafer argued in Politico that Trump pursued this rhetorical strategy partly to justify his earlier dismissal and political neglect of this clear and present danger to pub- lic health. This rhetoric serves the purpose of deflecting responsibility. The Trump administration’s insufficient response to the COVID-19 pandemic can supposedly be explained by the fact that the stealthy virus simply couldn’t be detected—that the enemy had the audacity of being invisible on top of everything else. This is, of course, a blatant lie cloaked in an obvious fact— namely, that viruses are invisible to the naked eye, the blatant lie being that, in spite of being somewhat stealthy, the virus had long been detected by the World Health Organization (WHO), which, in turn, had informed govern- ments in a timely manner.

But the notion of the “invisible enemy” is part of political discourse also to explain the lack of long-term strategies and to justify delays in political decision-making. This is partly due to viruses’ higher rate of evolution, which means that they can out-evolve human attempts at capturing them. For example, in the fall of 2021, newspapers reported the emergence of a “stealth variant” of the virus’s omicron variant. This variant was called “stealthy” because standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests could not reliably identify it as the more infectious omicron variant of the coronavirus; or dif- ferently put, it could not at first be distinguished from the delta variant. But actually, PCR tests could reliably identify the virus as SARS-CoV-2, just not which variant. That is why some science communicators have called the “stealth” label for this omicron variant a “misnomer” (Le Page 2022). But that makes it all the more urgent to ask what other reasons might motivate the use of the term “stealth.” Here, the term “stealth” no longer refers to the incubation period, but rather to the fact that the available testing technol- ogy is bound to lag the development of the virus itself. You can learn how to identify something only after it has begun to exist. So the notion of “stealth” here accounts for a more fundamental, processual unknowability of not only the virus, but the future more generally. Certain futures, especially contin- gencies, cannot be predicted. Here, “stealth” refers to the novel contingency that resists tech-based capture, and thus predictability.’

In combination with the talking point of “invisible enemy,” this stealth rhetoric associates invisibility or unknowability with hostile behavior. It sug- gests that the virus’s opacity is part and parcel of an offensive act against the American people. On April 5, 2020, Trump tweeted: “We are learning

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

12 Chapter 1

much about the Invisible Enemy. It is tough and smart, but we are tougher and smarter.” Designating the virus as a “smart” “enemy” thoroughly others it as an intentional threat: its intrusion into US territory becomes a willful act of attack rather than a matter of biological reproduction within a highly dense and mobile population of Homo sapiens. And, of course, that willful act is also hidden. Here, the invisibility or stealth of the virus acquires the inju- rious connotation of willful deception that Toby Beauchamp evokes. This also facilitates the war rhetoric that Trump promoted in his approach to the pandemic. This effect is compounded by the repeated association of the virus with China. Trump called SARS-CoV-2 the “Chinese virus” dozens of times, an association that further legitimized the militarization of the discourse around a public health crisis. This discursive triangle between the coronavi- rus, stealth, and China racialized the pathogen in a way that tapped into old and new discourses of anti-Chinese fearmongering. By casting the coronavi- rus as an outside threat from China, Trump’s rhetoric mobilized American “ideas of vulnerable sovereignty and xenophobia” (Chen 2012, 168).

In this complex entanglement of discursive strategies, the ascription of stealth lends itself to a politics of fear and even conspiracy thinking because it suggests that what one believes they see is not all there is to the story. In a culture that treats transparency as normative, discourses of stealth insinu- ate that a lack of knowledge results from the deliberate opposition to trans- parency. And this insinuation of stealthy behavior also intimates potential alternative explanations for certain events. Chapter 7 looks at the relation between stealth and conspiracy thinking to show that representations of stealth have their own ways of propagating alter-realities within our heavily media-based experience of the world.

Now compare all this to the way in which Fox News evoked the potential importance of “stealth voters” during the 2020 presidential campaign. “Are ‘stealth’ Trump supporters the president’s secret weapon to winning reelec- tion?” the news item suggestively, hopefully, asks (“Are ‘Stealth’ Trump Sup- porters the President’s Secret Weapon?” 2023). The question arises from Fox News’s shallow dive into a communication science paper that studied voters “who secretly voted for someone other than whom they publicly claimed to have voted for” (3). Aptly, the data cited by Fox News is perhaps the least revealing set of numbers provided in this paper: Out of a total of 558 [549] participating “stealth voters,” “27 percent [27 percent] secretly voted for Clinton, 54 percent [52 percent] secretly voted for Trump, and 19 percent

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth Parade 13

[21 percent] secretly voted for someone else” (4; the numbers in brackets are from a confirmatory study, those not in brackets are from the exploratory study; participants could only be part of one study, not both). Fox News picks up on the fact that the majority of those who lie about their vote voted for Trump. What the news item does not—and could not—mention, for lack of data, is how many “stealth voters” there actually are, for instance as a per- centage of the total voting population. This might be important to assessing the prowess of this “secret weapon to winning reelection,” might it not? Be that as it may, the item spins the overwhelming majority of Trump support- ers among 2016 “stealth voters” into a hopeful tale that allows the newsroom to relativize the importance of 2020 election polls that are less hopeful. Inci- dentally, Fox News already knew this in 2016 when it circulated Kellyanne Conway’s analysis, first offered on Fox & Friends, that Trump’s election was due also to a “small but potent force who kept their vote silent until it really counted,” dubbing them “undercover Trump supporters” back then (“Trump Campaign: ‘Undercover’ Supporters”). “Undercover supporter” in a 2016 postelection analysis; “stealth voter” in the frenzied runup to the 2020 elec- tion. The tone is certainly more conspiratorial in 2020, evoking the sense of a secret collective force, a sense of community and belonging. Specifically, the notion of stealth is discursively deployed to widen the perceived boundaries of one’s political in-group. Ultimately, though, this rhetoric deployment of stealth supports a divisive politics of polarization between “us” and “them.” The coda explores how collective stealth actions can foster a more productive sense of belonging. Through an engagement with the furtive graffiti bomb- ing of the TV series Homeland, the coda envisions how artful stealth can fos- ter an insistent sense of belonging across political and cultural differences.

Most striking, hopefully, is the contrast between the discourses of “stealth voters” and the “stealth virus.” The latter was discursively cloaked in stealth to conjure the image of a reprehensible foreign enemy, whereas the stealth vot- ers are evoked to encourage political sympathizers and inspire trust. The dis- cursive deployment of stealth is not exactly a free-for-all, but in this case, it is certainly a two-for-one. It can be deployed as an accusation against political adversaries and as a reassuring tale to maintain in-group solidarity. Stealth is a nimble middle term that spells both community and conspiracy.

These examples are offered as a first indication of what was earlier called the “currency” of stealth, understood as both the topicality of stealth in

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

14 Chapter 1

contemporary culture and the pragmatic purchase that a practice of stealth can have in that culture. Overall, this cultural theory of stealth takes media- based articulations of imperceptibility as its starting point and arrives at political questions of conspiracy, queerness, and whiteness in later chapters. This is the general hypothesis that this book explores: the notion of stealth, as articulated in a wide range of contemporary media and beyond, comprises a set of values and techniques that support the politically relevant project of managing and, in particular, reducing the perceptibility of oneself or one’s actions. Stealth is a mode of existence that is part of a politics of perception made necessary by a culture of increased technological surveillance. Indeed, chapter 2 proposes that the notion of stealth encompasses crucial aspects of what Colin Milburn calls the “technopolitics” of our digital times (2018, 7). The concept of technopolitics problematizes the ways in which life— including human life in its current geopolitical articulation—is thoroughly entangled with digital technology. The idea that technology and culture coevolve in the strong sense of that word is far from new and will be laid out in more detail through an engagement with the work of Gilbert Simondon in chapter 3.

What is new and specific to the history of the present are the singular ways in which technology and life coevolve to produce individual and collec- tive desires for stealth as a sociopolitical tactic across various political spectra. These starting points raise a number of questions: What are the “technopo- litical conditions” that make stealth desirable and necessary? When and how do they emerge? In what ways do these conditions constitute problems for life? These questions shall be answered through two brief genealogies of stealth.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

2 Digital Prehensions: Two Brief Genealogies of Stealth

Part 1: Digital Imperceptibilities

Stealth is what we want.

—The Americans, episode “Stealth”

Elizabeth and Philip Jennings are not their real names. Recruited at a young age into the KGB’s illegals program, they were groomed to infiltrate US society and then settled in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in 1965. Having fore- sworn their existence to the motherland, these two spies perform the liberal American suburbanite couple according to diktat: they produce two children, run a small travel agency as a family business, and maintain friendly ties with their neighbors and community. By night, they chase deserters and counter- spies or steal valuable information. The Americans (FX, 2013-2018) follows the lives of the Jennings from shortly after President Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration until 1987, exploring various aspects of espionage during the Cold War era in a total of six seasons. In the second season, which is of inter- est here, the Jennings are tasked to obtain information on a Stealth aircraft developed by two competing American companies, Northrop and Lockheed.

One of the achievements of The Americans consists in its processual undoing of mutual exclusions. From the very beginning, everything and its opposite are thoroughly embroiled. It begins with the title: Who are “the Americans”? Does the title refer to the unwitting targets of the Jennings sub- terfuges, or to the moles on US territory themselves? The series is inspired by the 2010 discovery and arrest of eleven Russian sleeper agents. For over a decade, these spies—“directed to gather information on nuclear weap- ons, American policy toward Iran, [Central Intelligence Agency] leadership,

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

16 Chapter 2

Congressional politics and many other topics’”—had lived “in American cit- ies and suburbs from Seattle to New York, where they seemed to be ordinary couples working ordinary jobs, chatting to the neighbors about schools and apologizing for noisy teenagers” (Shane and Savage 2010). Of course, they were found out. Dig deep enough, and it might just be possible to tell who is friend and who is foe. Yet in everyday life, the difference was for all intents and purposes indiscernible: all-American enemies. What’s more, the differ- ence left many indifferent. As former CIA agent-cum-series creator Joe Weis- berg states: “People were both shocked and simultaneously shrugged at the [2010] scandal because it didn’t seem like we were really enemies with Russia anymore. An obvious way to remedy that for television was to stick it back in the Cold War. At first, the ’70s appealed to me just because I loved the hair and the music. But can you think of a better time than the ’80s with Ronald Reagan yelling about the evil empire?” (Waxman 2013). Both Russian spy and surburban spouse, simultaneously shocked and shrugging it off: it is this entanglement of apparent contraries in our present political culture that the The Americans thinks through. To do that, the series—somewhat counterin- tuitively perhaps—uses the Cold War era for one principal effect: contrast. To a political culture that can shrug off a shock, the Cold War with its most clear-cut ideological divisions serves as a starting point for thinking through what it means that supposed ideological contraries begin to permeate one another. The Jennings in their suburban idyll are, as they repeatedly insist, at war. Another distinction that The Americans thoroughly muddies, then, is between military and civilian zones, between war and peace. “When the civil is no longer clearly demarcated from the military, nor offense from defense, it becomes impossible to say where the exercise of force begins and ends” (Massumi 2015a, 68). And indeed, the most formidable adversary that in turn has already infiltrated the Jennings is what, for purposes of contrast, one might call the American way of life. What was thought to be of the enemy, kept at ideological bay, is already constitutive of oneself. The most starkly contrarious terms are already mutually included in the individual’s process of subjectivation. In short, then, The Americans projects a political theory for the present into the Cold War era to propose that, even at a moment in history when official doctrine could hardly be stricter about categorical oppositions, these categories are already undone by the complex unfolding of a full-spectrum political process that subsumes everyday life. Or perhaps one could say that, for The Americans, our long contemporary moment in political culture begins in the 1980s.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 17

An important moment of mutual inclusion that provides the impetus for this historical apercu is prepared, as was said, in season 2: one of the Jennings’ crucial tasks is to steal information related to the entirely new, highly classi- fied Stealth technology that two private companies, Lockheed and Northrop, are developing in collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In addition, the second season of The Americans accords a noteworthy role to the video games of the early home console era, as well as the forerunner of the internet, ARPANET. Moreover, the series goes to some aesthetic lengths—to be unpacked and engaged with shortly—to slide the histories of stealth technology and video games into one narrative of the technopolitics of our time. Here, some nonfictionalized historical background information may be helpful.

In the 1970s, the US Department of Defense made an important strate- gic shift. After the bitter lessons of the Vietnam War, as well as the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, “military planners moved to offset the costs associated with heavy losses of both materials and men with technological capability” (Pan- dya 2010, 139). This was particularly urgent as Americans were troubled by the fact that the Soviet Union was vastly outspending the US on defense, resulting in about “three times as many tanks, artillery [pieces], and armored personnel carriers as [the US] had” (139). In the episode “New Car” (Weisberg and Ackerman 2014), a disgusted Elizabeth Jennings watches a TV broad- cast of President Reagan explaining this problem at the 1982 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC): “The Soviet Union outspends us on defense by 50 percent, an amount equal to 15 percent of their gross national product. During the campaign I was asked any number of times: If I was faced with the choice of balancing the budget or restoring our national defenses, what would I do? Every time I said restore our defenses and every time I was applauded. [The audience applauds.|” While the necessary funds were made available, it was also clear that “fighting plane for plane . . . had become too expensive” (Pandya 2010, 139). In other words, US defense strategy sought to shift away from a notion of symmetrical arms race and warfare (“plane for plane”) and pursued a qualitatively different, asymmetrical approach: the development of aircrafts that could travel without being observed and that could thus avoid force-on-force combat. In this way, the political desire for action below the threshold of the perceptible reoriented technological devel- opment toward problems of tech-based imperceptibility.

Significantly, the solution was found by means of digital technology. Previously used mainly in digital avionics systems that substitute for the

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

18 Chapter 2

mechanical steering of the plane, in the Stealth project digital technology was for the first time mobilized on a large scale to design a plane’s exte- rior. Specifically, digital technology made possible the complex calculations required to determine the surface properties of a plane’s exterior that ensure minimal radar signatures so the aircraft would become all but imperceptible to the enemy’s radar technology. This focus on technical objects and opera- tions perceiving one another constitutes, as Peter Westwick has established in great detail, a qualitative shift in “design philosophy” away from ques- tions of materials and aerodynamics to new design principles concerned with shape and radar signature (2020, 49; for context, see 48-54). In turn, the new experiments with shape and the resulting complexity of the aircraft’s flight behavior also made digital control systems or “fly-by-wire” urgently neces- sary. This produced a further entanglement between Stealth and video game technology as a “corollary of the rise of fly-by-wire was a dependence on flight simulators” (2020, 86). As Sega’s 1970 release of Jet Rocket (1970) and Taito’s 1975 launch of Interceptor show, flight simulators were one of the first military technologies that were adopted in a simplified manner for digital entertainment media and were one way in which this computation-based technics entered the culture at large.

Over the 1970s and 1980s, Lockheed developed several prototypes that resulted in the stealth fighter F-117 Nighthawk, first widely—and successfully— used in the Gulf War of 1991: “Thousands of missions were flown and targets destroyed, without a single plane being shot down” (Pandya 2010, 144). Over the same period, Northrop developed the B-2 “stealth bomber.” In service as of 1997, the B-2 was first used in combat in 1999 during the Kosovo War and was still operational at the time of writing. It is worth noting, then, that the technology that the Jennings are trying to steal in 1982 on The Americans only begins to transform military operations and will influence geopolitics about a decade later, reaching all the way into the present. And these transforma- tions were remarkable. As the US general Buster Glossen put it: “The single most important accomplishment of the F-117 during the Gulf War, however, was that it saved thousands and thousands of lives. Very close behind is the fact that it revolutionized the way we’re going to fight wars in the future, and the way people think about wars” (quoted in Pandya 2010, 144). That said, stealth planes were notorious long before then, especially for being a badly kept secret. US toy stores began to sell model versions of stealth planes in 1986, two years before the airplanes were officially declassified and announced

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 19

by government officials (Pandya 2022). Fittingly, Pandya calls stealth planes “the peacocks of the Cold War aviary,” confirming once more that stealth is often curiously conspicuous, that imperceptibility is spectacular (2022, 220). Broadening this assessment, this book contends that the concerns and technology surrounding Stealth can help us understand certain aspects of contemporary political culture, also and especially as articulated by con- temporary entertainment media. In this broader context, it is important to note that the preoccupation with digital war technology in The Americans cannot be separated from the preoccupation with digital or video games and ARPANET. Instead, the series suggests, these new digital technologies are part of a larger technical assemblage that enables a heterogeneous set of techno- logical and social practices. Put differently, a genealogy of contemporary political culture also passes—surely among many other factors missing from the present account—through a broad “technosocial assembling” around matters of perceptibility (Lamarre 2018, 7-29; emphasis added). That is a first, gen- eral way of stating how Stealth has changed “the way people think about wars.” The episode “New Car” provides a crucial sequence for this genealogi- cal entanglement: Henry Jennings, the unwitting son of the spies Elizabeth and Philip, visits his neighborhood friend Doug Tanner, who has an Intel- livision home console. Together, they play Astrosmash, a 1981 game from Mattel in which the player operates a laser cannon to destroy Earthbound targets from space. When the Tanners go on vacation, Henry, who knows where the Tanners keep their spare key—it’s the 1980s—and can’t resist the lure of the gaming console abandoned in his friend’s home, repeat- edly enters the Tanners’ house until, on the day the Tanners return from their vacation, he falls asleep in front of the TV set and gets caught. At this exact moment, the sequence cuts to the Russian Rezidentura in Washing- ton, where two Russian spies are busy playing a video game on their work computer, intrigued and overwhelmed by the novelty of the whole thing: “Do I shoot the helicopters or the men?” (Digital interfaces are challeng- ing.) They promptly get caught and interrupted by the Rezident, the head of KGB operatives in the Russian embassy, and are ordered back to work. How odd: in the middle of the season, the problematics of stealth and counterespionage contract around what the series itself presents as fairly innocuous gaming devices. Moreover, it suggests that the very use of such devices necessitate practices of infiltration and secrecy—namely, Henry’s breaking-and-entering-and-playing and the Rezidentura employees’ furtive

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

20 Chapter 2

Figures 2.1 and 2.2 Henry asleep in front of the gaming console, caught by the returning neighbors.

Stills from The Americans, episode “New Car” (Weisberg and Ackerman 2014).

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 21

+ : ae? Ay ok IRE

tt HI-SCORE: 1201

shelicopters or the men?

Figures 2.3 and 2.4 Russian spies having fun with a video game at the Rezidentura. Stills from The Ameri- cans, episode “New Car” (Weisberg and Ackerman 2014).

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

22 Chapter 2

enjoyment of their video game. Granted, the games that they play are by no means the kinds of stealth games under scrutiny in later chapters of this book. At best, they prefigure what would later be called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars.” But the juxtaposition of these two instances of video gaming generates further insightful contrasts understood as instances of “mutual inclusion of what under other circumstances tends to separate out” (Massumi 2015b, 69).

Besides the obvious contrast between the Americans and the Russians, there is the contrast between the Rezidentura office as a professional envi- ronment and the living room as a domestic space. The illicit use of digi- tal entertainment technology clearly exists in both settings. Yet, while the Russian spies are interrupted and their gaming activity is promptly dismissed as childish and thus out of place in the workspace, the American living room provides a setting for the confluence of digital technology, entertainment, warfare, and stealth. When Henry stealthily gains access to Astrosmash, it’s as if he’s already performing, perhaps intuitively, the political culture and cultural politics of a new era. This is further compounded by a certain gen- erational contrast: the adult Russian spies, with all their knowledge of power and politics, seem to consider their video game a curious plaything that is easily discarded, whereas Henry, a child of digital culture, knows that the lure of the digital can be answered by means of subterfuge and imperceptibility— at least until one falls asleep in front of the TV, presumably exhausted from gaming. Digital technology is powerful and can get in the way. In any case, the important point, then, is that The Americans pulls video game, network, and stealth technologies into the same technocultural complex, and this complex as a whole is characterized by practices of subterfuge and stealth. For The Americans, digital technologies and their operational principles in general are necessary conditions that enable the reorientation of technopoli- tics toward stealth.

Operational Principles of Stealth

In the following chapters, this book explores the technopolitics of stealth from the perspective of contemporary media culture and, in particular, video games. Much will be said that does not apply or only partially applies to the specific Stealth military project. Yet, here at the beginning, it is worth high- lighting some of the core operational principles that digital technoculture

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 23

enables and that inflect it toward matters of perceptibility. Put differently, what are these new and supposedly revolutionary ways in which people think about war and, more broadly, politics and political culture?

In Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life, Colin Milburn explores modes of life that have emerged with digital technologies. Following and extrapolating from this study of hacking culture, it can be said that two crucial principles of contemporary technopolitics are occlusion and intrusion (2018, 33-35). Of course, Stealth took occlusion as its very premise: conventional performance measures for aircraft such as speed, altitude, range, maneuver- ability, and payload—which all have their own strategic advantages—were subordinated to the key measure of observability. Similarly, hacking culture partially defines itself through a strong resistance to practices of surveillance and tracking. Obscurity is not only an important condition of possibility for the success of a hacking attack; it also becomes a mode of cultural expres- sion. Think of the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta, the graphic novel and film, which became the emblem of the Anonymous collective. Hiding, masking, dissimulating—in an era of massive surveillance, these practices are also expressive of cultural concerns more broadly. The sticker that you may have placed across your laptop’s built-in webcam can count as a case in point: clearly, contemporary technoculture needs a low-tech, analog down- shift for people to feel safe—and sometimes a cut-to-size sticky note will do. One might object that the latter is a means of defense rather than offense, but that is secondary for now. More important, the principle of occlusion is worth noting because it undermines values that are central to political theories of Western modernity, most importantly transparency and represen- tation (in both the political and aesthetic acceptations of those terms). The ramifications are significant. As chapter 6 explores in more detail, sanctioned political process in Western democracies is conventionally grounded in an understanding of citizen as subjects who appear in the public sphere to defend their interests; to this end, political subjects elect representatives who act as mediators for their constituents; political deliberation is held to be rational and transparent so representatives can be held accountable. Now imagine a political process that tries to circumvent as many of these italicized notions as possible. What would that look like? And sound like? And play like? One of the guiding questions of this study is indeed how digital media contribute to the articulation of a political culture that deviates from conventional and fundamental democratic principles. This media aesthetic of stealth will be

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

24 Chapter 2

explored in dialogue with critical thinking that already champions occlusion as a Strategic and tactical advantage. For example, the following chapters will look to the Tiqqun collective and its proclamation that “to be perceived is to be defeated” (2010, 214). A similar proposal can be found in the Invisible Committee’s To Our Friends: “Let's disappear,” they enjoin (2015, 131).

But stealth is not only about occlusion, in which case it could be mistaken for a secretive defense strategy akin to classifying documents. Stealth implies a mode of secrecy that maintains high levels of actionability. Stealth in this sense is utterly offensive: it enables a continuous secretive forward move- ment toward the enemy. Or, more to the point, the movement is directed inward as the term “intrusion” suggests. In a nutshell, stealth is about cre- ating and maintaining an unwelcome and efficacious presence in a hostile environment without being perceived. In the case of Stealth aircraft, the goal was for aircraft and missiles to penetrate enemy territory for purposes of reconnaissance and combat. When digital technologies support capitalist models of property, as well as data extraction and management, matters of territory also impose themselves: Who is allowed access to which data and information circuits? Hence the massive investments in network securitiza- tion and antimalware software. And, of course, these proprietary enclosures of digital infrastructures generated resistance from hacking communities and their particular ethos. As the hacker St. Jude explains, this ethos is also a matter of intrusion: “Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics” (quoted in Milburn 2018, 27). This statement also indicates another technopolitical condition of the digital era to be explored in more depth—namely, the potentially tremendous asymmetry between adversaries (Brunton and Nissembaum 2015, 48-49). A teenager in his base- ment can, or could in the recent past, successfully take on (and down) the tech infrastructure of national governments or large corporations. As late as 2010, Sony aggressively pursued and sued the hacker George Hotz (aka geo- hot) for managing to jailbreak the Playstation 3 and sharing that knowledge (Milburn 2018, 115-118).

Occlusion and intrusion: together, these two create the hair-raising suspi- cion that the enemy may already be here, among us, within us, and we don’t even know it. Instead of relying on clearly demarcated territories with their reliable sets of values, we have to consider that we have already been infil- trated. One effect of admitting the mutual inclusions that stealth produces is

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 25

paranoia, as when Philip and Elizabeth Jennings begin to mistrust each other because they have been infiltrated by the American way of life. As the discus- sion of stealth viruses and voters in the introduction showed, this anxiogenic potential of stealth itself can be stealthily employed in political discourse.

Part 2: A Manifold of Prehensions

This is a Google Ngram, which, in this case, indicates how often the word “stealth” has been used in the corpus of English texts searchable on Google Books (see fig. 2.5). There are two graphs: a lower one for “Stealth,” with a capital “S,” and an upper one for the uncapitalized “stealth.” The lower graph for “Stealth” can be considered to roughly refer to the specific DARPA research project presented in the previous section. The upper graph for “stealth” refers to all other uses of the term stealth in the available corpus. It should be said right away that the reliability of the data visualized in Google Ngrams is limited for a number of reasons (Pechenick, Danforth, and Dodds 2015). The argument will curve back to this point. This said, if the graphic is taken at face value for a moment and read accordingly, several things are worth noting. With an eye to the recent past, we can notice that the use of the term has increased since around 1980. But while references to the DARPA

Google Books Ngram Viewer Q_ Stealthstealth x @

1800-2019 ~ English (2019)~ —Case-Insensitive Smoothing of 3 ~

0.000200% ~ 0.000180% ~ 0.000160%- o.o00140%.- stealth 0.000120%~ 0.000100%~ 0.000080". - 0.000060". - 0.000040% ~

Stealth

0.000020% -

0.000000% 7

800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000

(clk ontinerabel or focus)

Figure 2.5

Google Ngram Viewer for the terms “stealth” and “Stealth.” Note the considerable increase of both terms since the 1980s. The capitalized “Stealth” refers to the specific US defense program focused on Stealth technology. Retrieval date: January 11, 2020.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

26 Chapter 2

project “Stealth” start increasing in the 1970s and then decline and plateau from the 1990s onward, the term “stealth” has consistently gained in use.” That is, the notion of stealth has detached itself from its genealogical pro- genitor and taken on a cultural life of its own. How is this to be explained?

The previous sections of this chapter emphasized the role of digital tech- nology in practices of stealth to prepare the following proposition: digital technology perceives us, and its perceptive capacities far exceed those of human beings themselves. This second genealogy will unpack this proposi- tion and suggest that “stealth” is the term used to describe a mode of sub- jectivation under conditions of digital hyperperceptivity. Note that already stealth needn’t be thought as a cultural reaction against or resistance to sur- veillance technology, as was briefly suggested in chapter 1. If anything, stealth is a technocultural mode of subjectivation of digital surveillance techno- culture. And its concern is perception. Or, to be more specific: prehension.

The process philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead writes: “Actuality is through and through togetherness” (1967b, 174). Things in the world are noth- ing without the relations that brought and hold them together. This line of thought is becoming more convincing in recent decades because we are beginning to understand our ecological entanglement with the world. But it is a line of thought that much of modern philosophy struggles with. What Whitehead calls the “materialist view,” dominant in modern science and philosophy, insists on strict separations between matter and mind (or soul), giving each the status of a fundamentally distinct substance (17, 55). This amounts to a “bifurcation of nature” into a nature that is pure, uncreative matter and a nature that is perceptive, mental, and creative. In this view, where the world and the mind are a collection of separate and essentially different entities, it is difficult to take full account of the relations between things, such as the relation between human industrial activity and transfor- mations of the climate. For centuries, the materialist view has needed to be shocked out of its arelational quagmire by new observational insights into the fact of relationality. How, then, does one begin to think differently, in a manner that accounts for relationality?

One can start from the idea that what brings things together is process. All actual reality, altogether, issues from the past and feeds forward into the future. This is because, instead of being a mere collection of separate things, the actual world continuously generates itself by virtue of prehensions, a “taking account of” certain aspects of the world to form a unity of process

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 27

(Whitehead 1967, 42, 69). Following Whitehead, such a prehension must first of all be thought outside the materialist bifurcation of nature. As the philosopher Stamatia Portanova points out, “It is important to note here the nonanthropomorphic nature of prehension as a nonhuman affective response and as the immanent affective ground of all physical and conceptual experiences: the stone prehends the water it falls into. Every step prehends the other, and can never be physically separated from the other” (11). That is, a relational and creative grasping of the world is not the privilege of human intellect or even of animals. Process is a matter of things—say, air molecules, a computer, light, the weather, an idea, a memory, a Whitehead book, these words—tegistering one another and taking account of one another in the further processual elaboration of their existence. “A prehension is a process of unifying” different aspects of the world into actual fact: “The actual world is a manifold of prehensions” (Whitehead 1967b, 71).

This series of manifold prehensions is produced by “the one underlying activity of realisation individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes” (Whitehead 1967b, 70). Such a process, of course, cannot realize every potentiality into actual fact; the work of realization is precisely to unify those aspects of the world that can be organized from within the ongoing “interlocked plurality” of process and fit into the wiggle room for creativity that process holds forth. Following Luciana Parisi, we can speak of a “process of selection [that] is driven by prehensions, which can also be defined as modes of computing data from other actual entities” (Parisi 2013, 62).> The crucial point—the very point of substituting the term “prehension” for “perception”—is that a prehension does not accord an ontological primacy to any position within a prehensive constellation, such as to a human per- ceiver or agent. Here, ontological primacy goes to the encompassing unity of prehension itself. As Whitehead (1967, 72) says: “The [awkward] term [pre- hension] was introduced to signify the essential unity of an event, namely, the event as one entity, and not as a mere assemblage of parts or of ingre- dients. It is necessary to understand that space-time is nothing else than a system of pulling together of assemblages into unities. But the word event just means one of these spatio-temporal unities. Accordingly, it may be used instead of the term ‘prehension’ as meaning the thing prehended.”

What acts—by virtue of its very own prehensive unity—is the event itself. In light of this, the world appears as a plurality of interlocked processes that inform—or process—one another by way of prehensions. This is another way

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

28 Chapter 2

of stating Portanova’s point: “processing” is something that not only techni- cal objects do, but all actual entities in the world. Everything is in process or being processed, including humans: “The human user is no longer the opera- tor of an inflexible machine of calculation, but has become a component or trigger of sequential operations” (Parisi 2013, 28). As machines and humans process each other, their mutual prehension into units of process constitute what Whitehead calls moments of “concrescence” in the literal sense of the word: a growing together.* Following Whitehead, then, the term prehension is adopted “to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things” (1978, 52; emphasis added).

“Stealth” is the term chosen here for one way in which humans and digi- tal technology have grown together. Thus, such a relational and processual understanding of reality is important to an evaluation of stealth because the notion of stealth implies an increased and intensified awareness of the world’s “prehensity,” defined here as the ability to prehend and be prehended; that is, to be taken up in moments of concrescence.‘ Digital technology has made us newly aware that human activity registers in the world and feeds into worldly processes, like it or not. Often, one likes it not. And the reason for that is that one does not understand how one’s being prehended feeds into further developments of worldly processes. Hence, the desire for stealth. Put differently, one does not understand the new unities of process that have emerged above or below human prehensive abilities. And yet one must live with them. That is, one must process these processes in turn. The central question raised in this book can be formulated in these terms: How do we culturally process the new technological processes enabled by digital prehen- sity? And, as is clear by now, the partial answer provided in this account can be grasped by the term “stealth.” Now, to unpack all that.

As shown in the previous section, stealth planes rely on the digital for the sake of generating imperceptibility, in this case the imperceptibility of one technical object, the plane, for another technical object, radar. The digi- tal has the power to prehend and process an entity’s power to prehend and process the ambient world. Moreover, the digital has the power to technolog- ically transform the prehensity of certain parts of the world. This introduces a problematic asymmetry into prehensive relations insofar as the stealth plane downright cancels out the purpose of the radar and thus transforms what the enemy comes to perceive as reality. Indeed, following Whitehead,

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 29

it can be said that the relation between the stealth plane and the radar is one of negative prehension: “An actual entity has a perfectly definite bond with each item in the universe. This determinate bond is its prehension of that item. A negative prehension is the definite exclusion of that item from positive contribution to the subject’s own real internal constitution [or con- crescence]” (Whitehead 1978, 41).° Put differently, to come into itself, every process must also exclude certain aspects of experience from constituting its subjective form. This exclusion is an important productive contribution to the way in which processes play out. The example of the stealth plane makes this clear: the planes’ surface is meticulously engineered for the radar—it is a bond—so that the plane’s presence is excluded from the radar’s processing of the world. Similarly, one could say that an animal in mimicry or camouflage has developed a relation to the surrounding world that actively subtracts its presence from contributing to other entities’ subjective experience of the world, such as that of a predator. This is the strange relationality of stealth: one actively engages with certain entities in the world to subtract one’s exis- tence, or aspects thereof, from that entity’s experience of the world. Both examples point to a thorough and intensive relational engagement with the surrounding world. This dynamic of positive and negative prehensions is not only at the heart of the digital’s debut in aircraft design; it is also analogous to the cultural politics of perception summarized in the term “stealth”: the rapid adoption of digital technology in almost all aspects of human activity requires individual and collective behavior to process digital prehensity in turn—be it through the sticky note on your webcam or the General Data Protection Regulation. A strategic cornerstone in this process is the produc- tion of negative prehensions, the active elimination of worldly elements of process from subjective experience. In this genealogical perspective, then, stealth is an effect of technoculture; that is, an effect of technology and culture evolving together, insofar as this coevolution has accentuated the tendency of experience to subtract from existence. (There will be more on coevolution in chapter 3, but first the more concrete part.)

To articulate the prehensive dynamic that both constitutes stealth and creates the cultural desire for stealth through concepts of technoculture and theories of the digital, it can be said that stealth consists in the conjunction of surveillance capitalism and ubiquitous computing. Simply put, the con- cept of surveillance capitalism implies the overwhelming positive prehensity

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

30 Chapter 2

of the digital, while ubiquitous computing implies that this surveillance is often carried out surreptitiously (in the mode of negative prehension). Following Shoshana Zuboff’s account, surveillance capitalism exploits behavioral sur- plus, that is, it extracts value from the “behavioral by-products” that “trail[] every online action” (2019, 68). Initially, “these behavioral by-products were haphazardly stored and operationally ignored” (67). That is, before it was understood as valuable—or as a “difference that makes a difference,” to use Gregory Bateson’s (2000, 315) definition of a bit of information—behavioral surplus data existed as pure excess, “data exhaust,” information that doesn’t inform (Zuboff 2019, 67).

Google was leading in the realization that this barrel of exhaust data could be turned into a treasure chest for predictive computing. Surveillance capi- talism thus begins with the realization that the excessive prehensity of the digital is not just waste, but has value to the extent that it can inform (i.e., make a difference for) capitalist processes. Excess over what, though? That is the important question for understanding the “asymmetries of power and knowledge” at stake here (Zuboff 2019, 81). Behavioral surplus was in excess of what humans could perceive without technological prehensions and thus also make sense of; thus in excess of what humans deemed worthy of pro- cessing for its potential import for human activity. Once discovered, this asymmetry between perceiver and perceived was not treated as a convenient side effect but turned into an integral part of Big Tech’s business model (Brun- ton and Nissenbaum 2015, 48-53). If, according to Google’s Amir Patel, the company was to become a “broad sensor of human behavior,” then this sen- sor itself had to be imperceptible. In Zuboff’s words:

Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. .. . In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends. ... The last thing that Google wanted was to reveal the secrets of how it had rewritten its own rules and, in the process, enslaved itself to the extraction imperative. Behavioral surplus was necessary for revenue, and secrecy would be necessary for the sustained accumulation of behavioral surplus. . . . Hiding was not a post hoc strategy; it was baked into the cake that would become surveillance capitalism. (2019, 88-89)

As companies like Google feast on behavioral excess data, they have an inter- est in preserving the impression that their treasure trove is really just a fog of “data exhaust” for those from whom it is extracted. The broad sensor must prehend positively and be prehended negatively, let alone comprehended.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 31

Ubiquitous computing is a euphemism for this obfuscation of the digital’s processing of human activity. The term might initially be taken in the oppo- site sense since “ubiquity” suggests ever-presentness, and presentness might be mistaken for presentation. But, as Luciana Parisi points out, “the arrival of ubiquitous computing” must be understood as “the withdrawal of mediatic action to the background of perception and direct experience” (2013, 27). Yet human activity is therefore no less entangled with digital processes of algo- rithmic computation. “According to Weiser, ubiquitous computing changes not only the locations of digital machines but also the use of such machines. The human user no longer activates computation, but is now incorporated in the programming system, as she or he can now indirectly profit from the computational capacities hidden in mundane objects. . . . This stealthy intru- sion of algorithmic programmability into distinct ordinary objects” allows for the backgrounding not only of how and what the broad sensor prehends but also when and where, for instance in a smart home (28).

Even lightbulbs are in touch with Google these days. Thus, one might say pessimistically, we are a bit like radar to a stealth plane: oblivious to intru- sions into and prehensions of our existence by the digital. Except, of course, that we know all of this, at least generally. And that is crucial. One important note to make regarding negative prehensions is that they are integrated into experience: “The negative prehension of an entity is a positive fact with its emotional subjective form” (Whitehead 1978, 41-42, see also 219; see Parisi 2013, 185-193). That is, our experience of the world is also an experience of active exclusion and that which has been actively excluded. For example, toxic environments, though they rarely betray their toxicity on the surface, can be so heavy because they are thick with experiences of what is continu- ously disallowed to exist in them. So, even though the “ubiquitous apparatus operates through coercion and stealth,” and even though we may not know exactly what information digital technology perceives and processes, we very much experience that there is an asymmetry in prehensity, which in turn is imbricated with circuits of economic and political power (Zuboff 2019, 253). While these transversal relations between technology, economy, and politics are not themselves the focus of subsequent chapters, it is important to state here that digital technology has allowed for an intensified political and eco- nomic investments in matters of perception. The general knowledge of and disappointment in these vested interests make the hyperprehensity of the digital world seem suspect.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

32 Chapter 2

For example, discourses of the so-called smart city heavily rely on infra- structures of ubiquitous computing that strategically distribute positive and negative prehensions. As Adam Greenfield points out, “the average pedes- trian” in a smart city “is at best only liminally aware of the presence or the operation of these sensors” of the smart city (2017, 36-37): “With the excep- tion of [closed-circuit TV] cameras—most of which are very much meant to be seen—these devices are not of any particularly obvious telltale shape. Some are literally embedded in the walls; others are sealed away beneath the street surface, with nothing more than the occasional shiny seam in the pav- ing or the Day-Glo annotations of utility personnel to betray their presence.” Thus, smart city networks are reliant upon the creation of negative prehen- sions for their basic functioning and thus risk evolving into what Julian Oli- ver in a related context calls “stealth infrastructure” (2014). (There will be more on smart city discourses in chapter 4.)

The Ngram from the beginning of this chapter can count as another example. It is extremely prehensive, in that it grasps the minutest of changes in frequency. The noncapitalized “stealth” made up 0,0000269567 percent of Google’s English-language corpus for 1980 and rose to 0,0001403942 percent in 2017. Granted, that is more than a fivefold increase. But how reliable is this historical graph if we consider that the visualization tool indiscrimi- nately grasps information from an immense hodgepodge of heterogeneous sources—for instance, fiction and research literature—whose distribution within the overall corpus also changes considerably over time (Pechenick et al. 2015)? So how does this information inform? What did statistical com- putation have to actively exclude to produce the entity of the Ngraph that we are meant to consider valuable information? It’s hard to tell, by design.

The overall result of these developments is a general distrust of prehension itself. Thus, the situation becomes culturally problematic, for both individuals and societies, in a way that cannot at present be resolved, as ongoing tensions around privacy regulations and data extraction demonstrate. So what does one do? One begins to manage how one is prehended, selectively withdraw- ing and exposing oneself in an attempt to prevent unwelcome intrusions.

The unresolved problem of prehensity that digital technoculture poses comes to cultural expression in what is called here the aesthetic of stealth. In a world of information asymmetry, stealth as a means of obfuscating one’s indi- vidual data traces can be, to follow Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, a weapon of the weak (2015, 56-58). As the following chapters of this book will

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Digital Prehensions 33

show, stealth as a concept and practice articulates a process of subjectivation that aims at the selective making and unmaking of one’s own information signature. But, importantly, stealth is not simply a reactive resistance to sur- veillance. It is, to rejoin the stealth parade from the introduction, showcased and celebrated in technoculture itself. The brief example of Hunted from chap- ter 1 illustrated that aesthetic expressions of stealth come to directly value this mode of subjectivation as an affordance of digital technoculture. The example of stealthing or nonconsensual condom removal evidences the offensive and aggressive power fantasies that are also articulated through to the notion of stealth. That is to say, even though the currency of stealth issues from planes and digital technology, it has maintained itself by propagating and taking on wider cultural importance. Stealth is, as was suggested earlier, an effect of tech- nology and culture coevolving. It is an aspect of technoculture’s ambiance.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

3 Stealth: A Coevolution of Technology and Culture

Human and technological prehensity could be deemed “incompatible” or “jncommensurable” based on the argument presented in chapter 2. But they are better thought of as belonging to different modes of existence, or general ways of being in the world. The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon distin- guishes between different and disparate modes of existence with their auton- omous processes of individuation: physical, living, psychic, technical. Each mode comes with its own immanent processual parameters that distinguish how an individual—a crystal, a worm, a human, a machine—comes into existence and continues to individuate (Simondon 2017, 2020). For exam- ple, an important processual parameter for the individuation of the living is the maintenance of metabolic homeostasis. According to Simondon, this is not a processual parameter for psychic individuation, although psychic individuation depends on the living being that supports it, of course. Indeed, aside from describing the different forms of individuation, an achievement of Simondon’s philosophy is his description of how these modes of existence relate to each other. That is also the topic of this chapter. Stealth, understood as the cultural desire for and practices of imperceptibility, arises from the differential between psychic and technical modes of existence as they act on each other. This chapter addresses the question of how this relation is to be thought more generally as a motor of cultural developments. Furthermore, it strives to articulate this relation for the particular case of video games, which constitute one important technology through which this book thinks the aesthetics of stealth. Since the remainder of this book will concentrate on the cultural—and thus transindividually psychic—development of stealth, the overall focus here shall be on technical individuation. But for the purposes of contrast, a short sketch of psychic individuation is in order.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

36 Chapter 3

From the processual and evolutionary viewpoint that Simondon takes, psychic individuation is an achievement of living individuation that allows life to individuate in more complex and creative ways. Instead of following the parameters of living individuation, psychic individuation invents cogni- tive schemata and higher-order processes that ultimately allow it to conceive and actualize alternative ways of relating to the world, for instance through technology.! “Foresight,” “creative imagination,” and conceptual “thought” are some of the important aspects of psychic individuation that allow humans to prehend a larger scope of abstract potentials for how the world can grow together (Simondon 2017, 60). To put it in the terms introduced in chapter 2, one achievement of psychic individuation is that it introduces higher degrees of abstraction into the world’s process of concrescence and thereby potentializes them.

The mode of existence of a technical object is quite different. Simon- don’s starting point is the observation that “the operation of a machine harbors a certain margin of indeterminacy,” which “allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information”; “it is this sensitivity”—or prehensity— “to information on the part of machines that makes a technical ensemble possible” (2017, 17). This openness is the key to coindividuation because it “presuppose[s]” the human as the “permanent organizer, as the living inter- preter of all machines” in relation to one another (17). Technological and psychic individuation require one another for the continuous determina- tion of their processes of existence. In this sense, “the human is among the machines that operate with the human” (18; emphasis in original, transla- tion modified). Thus, humans and technology are mutually included in one another in that they require each other for processing each other’s processing of the surrounding world. They mutually codetermine their various poten- tials into actual, albeit provisional realities. This determination advances the process of technical individuation if it leads to the increased functional con- sistency of the technology itself or what Simondon calls its “concretization” (20, 36 passim). Analogous to Whitehead’s concept of concrescence, “con- cretization” refers to the growing-together of articulated, yet discontinuous parts that “tends toward a state which would turn the technical being into a system that is entirely coherent within itself and entirely unified” (29). But, importantly, “the technical object is never fully known; for this very reason, it is never completely concrete” (39).

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth 37

All of this leads to the central concept of technicity: As a technology’s mar- gin of indeterminacy decreases and its internal functionings concretize, that technology specifies the manner or mode in which it allows a processing of the world. This is what Simondon calls “technicity”: the internal “functional schemas” or “stable behaviors” that a concretizing, functionally integrated technology acquires (74). “Technicities are powers [puissances], in the fullest sense of the term, which is to say capacities for producing or undergoing an effect in a determinate manner” (74). By extension, technicity also betokens the various potential qualities of or affordances for engagement that a tech- nology holds forth.” This is important because it means that it is through technicity that technology and culture creatively and inventively interact. Technicity refers to a technology’s particular “mode of relation between human and world” (Combes 2013, 60). Thus, it is also in the domain of technicity that technologies bend to the forces of other modes of existence, including social, political, and economic modes of organization.

Technical invention happens as the “internal distribution of functions” within a technical system is modified, rearranged, and integrated in such a way that previous limitations internal to the system’s functioning itself can be overcome (32). The technical object makes an evolutionary “leap” over itself to acquire a new functional consistency. This is a moment of invention—not of discovery (e.g., of behavioral surplus)—because technology is informed by its own potential in “a conditioning of the present by the future,” effectu- ated by the “schemes of the creative imagination” (60). Thus, humans and technology are capable of taking up the functional schemes of each other, but this should not be thought as a mere application of established princi- ples. Because the technical and the human belong to different modes of existence, they cannot but transduce into other domains of existence, where transduction is “the transmission of a force of potential,” “the transmission of an impulse of virtuality from one actualization to another and across them all (what [Félix] Guattari calls transversality)” (Massumi 2002, 42-43). Transduction is the mutual potentialization of different domains of existence with the strange effect that what was a mere virtuality, a vague futurity, in one domain is informed by the virtuality of another domain in such a way that it becomes an actualizable possibility. How such transmissions of vir- tual impulses play out is not a matter of intentional human agency, but of different processes of individuation informing one another. Thus, following

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

38 Chapter 3

Simondon, technology’s process toward increased concretization and speci- fied technicity proceeds according to its particular mode of existence, which is however open to human creativity as an important, nonoptional factor in this process.

The previous chapter's argument regarding the prehensity of the digital can be specified by way of this theorization. Digital technology’s excessive prehensity and what was initially considered its propensity for “data exhaust” are—as was parenthetically remarked—a more concrete formulation of the digital’s openness to outside information, an aspect of its technicity await- ing determination by its coevolver. How did this mutual determination for the purpose of concretization come to pass? The following passage from Shoshana Zuboff’s account can serve as an anecdotal illustration of the com- plex existential moves between technology and culture. Zuboff relates how the employees at Google discovered the full potential of behavioral surplus, which then made way for the technical inventions of surveillance capitalism. Interestingly, at least for a media scholar, this anecdote involves broadcast TV:

The firm’s appreciation of behavioral surplus crossed another threshold that April [2002], when the data logs team arrived at their offices one morning to find that a peculiar phrase had surged to the top of the search queries: “Carol Brady’s maiden name.” Why the sudden interest in a 1970s television character? It was data scien- tist and logs team member Amit Patel who recounted the event to the New York Times, noting, “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”

The team went to work to solve the puzzle. First, they discerned that the pattern of queries had produced five separate spikes, each beginning at forty-eight minutes after the hour. Then they learned that the query pattern occurred during the air- ing of the popular TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The spikes reflected the successive time zones during which the show aired, ending in Hawaii. In each time zone, the show’s host posed the question of Carol Brady’s maiden name, and in each zone the queries immediately flooded into Google’s servers.

As the New York Times reported, “The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.” Even Brin was stunned by the clarity of Search’s predictive power, revealing events and trends before they “hit the radar” of traditional media. As he told the Times, “It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time. It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.” (Zuboff 2019, 75)

What a manifold of prehensions and transductions! Machines prehend human behavioral surplus—in the form of apparent data waste like Carol Brady’s maiden name—which needs to be prehended and coordinated—by way of human cognition—with a related series of events or prehensions—the

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth 39

regularity of broadcast schedules—in order for humans to conceive a poten- tial functional scheme of digital technology. The mere potential of data excess transduces into a clear conceptual idea: data exhaust holds the power [puissance] to predict individual and group behavior, and this allows it to be coupled with the future-tending operations of capital. The pennies drop. In this way, as yet unrealized functional schemes of technology are transmitted and integrated in a moment of psychic individuation. This conceptual idea now needs to be transduced back into viable functional schemes of digital technology. As chapter 2 suggested, the subsequent codevelopment of tech- nical and psychic (cultural) individuation largely followed political desires of control through surveillance and economic desires of capitalist value extraction. And thus the digital’s dual potential to prehend the world while remaining operationally opaque have concretized into a core aspect of its technicity. The term “stealth” can be taken as a way of grasping this technic- ity in one word.

Yet these developments were preceded and prepared by the much earlier invention of stealth planes. According to Simondon, technical lineages have an “absolute origin” consisting in the “synthetic act of invention constitutive of a technical essence” or “pure schema of functioning that is transposable to other structures” (2017, 46, 45; emphasis in original). The present account situates the technical origin of stealth in the military research project Stealth because it is here that the digital as an element in the technical ensemble of the plane concretizes an entirely new functional mode of the plane as a whole and becomes synergistic as it transduces the human desire for imperceptibil- ity. Converging with a much longer history that connects matters of warfare and perception, traced for instance in Paul Virilio’s Cinema and War, the digi- tal here actualizes its potential for the creation of reality as prehended.? As this tremendous ability to shape what will register as actionable reality is func- tionally integrated, technology becomes newly powerful or potentialized. In chapter 10, this mode of power will be specified as ontopower (Massumi 2015a). Following Simondon, it can be said that the broader economic and political exploitation of digital prehensity at a later stage constitutes a series of inven- tions that refine the new potentials released by this initiating moment. That is not to say that these refining inventions are less worthy of interest. Quite the contrary: these refinements and their cultural impact are the topic of this book. But it is worth noting that an evolutionary deployment of the technical usually requires a certain freedom from economic imperatives. As Simondon

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

40 Chapter 3

puts it, “It is mostly the domains where technical constraints prevail over eco- nomic constraints (aviation, military equipment) that become the most active sites for progress” (Simondon 2017, 31; translation modified). This explains why many now common technical objects—from duct tape over EpiPens and microwaves to the global positioning system (GPS)—were invented by and for military use: money was decidedly not an issue. It is the relative freedom from economic pressure that allowed aircraft technology and the digital’s prehen- sive potential to grow together and create Stealth.

In light of this genealogy, the supposedly “revolutionary” impact of stealth planes hyperbolically hailed by General Buster Glossen (quoted in Pandya 2010, ch. 2) can now be thought as merely an evolutionary leap. But Paul Virilio himself was partial to such hyperbole when, in Desert Screen, he qualifies Stealth as a “technological revolution” (2002, 110). Discussing the deployment of Lockheed’s F-117 during the first Gulf War, Virilio confirms that Stealth produces the subordination of aircraft’s aerodynamics to what he calls “icodynamics,” the power to create semblances or likenesses:*

The image in real time of the supersonic aircraft prevails from a distance over the form of least aerodynamic resistance; in other words, over the real space of the design of its cockpit and airfoil... . It is almost as if the image in the mirror were suddenly modifying our face: the electronic representation on the screen, the radar console, modifies the aerodynamic silhouette of the weapon, the virtual image dominating in fact “the thing” of which it was, until now, only the “image.” .. . Therefore, the immediate and remote presentations of the flying object tend to be indissolubly confused. (Virilio 2002, 111; emphasis in original)

“As if the image in the mirror were suddenly modifying our face”: what Virilio describes here is once again the processual aspect of digital prehensity (albeit in terms reminiscent of discourses of simulacra that were widespread in the early 1990s). Similarly, Harun Farocki in his own engagement with the Gulf War, most notably in the installation Eye/Machine, established the term “operative image” to refer to the fact that such images intervene in and transform reality rather than just representing an object (see Farocki 2004 and Hoel 2018).5 Indeed, the present account relies on Whitehead’s theory of prehension in part because, unlike many other theories of perception and images, it thoroughly subordinates questions of representation to matters of process and processing. (Hence also the resistance to simulacra.) The techno- logical processing of reality in real time results not merely in an accelerated exchange of information between human and technology; it folds (rather than “confuses”) human and technological prehensity into one another in a

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth 41

way that transforms what comes to count as reality. It both opens human per- ception to the prehensive scale, speed, and processing power of the nonhu- man and requires it to operate with them (if not exactly at them, given their different modes of existence). This challenge leads to the increased “signifi- cance of the screen of control” as an interface that articulates human and tech- nological prehensity and which takes on the “eminently strategic function of the central control of information” (Virilio 2002, 111; emphases in original).

The question regarding coevolution raised in this chapter concerns pre- cisely this strategic control of information that is at the heart not only of Stealth, the military research project, but also stealth as a technocultural practice. If, as Virilio states, “the technologies which compose and organize [Stealth] are those that tomorrow will structure the city” and civic life more generally (2002, 114), then how has the technological phylum that begins with a military research project concretized or grown into our technocultural lives more generally? How has the human as the “permanent organizer, as the living interpreter of all machines” strategically interpreted their activity as their tremendous prehensity become both affordance and danger (Simon- don 2017, 17)? How do we who cannot help but be “among the machines,” which cannot help but prehend us, “operate with” them (18; emphasis in original)? The following chapters of this book attempt to provide answers to these questions, with a particular focus on media culture and how it articu- lates spectacles of strategic imperceptibility, or what has been called the aes- thetics of stealth since chapter 1. What remains to be done in this first part of this book is to explain this particular focus. Along the way, the argument will also lay out how the present account conceives the cultivation of stealth through digital art and video games more specifically.

When chapter 2 introduced stealth planes via The Americans, a TV series from the 2010s, it was to suggest that we are indeed still individuating with or along this lineage in technical evolution. It was also to highlight how the series brought cutting-edge developments in war technology into aesthetic proximity with digital entertainment technology: As Elizabeth and Philip chase the science and engineering behind Stealth, their son Henry sneaks through the neighborhood to play Astrosmash, and even Russian spies are distracted by the spectacle of video games. These are all examples of human- technology coindividuation that involve a control screen or interface and that articulate complex matters of technical and ultimately social impercepti- bility. Digital interfaces, then, are the sites not only of information exchange and the seamless interaction between machines and humans. They moreover

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

42 Chapter 3

articulate the operational differentials between technical and psychic indi- viduation that can transduce into new strategies of engagement that propa- gate and settle into cultural practice. So while this book occasionally returns to such notions of stealthing and going stealth, first presented in chapter 1, the remainder of this book will take digital media art as a starting point because it is here that the cultural effects of the disparity between human and digital technology can be experienced more directly. It is here that the preoccupa- tion with digital prehensity is transduced and expressed through the strange and instructive duplicity of an aesthetics of stealth, that imperceptibility becomes conspicuous and spectacular. While the following chapters consider examples from TV and video art, video games are particularly conducive to such an investigation because their interfaces articulate aesthetic experiences that require and allow for the counterenactment of digital procedures in real time. As Alexander Galloway (2006) puts it: “To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to inter- pret a game means to interpret its algorithm. I suggest that video games are, at their structural core, in direct synchronization with the political realities of the informatic age” (90-91; emphasis in original). Note that this is differ- ent from saying that players themselves are in direct synchronization with the political realities of the information age. On the contrary, playing video games often involves cheating code and strategically circumventing or cre- atively exceeding the human behavior intended (but not determined) by a game’s algorithms (Consalvo 2007). In other words (namely, Simondon’s), video games provide an arena of play in which the technicity and margin of indeterminacy within the operations of digital machines can be creatively and playfully tested through a variety of behaviors.

The aspect of play is crucial for what was just called the “cultivation” of stealth. Play is a (human) animal activity in which the requirements of func- tional, use-oriented behavior are temporarily suspended. This enables the existential experimentation through gestures that are analog to functional behavior, but through that very analogy introduce a difference, an “excess over function” (Massumi 2015c, 11):

The gap between the ludic gesture and its analogue creates a margin of maneuver: it opens the door to improvisation. Play is the arena of activity dedicated to the improvisation of gestural forms, a veritable laboratory of forms of live action. What is played at is invention. The aesthetic yield of the play comes with an active mobi- lization of improvisational powers of variation. (Massumi 2015c, 12; emphasis in original).

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Stealth 43

In structured play activities, including video games, this freedom to exper- iment and improvise is of course considerably constrained by the game’s logical and computational rules. But these constraints must be thought as affordances enabling the inventive engagement with algorithmic opera- tions or, in short, as the digital game’s technicity. However strict their rule systems may be, games must create uncertainty—and not only regarding out- comes, as the game designer Greg Costikyan insists: “The uncertainty is in the path the game follows, in how players manage problems, in the surprises they hold” (2015, 13).° For the particular case of video games, this means that the algorithmic rules framing the play activity must hold open a “creative plasticity, an improvisational margin of maneuver” that allows for a variety of creative rejoinders that can in turn be processed by the game soft- ware (Massumi 2015c, 13). Differently put, then, the schematic or patterned uncertainty that imbues the activity of video gaming is a constructed analog of the game engine’s own margin of indeterminacy, its functional openness. Thus, Galloway’s general proposition that gamers “know” algorithmic sys- tems is here understood to mean that they creatively explore digital games’ technicity and operational margin of indeterminacy. For the study of stealth video games specifically, it is furthermore important that a game’s schematic rule system—already an analog of digital algorithms—is in turn “skinned” in the representational analogs of secret agents, black sites, and infiltration missions. Viewed in this way, video games are complex digital analogs. The following chapters explore how video games and other artworks of the digital era articulate these analogies and how they engage with the improvisational margin of maneuver opened up through artistic articulations of digital pre- hensity. In any case, this study contends that a strand of video games (and other digital art) composes conjunctions of algorithmic operations, playfully creative behavior, and representations of stealth, and that this conjunction makes these media promising sites for the development and study of a digi- tal ethico-aesthetic of the present. That is, video games constitute an aesthetic form that actively fosters in players the cultivation of their own ethos or behavioral habits when engaging with digital technology.

Following Massumi, play is a form of “lived abstraction” (2015c, 9). The excess over function is an expression of “a surplus-value of animation, vivacity—a surplus value of life” (10; emphasis in original). This means first of all that play is one of psychic individuation’s ways to explore and actualize potentials, to grow the abstract into our lived experience and let it act in the world. Indeed, this can be considered an important processual aspect of art in

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

44 Chapter 3

general.” This, in turn, means that digital play as a form of lived abstraction runs alongside and potentially counter to the concretizing thrust of technical evolution. As digital play actualizes new potentials through improvisation and experimentation, it creatively modulates the operations of algorithmic procedures rather than just “modeling”® itself on them (4 and 23-24). Thus, play creates a “circuit of reciprocal potentialization” between the play activ- ity and its operational analog (24). This is important because of what hap- pens in the course of this processual circuit: The player develops new qualities of doing, new ways of operating that introduce a minimal but momentous difference into human-technology relations. Another word for these quali- ties is style, understood as the inventive singularity of ludic gestures. Style is the aesthetic signature of the player’s creative liveliness in doing what can of course be done differently as well (Massumi 2015c, 5, 9, 13). But it is this qualitative singularity of style that produces the “aesthetic yield” of play that makes a difference in how processes play out, that creatively inflects how things concretize.

On the one hand, then, stealth appears as a style invented in and with playful art. In what follows, this will show most clearly in the chapters that look at stealth as a specific “gameplay style.” For now, let’s note that stealth as style pries open the concretizing force of the digital to flush it with abstrac- tion, to invent tactical rejoinders to the existential threat of the world’s increased prehensity. Put differently, the digital’s extraction of behavioral surplus is countered by playful abstraction as a surplus value of life. On the other hand, though, for Simondon, such inventiveness “presupposes in the inventor the intuitive knowledge of . . . technicity” (2017, 74). Thus, to refor- mulate a throughline of this introductory part, stealth as stylistic invention goes hand in digit with stealth as the abstract functional schema of digital technology. Ultimately, then, stealth is the name given here to the creative push and pull between style and technicity.

Now, what characterizes this style? Chapter 4, which immediately follows, proposes that the general disposition of stealth aesthetics can in many ways be qualified as baroque, for instance because it proliferates “microperceptions” as a technique for inflecting how the world comes to be experienced (Deleuze 2006, 98). Stealth is the style of negotiating the relation-of-nonrelation between human and technological prehensity by creatively and tactically enfolding microperceptions to unfold a precarious, yet resilient subjectivity of digital technoculture.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

4 Technostealth: A Baroque Disposition

The aesthetics of stealth allow many different stylistic variations, as later chapters will show. This chapter, however, aims at elucidating the more gen- eral aesthetic disposition of stealth by suggesting that stealth follows the aesthetic principles of the neobaroque. In particular, this chapter wants to highlight two points. The first is that the aesthetics of stealth across various media rely on the construction of a multiperspectivalism within a network of interlocking prehensions. As a result, the focus of aesthetic operations shifts to the threshold of perception: an intervention is efficient if it succeeds in acting just under the threshold at which an entity can be positively pre- hended from other attending points of view. Second, the processual yield of this aesthetic inclination is a mannerism that foregrounds minimal interven- tions and minor gestures as capacious modes of world-making. Two media examples will serve as case studies to demonstrate these aesthetic tendencies of stealth: after returning to The Americans once more, the chapter will look at the video game Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft Toronto 2020) to formulate the mannerist style of stealth gameplay.

The particularly baroque qualities of digital technology have been well established, for example in the work of Angela Ndalianis and Timothy Mur- ray. In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Ndalianis shows that the entertainment industry’s shift toward expanded seriality through, for instance, transmedia franchises and their extensive world-building proj- ects relies on the affordances of digital production, distribution, and recep- tion (2004, 4). Such franchises of networked narratives foreground what Ndalianis calls “polycentric” approaches to world-building, an approach that attempts to compose an experience of worlding by proliferating narratives that provide new partial and intersecting perspectives on the shared fictional

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

46 Chapter 4

world (2004, 25-27). In this sense, contemporary media culture shares with the Baroque a fascination with whole-part relations and an appreciation for the ways in which the relations between parts associate them into complex systems. As a result, increasingly extensive storyworlds are experienced as narrative “labyrinths,” an architectural form that the Baroque appreciated both for its compositional complexity and its ability to overwhelm human sense-making. Not incidentally for a consideration of video games, laby- rinths are also playful spaces that visitors can learn to navigate. Often in the digital Baroque, the “audience is placed within a confusing labyrinth and then invited to discover order” (76-77). Thus, the mazelike constellations of digital media culture foster the baroque desire for encyclopedic mapping of real or fictional worlds, or what Murray refers as the “baroque trope of the informational interconnectivity of networks, libraries, and archives” (2008, 19). While the seventeenth century found its exemplary expression of the desire for a comprehensive collection of available knowledge in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, today this desire manifests in collaborative projects such as Wikipedia and the numerous online wikis that collect and order the knowledge about fictional worlds such as the Star Wars or Marvel universes. In turn, this striving for perfect knowledge and reproduction of the world is closely related to the baroque desire for virtuoso artistry and technical perfection through repetition, which find their contemporary expression in digital practices of data mining, but also the aesthetic excess of illusionistic computer-generated images (Ndalianis 2004, 81-107; Murray 2008, 1-14).! So there’s something peculiarly baroque about the digital and digital culture.” Given that stealth is conceptualized here as a tactical engagement with the prehensive aspect of said digital culture, this chapter relies on theories of the (digital) Baroque to clarify the aesthetic principles of stealth.

Like our contemporary era, the seventeenth century was characterized by tremendous advances in the technical prehensity. Microscopes and telescopes in particular allowed for the visual prehension of things minutely small and unimaginably distant. Differential and integral calculus as developed by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz gave the mind a mathematical grasp of the complex rates of change and curved shapes observable in the world. Certain aspects of the world could now be perceived, described, and under- stood at new scales and in terms of process. These technical and scientific developments would later pave the way for the formulation of a so-called modern humanist worldview that gives the human primacy and supremacy

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 47

over the world. But the inauguration of humanist Enlightenment, which cel- ebrates Homo faber’s power over a world of material objects, also required the marginalization and depreciation of a philosophical current that emerged in the seventeenth century itself: the Baroque.

This turn toward the historical period of the Baroque may seem like an odd kink in the story that this book tries to tell. Yet the Baroque and its fascination with the processual and relational exuberance of the world pro- vide important precursors to contemporary process philosophies and digital aesthetics. In his book The Fold, Gilles Deleuze not only offers a thorough engagement with Leibniz as “the Baroque philosopher par excellence” (2006, 37) but also provides his sole explicit engagement with Whitehead. One rela- tion between these two philosophers consists in the crucial question that resounds through both philosophies: “What is an event?” (86). Like White- head, Leibniz, and with him the Baroque, are interested in how an occur- rence comes to happen. Both think of the world as a series of interlocking perspectives or points of view—located in monads for Leibniz and events or prehensions for Whitehead—from which certain aspects of the surrounding world are illuminated or gain importance (Deleuze 2006, 26, 88). If the con- ditions are favorable, the surrounding worldly processes are inflected from the capacitated perspectives, which thus act as processual nodes. By implicat- ing Deleuze’s perspective on Leibniz and the Baroque at this juncture, the argument opens itself to an aesthetic practice and philosophy that can help explain the aesthetics of stealth, as well as the political culture from which they emerge.

Of crucial importance is the baroque emphasis on the dynamism of form. Here, form is not simply imposed on a material but developed as an aspect of an active or vibrant matter as it envelops worldly excitements. Thus, baroque art is fascinated with pleated fabrics and garments because they extend, multiply, and transform the movements of the body animat- ing it (Deleuze 2006, 139). The folded garment prehends and, in processing it, amplifies the expressive forces of the ongoing surrounding world. That is why Deleuze calls the Baroque the “informal art par excellence,” where the “informal” must be understood as that which informs a process of existence through the transduction of potentials relationally distributed in the world (40; translation modified). Baroque art is informal because it highlights how worldly processes hold together by continuously modulating one another. In Italian baroque painting, for instance, this preoccupation is articulated

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

48 Chapter 4

through the notions of moto and affetto (movement and affect). Here, affect is best thought in a nonpsychological way, referring first of all to the “vibra- tions, elasticities,” “tendencies,” or “efforts” by which matter relationally develops its modes of existence as its “affective qualities” (109-110). As the body moves, it may stir the pleated garment, but the garment picks up the movement in its own style, swirling lightly perhaps or billowing weightily, depending on the “molecular movements” that constitute the fabric’s man- ner of being. So if affetto initially refers to the internal processual form-taking of matter, it also indicates how different “styles or manners” can inflect and activate one another. These potentials to affect thus express themselves in particular moti. Following the Baroque aesthetic, then, dynamic form is thor- oughly recast as a mode or manner of informing: “the informal is not a nega- tion of form: it posits form as folded, . . . folded forms are styles or manners” (40). “As a general rule the manner in which a material is folded is what constitutes its texture. It is defined less by its heterogenous and really distinct parts than by the style by which they become inseparable by virtue of partic- ular folds” (41).

This general sketch of the baroque aesthetic can guide the present account of stealth in several ways. As the following section will elaborate in detail, the dynamic relation between affect and movement implies a relation of compo- sition between “microperceptions” and “macroperceptions,” where micrope- rceptions themselves may remain under the threshold of the perceptible even as they recompose the macroperceptions available in the surrounding world. This in turn requires the prehension of other perspectives on the world and the relational informing of their styles or manners of existence.

The Americans

At the beginning of its very first episode (Weisberg and Batistick 2013), The Americans presents a scene of about two minutes that articulates the baroque prehensive ecologies, which enable an aesthetics of stealth. Elizabeth and Philip Jennings and their colleague Rob are tasked to capture a defector. Their plan is to intercept the target at night on a calm street in Washington, D.C. While Philip and Rob wait for their target outside behind the corner of a building, Elizabeth positions herself inside, on the first floor of an apartment building facing her collaborators’ hiding place. In this way, they can com- municate their target’s position to each other without being detected; they

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 49

can get a visual of their approaching target without being seen themselves. The scene goes to some lengths to convey this sense of invisibility aestheti- cally. As the spies establish a line of sight between their positions, we barely catch a glimpse of them through half-opened doors and behind window curtains. Darkness and smoke further wrap them in relative opacity. Many close-ups cut each frame off from the wider surroundings. Darkness, mist, angles, blocked views, and close-ups are the visual techniques used here to make the viewer sense the furtiveness of the spies’ operation. We perceive a concerted effort to be imperceptible and simultaneously prehend the tar- get from multiple perspectives. This constructed duplicity—imperceptibility made perceptible—is at the heart of the aesthetic problem that this scene poses. Who is imperceptible here? And for whom?

Given that many shots frame their content in close-up or partially hidden behind out-of-focus obstructions, this sequence does not present a seamless pro-filmic space. It is a bit of an audiovisual maze. And, yet, as the sequence multiplies and refracts points of view, relational cues such as sightlines, head angles, lighting, and shade allow the viewer to compose a full sense of the surrounding world. So instead of establishing a continuous representational space, the image connects various points of view to let the viewer enter a functional network of perspectives, a field of mutual prehensions. Stealth always relies on such multiperspectivalism, the point of which is to grasp the affective and prehensive potentials distributed across the field. The aes- thetics of stealth can be qualified as baroque, then, because they proliferate viewpoints that are integrated into a perceptual ecology in the interest of a targeted intervention. Interestingly, Deleuze and Leibniz both articulate this idea by way of Plotinus’s original sketch of the monad as “a point of view on the city,” a metaphor that will become quite literal as this chapter pro- ceeds: “What can be apprehended from one point of view [say, Elizabeth’s or Philip’s] is therefore neither a determined street nor a relation that might be determined with other streets, which are constants, but the variety of all pos- sible connections between the course of a given street and that of another. The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered” (Deleuze 2006, 26).

The opening sequence of The Americans indeed renders the street corner as a labyrinth of affective and prehensive potentials. And as the suspense of the imminent capture makes palpable, these potentials create a contrast that is bound to discharge into open conflict. The goal is thus to modulate the perceptual maze in such a way that the spies’ intervention can be executed

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

50 Chapter 4

on their terms—that they can affect the surrounding world without being adversely affected themselves. As will shortly be seen, they are relatively unsuccessful at this. Stealth is a challenge.

But it is important to first unpack the full implications of the multiper- spectival aesthetic that this sequence articulates. The proliferation of view- points is the series’ way of performing what James J. Gibson has called an “ecological approach” to visual perception. Moving images can do this pre- cisely because they are in motion and, thus, present “invariants” (surfaces, angles) under transformation (of ratios, proportions) in a changing “optic array” (Gibson 2015, 280). One of the achievements of Gibson’s theory is to take into account the fact that the perceiving individual is in movement and therefore perceives the changing relations between surfaces in relation to their own displacement. This approach is termed “ecological” because it acknowledges that what is perceived or picked up is first and foremost a field of relationally distributed information.* A crucial consequence is that one can experience the surrounding world from several viewpoints at once:

It is obvious that a motionless observer can see the world from a single fixed point of observation and can thus notice the perspectives of things. It is not so obvious but it is true that an observer who is moving about sees the world at no point of observation and thus, strictly speaking, cannot notice the perspectives of things. The implications are radical. Seeing the world at a traveling point of observation, over a long enough time for a sufficiently extended set of paths, begins to be per- ceiving the world at all points of observation, as if one could be everywhere at once. To be everywhere at once with nothing hidden is to be all-seeing, like God. Each object is seen from all sides, and each place is seen as connected to its neighbor. The world is not viewed in perspective. (Gibson 2015, 187-188; emphasis in original)

One possible conceptual confusion arises and must be immediately clari- fied: How can the aesthetic of The Americans be qualified as “multiperspec- tival” in light of Gibson’s theory when Gibson himself holds that “the world is not viewed in perspective” at all? What Gibson rejects here is the conflation of our natural ways of perceiving the surrounding world with the “technique of picture-making” that Renaissance painters rightly referred to as “artificial perspective” (63).° Similarly, Deleuze states that “[it] does not suffice to state that the point of view apprehends a perspective, a profile that would each time offer the entirety of a city in its own fashion. For it also brings forth the connection of all the related profiles, the series of all curvatures or inflec- tions” (2006, 26). Indeed, points of view must be understood as potential

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 51

“points of inflection” at which the “intrinsic singularity” of a process inflects or reorients itself as well as the worldly processes that feed into it (15). That is why the present account also follows both Deleuze and Gibson in speaking of “points of view” and refrains from assigning characters or spectators one particular (artificial) perspective. If the term is nonetheless retained in the notion of the multiperspectival, it should be understood in the broader White- headian sense of any event’s “perspective of the universe”: “Each entity, of whatever type, essentially involves its own connection with the universe of other things. This connection can be viewed as being what the universe is for that entity either in the way of accomplishment or in the way of potentiality. It can be termed the perspective of the universe for that entity” (Whitehead 1968, 66).

The multiperspectival as it is used here is an attempt to generalize Gibson’s insights into ecological perception to make them compatible with White- head’s theory of prehensions laid out in chapter 2. Evidently, the audiovisual rendering of a perceptual ecology in The Americans is made for human eyes and ears, but this mode of perception constitutes only one particular—and limited—manner in which worldly entities prehend one another. So the opening sequence of The Americans is offered here as one insightful exem- plar of more general prehensive dynamics. One could ask, for example, how these more general dynamics play out once they explicitly involve digital prehensity, such as in stealth video games. (An answer to this question will be provided shortly when this chapter turns to Watch Dogs: Legion.) In any case, the multiperspectival suggests that certain processes, including so-called higher organisms like humans as well as technological processes, not only have their own perspective of a shared world but can also prehend other existential perspectives of it. Such an ecological prehension-of-prehension is crucial to the aesthetics of stealth because it is a condition for grasping what has importance for the other perspectives of a shared world. It enables an understanding of the tendencies that a potentially adversarial perspective may follow and the antagonistic efforts that it may make to ensure the con- tinuation of its process. And if the opening sequence of The Americans makes the viewer participate in such a multiperspectival perceptual ecology, it is to show that the point of such perceptual knowing is to prevent the expression of adversarial tendencies and efforts before the target can become aware of them. In this sense, stealth is a mode of preemptive action (Pape 2019). At this, however, the spies fail:

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

52 Chapter 4

Once Elizabeth and Philip and their collaborator Rob are in position, they stay put and wait for the target to get closer. As the target approaches the unseen spies, the musical score first grows in volume and dramatic force, building toward the imminent encounter of the adversaries. But just before walking into the trap, the target stops short—and with him the musical score. In this moment of silence, the viewer can sense the target’s hesitation, as well as the interruption in the operation’s chain of events so carefully laid out by the agents. Should viewers listen for aural signs that might betray the secret agents’ presence, they will be disappointed. Modes of prehension are, as was said, limited: We cannot see the target seeing his pursuers, nor can we hear any giveaway sounds that the spies might have accidentally made. And yet, despite the spies’ best efforts at becoming imperceptible, the target somehow senses their presence and flees. How did he do it? This is indeed the aesthetic problem of the scene. What stands out for the viewers is the pronounced vis- ibility of the Russian spy trio in contrast to the target. Even though the spies hide from their target, it is them who are exposed to the viewers, who can adequately map their positions within the perceptual ecology. The target, by contrast, remains audiovisually elusive from the beginning of the sequence, when he moves in the distance and through shadows, to the moment of the disrupted encounter, when the viewer can clearly perceive him but not what or how he perceives. The animated musical score contributes to the audio- visual saturation of this scene so that what disappears for the viewer in the audiovisual noise is the target itself. It is as if the sound and image skipped an important beat because they were so busy establishing the perceptual ecology between the spies themselves. As a result, the target’s perspective of the uni- verse cannot not be fully prehended. How can an aesthetic theory of stealth with a baroque bend account for this?

Following Deleuze’s account of Leibniz’s baroque theory of perception, the abovementioned affective qualities of a processual entity—its folds, vibra- tions, elasticities, and tendencies—are further agitated by “microperceptions” that are “representatives of the world” (2006, 98): “Microperceptions or rep- resentatives of the world are these little folds that unravel in every direction, folds in folds, over folds, following folds, like one of Hantai’s paintings, or one of Clérambault’s toxic hallucinations. And these are minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up our macroperceptions, our conscious, clear, and distinct apperceptions. Had it failed to bring together an infinite sum of minute perceptions that destabilize the preceding macroperception

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 53

while preparing the following one, a conscious perception would never hap- pen” (Deleuze 2006, 98-99)

Two things are important here: First, conscious perception and all pre- hension more generally are a matter of composition. Elusive micropercep- tions can agglomerate and inform each other in such a manner that they unfold forms that are “notable or remarkable” to the human eye or ear. Thus, microperceptions can and often do participate in positive prehensions. But, once again, eye and ear—understood as modes of prehension—have their limits. “All consciousness is a matter of threshold,” including perceptual thresholds (101). This means that microperceptions can also act in the world as negative prehensions; that is, without being included in an entity’s inter- nal constitution of its subjective form. The second important point, then, is that microperceptions can efficiently contribute to the composition of process while remaining under the threshold of conscious perception. They can also compose macroperception by destabilizing it. This is what happens in the opening scene of The Americans. All that the viewers—and presumably the Russian spies—can know is that something inflected the target’s process of existence. Something somehow gave away that something was off on that street corner somewhere in Washington, D.C. But his unexpected awareness of the imminent stealth attack destabilizes the viewer’s perception to the extent that it cannot be accounted for in terms of conscious perception of the representational information provided by image and sound. The viewer is left to conclude that the target must have picked up a microperception that refused to cross the viewer’s threshold of perception, that the something off on the street corner entered experience by way of a negative prehension. This is, of course, because the sequence is edited in that way. There is supposed to be a gap in conscious perception, a beat that got skipped. This is to articulate that the true virtuoso of stealth in this scene, the person whose perceptions and actions remain elusive, is the target himself. He is a stealth virtuoso, then, because his experience of the world takes negative prehensions into account as positive facts of the world. He can thus perform what Brian Mas- sumi calls “action-perception” (2015a, 98 passim).

Action-perception is a mode of perceptual awareness that is able to reg- ister microperceptions—the minute vibrations and tendencies that result from the commingling of wordly processes—within a perceptual ecology before they can fold into a macroperception. Thus, action-perception is a preconscious or nonconscious mode of relating to, and ultimately acting on,

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

54 Chapter 4

the “pricklings” of potential futures as yet enfolded in one’s surroundings (Deleuze 2006, 99). Indeed, such a mode of action, which disconnects action from ratiocination and regrounds it in perception and affect, is increasingly required by the geopolitical conflicts of recent history, which are character- ized by an unsettling asymmetry between the visibility and exposure of state actors on the one hand and the diffuse threat of terrorism on the other.® The aesthetic of stealth articulates this problem for a broader audience: Is it possible to rationally deliberate on a strategy to fight an enemy if you do not know the enemy’s position, personnel, or equipment? It isn’t, and therefore, Massumi shows, recent military policy texts on “network-centric warfare” address this problem by transferring decision-making from strate- gic and rational instances of command to the event ecology of the network itself: “This epistemological incompleteness theorem [i.e., the irreducible unknowability of the enemy] at the basis of network-centric war is an expres- sion of an ontological condition: the ‘real time’ of war is now the formative infra-instant of suspended perception. What are normally taken to be cogni- tive functions must telescope into that non-conscious interval. What would otherwise be cognition must zoom into the ‘blink’ between consciously reg- istered perceptions—and in the same movement zoom instantly out into a new form of awareness” (Massumi 2015a, 97).

This new form of networked or ecological awareness’ of one’s implication in a perceptual event ecology is a crucial element of the aesthetic of stealth. It is so important that the opening sequence of The Americans carefully plots out a perceptual ecology for viewers, only to trip them up with an instance of action-perception. Through this experience of audiovisual incomplete- ness, the viewers are forewarned that the aesthetics of stealth in this series will also test their thresholds of perception and consciousness. We must be like Leibniz’s “animal on the alert” [l’animal aux aguets|] because “there are always minute perceptions that are not integrated into the present percep- tion” (Deleuze 2006, 99). There is always more to find in one’s surroundings that may cross the threshold of the perceptible to turn into a prehension of pain or worse (Stengers 2017, 69). And just as for the animal, Isabelle Stengers specifies that this is very much a “pragmatic preoccupation” concerning life and death rather than a matter of “conscious representation” (69). Perhaps that is why this crucial element of stealth aesthetics is rendered in the open- ing sequence of The Americans without being represented.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 55

In any case, the contrast between the Russian spies and their target allows this opening sequence to approach and activate the threshold of perception from both directions. It makes the spies’ practice of hiding pass into visibility and renders the target’s action-perception imperceptible, certainly in terms of its efficient causation. This chiasmic play around the threshold is at the heart of the aesthetic of stealth. Stealth, when experienced through media, is a dance around the threshold of the perceptible because media themselves have to render the becoming-imperceptible of stealth in their sensory modes (sight and sound in this case). In other words, stealth implies the holding of a contrast: the perceptible and imperceptible are articulated through one another and, in this way, they coexist in the closest experiential proximity as microperceptions and macroperceptions that processually fold into one another. In this way, stealth forces perception to tremble on the threshold of the perceptible, a threshold that is moreover relational and dynamic. As the openings for imperceptibility continuously change, it is more accurate to speak of stealth aesthetics as a continuous thresholding within a perceptual ecology.

This scene stands out as emblematic for the The Americans and the aesthet- ics of stealth because it shows two parties trying to “outstealth” one another by means of a prehensive one-upmanship around the threshold of the per- ceptible: points of view and prehensions have proliferated; connection after connection has been made for us. Yet something slips through the cracks. What creates a moment of awe is precisely the elusiveness of effective stealth. Thus, the scene undermines the spy fantasy that it constructs by making the target perceive its perceivers. Right from the beginning, then, The Americans denies the fantasy that observers could in any way separate themselves from the world they observe. Targets and pursuers are embedded in a perceptual ecology in which processes cannot help but inform one another. The goal of stealth is a way of obscuring these connections without rupturing them. This contributes to the high risks of stealth.

Hacking the Smart City in Watch Dogs: Legion This flexible attunement to perceptual thresholds becomes even more of a

pragmatic problem in stealth video games, where the player themself takes over the task of remaining imperceptible. Many stealth video games enable

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

56 Chapter 4

the player to do this by creatively folding the digital environment to create experiences of the world that can only negatively prehend the presence of the stealth agent. The baroque qualities of this gameplay style are clearly observable in the video game Watch Dogs: Legion.

Watch Dogs: Legion, henceforth WDL, is the third main entry in the Watch Dogs series. Each game is set in a realistic model of a global city. After the first two games were set in Chicago and San Francisco, respectively, WDL is set in a near-futuristic London policed by a private security company. The story can be summarized as a conventional action-adventure plot in which the player has to take revenge on a conspiratorial and power-hungry corpocracy: After a series of anonymous terrorist attacks, the private security company Albion has been given access to London’s smart city infrastructure and is in the process of establishing an Orwellian surveillance state. Albion has also been successful in wrongly accusing the hacker collective DedSec of carrying out said terrorist attacks. The player operates several members of this hacker collective and is tasked to fight Albion by hacking its smart city infrastruc- ture. WDL imagines resistance to the smart surveillance city as a form of technostealth through a distributed networked agency.

It is perhaps not surprising that many stealth games are set in urban spaces. Even before the implementation of smart city infrastructures, urban spaces harbored desires and affordances for stealth. Conventional understandings of (especially) modern cities describe them as dense, heterogeneous social spaces whose components and subsystems operate in highly complex ways. In seminal studies of the metropolis by Louis Wirth (1938), for example, social relations in cities are characterized by anonymity, superficiality, and transito- riness. All of this makes urban environments opaque to a certain degree. Both the functional operations of the city as an organized whole and the dealings of its numerous denizens are beyond the grasp of any one individual. On the one hand, this relative opacity of urban spaces makes them dangerous; on the other hand, it makes urban spaces amenable to stealth because it allows for tactical imperceptibility by moving into these opaque domains of city life. The city is indeed a labyrinth (Deleuze 2006, 26). Stealth games draw on these aspects of the urban imaginary to motivate core gameplay mechanics of hiding, deception, and distraction in various ways. Consider, for instance, the Assassin’s Creed series, which has titles set in Renaissance Florence, Rome, and Constantinople as well as revolutionary Paris, Victorian London, and many other historical cities.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 57

In WDL, this challenge of being stealthy is complicated by the integrated surveillance apparatus of the smart city, which acts against the abovemen- tioned opacities. So in WDL, the digital infrastructure that supports the smart city promises to finally make the opaque processes of urban organization commensurable with desires for comprehensive data extraction, processing, and control. Utopian visions of what Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell have termed the “smartness mandate” see it as “enabling a mode of automated, and seemingly apolitical, decision-making that would guarantee the survival of the human species in the face of pressing . . . challenges” (2022, 1-2). But this potential for optimization has of course been overdetermined by political interests, as many have pointed out. In her Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford points to former US secretary of defense Ash Carter’s strategy to harness digital tech- nology and artificial intelligence (AI) for military purposes in what he called the Third Offset strategy (2021, 187-188). An offset is “a way of compen- sating for an underlying military disadvantage by changing the conditions” (187-188). If stealth planes were part of what Carter considered the Second Offset, then the third should be a “combination of AI, computational war- fare, and robots” (188). The strategic disadvantage that must be compensated for this time is the complexity of contemporary societies and the unforesee- able fallout of complex nonlinear processes. Smartness “understands threats as emerging from an environment that, because it is always more complex than the systems it encompasses, can never be captured in the simple sche- mas of rivalry or game theory. This in turn allows smartness to take on an ecological dimension: the key crisis is no longer simply that emerging from rival political powers or nuclear disaster but rather, more fundamentally, intrinsically unforeseeable events that will necessarily continue to emerge from an always too-complex environment” (Halpern and Mitchell 2022, 5). To maintain stable operations, the cybernetic smart city has to “know [its denizens] by their metadata,” which are harvested to feed algorithmic con- trol systems that can respond to disturbances of optimal operations in real time and in a precise manner. This also implies a particular understanding of social and political change as merely the incremental modulation of complex processes. The possibility of substantial social change through large-scale structural transformation is intentionally sidelined. Indeed, as Gillian Rose points out, the intervention of human intelligence becomes increasingly superfluous as smart networks protect the order of operations in a seemingly autonomous and thus apolitical manner (2019, 107). The utopian goal of

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

58 Chapter 4

the smart city is the dream of cybernetic control: the maintenance of urban space as a system of continuously regulated flows of energy and informa- tion. Hence, the cybernetic task of the smart city is to eliminate, incorporate, or otherwise compensate for any unforeseeable event that might disturb or disrupt the system. In WDL, the smart city’s project consists in the organized suppression of contingency.

Thus, the narrative setup of WDL squarely situates its near-future ver- sion of London in the context of excessive and asymmetrical digital pre- hensity outlined in chapter 2 and explicitly relates it to surveillance culture and cybernetic control. This is also clearly articulated in the gameplay. If the player confronts an Albion security operative, steals a car, or causes a traffic accident, a slew of drones will immediately intervene to suppress the source of social disorder. Here, WDL aligns itself with critical views of the smart city by relating it to predictive policing. While the smart infrastructure makes urban processes transparent and citizens vulnerable, those owning and oper- ating that infrastructure can conceal their actions and remain out of reach. All of this is to say that the player, in the role of the resistant denizen, is better off moving through the smart city’s finely meshed surveillance matrix with- out being detected. Now, how does WDL articulate this in its gameplay? And how is this an instance of digital baroque?

As in many open-world stealth games like Metal Gear Solid V or Assas- sin’s Creed games since Origins, many roads and areas in WDL’s London are relatively safe to enter as one moves from one point of interest to another. But the open world is speckled with “restricted areas,” full of hostile guards, surveillance cameras, motion capture devices, armored drones, and other surveillance technology. It is in these restricted areas—which can be cor- porate offices, construction sites, and other proprietary and architecturally complex locations—that many of the campaign missions need to be carried out. A usual mission in the game tasks the player to physically access a server in a remote corner of the restricted area or rescue an ally from a detention cell that is difficult to reach. Thus, a successful resistance mission consists in navigating the game architecture and reaching the target without being prehended by the sensing devices of the smart city. To do this, the player can and must frequently hack into Albion’s surveillance system and manipulate it in their favor. To return to what was said in chapter 2, the player must har- ness occlusion and intrusion.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 59

Change of Heart jostage

Zoom EWAttract © Close

rf

Figure 4.1

View of a restricted construction site from a surveillance camera that the player has hacked into. All highlights and icons indicate a hackable object. Screenshot from Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft 2020).

Change of Heart © RESCUE the Hostage

Figure 4.2

View from a hacked surveillance camera on the same construction site. After hacking a minivan, the player can remotely steer it to distract the enemy patrolling the area. Screenshot from Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft 2020).

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

60 Chapter 4

This requires tech-enhanced action-perception. The games’ interface not only renders a three-dimensional photorealistic London, it also overlays it with numerous visual cues, such as visual icons for enemy positions or trace maps for their movements. Most importantly, however, the interface indi- cates each and every hackable item in the player’s visual field (see figures 4.1 and 4.2). In the fiction of WDL, these cues indicate ongoing worldly pro- cesses that can be modulated in real time as the player moves through that world. The interface of WDL thus works like a “smart visor” that embeds ini- tially environmental information in the sense mode of vision “as affordances rather than featuring in it as focused content” (Massumi 2015b, 128). Every visual cue indicates a potential action that the player may actualize in the next moment. Since such decisions must be taken from within a complex, dynamic and hostile environment, the processing of these cues cannot be left to ratiocination. For example:

A numerical indication of distance on a smart visor can increase the accuracy of tar- geting. But this can work only if the number is not experienced in such a way as to trigger a calculation in the shooter’s skull. It is already a calculation in the machine precisely so it doesn’t have to be one in the time-pressured war head. Instead, its seeing must instantaneously, unreflectingly trigger a postural modulation of the shooter’s body or an instantaneous recalibration of the weapon setting. The num- ber must be performatively transduced into posture and gesture, in the instant. It

must already have hit the body as “actionable” information. (Massumi 2015b, 130;

emphasis in original)

The interface of WDL similarly provides the player with a panoply of action- able cues or affordances that the player must “instantaneously, unreflectingly” transduce to modulate their environment in their favor. In this sense, WDL is a training arena for action-perception. When the analysis now looks at game- play in more detail, it should be kept in mind that much of the gameplay action happens “on the fly”; that is, in the middle of an active urban battle- ground. Thus when the argument involves higher cognitive functions such as calculation or ratiocination, these should be thought of as “operatively fused” into perception, as suggested by Massumi: “sensing, deciding and acting” are “brought together into a single ‘complex functionality’” (127).

The game spaces in WDL are effectively environmental—that is, complex and dynamic—puzzles with multiple moving parts. And the gameplay engages with the sensing devices of the smart city network: Every restricted area in the game contains dozens of security cameras that can be hacked,® which means

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 61

that the interface switches to the point of view of the hacked camera. In this way, players can study the environment they have to infiltrate. Players can also hack their way from one camera to the next so that an entire building can be scouted out before an avatar actually enters it. Here, hacking the smart city partly consists in moving through as many of its points of view as needed to establish how the various elements of surveillance cooperate to make the environment hostile, as well as to prehend how and what the environment prehends. This makes WDL the rare third-person action adventure that con- stantly requires players to change points of view and integrate them into an ecological perception of the game space as a whole.’ Through this rendering of the multiperspectival, players can grasp how the game software articulates and understands certain fundamental values such as perceived presence.!° In other words, players gather various perspectives of a technologically rendered digital environment to get a sense, a feel, for the technology’s margin of inde- termination: To what degree is it open to be informed by player input without certain in-game entities registering that input?

Once the player has the lay of the simulated land, they can create openings for undetected movement toward the target by moving around the pieces of the rule-based environmental puzzle. For example, following the algorithmic rules of WDL, guards and drones patrol the game space in regular patterns of direction and speed, with various ways and levels of prehensity and respon- siveness. These algorithmically generated patterns must be creatively manip- ulated or circumvented by the player by means of a vast array of hacking mechanics and other tech-based gameplay modifiers. Guards can be distracted or lured away; drones can be repurposed; security doors can be deactivated, etc. Ideally, interventions are made in such a way that they remain under the threshold of what the smart infrastructures itself can perceive.

So the core gameplay of WDL pursues two aesthetic processes that can be qualified as baroque. First, it is about perceiving how all the different ele- ments of the environment move in concert to create a near-comprehensive surveillance matrix. The gameplay foregrounds the “concertation” of many minor elements that form a complex moving whole (Deleuze 2006, 152- 153). To borrow one of Leibniz’s dicta, which he borrowed from Hippocrates, the technostealth of WDL simulates a smart surveillance network to allow players to understand how “everything” in that digital environment “con- spires” to ensure maximum prehensity: The player has to appreciate how the elements constituting the environment are carefully arranged in such a way

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

62 Chapter 4

as to foreclose a presence that can be positively prehended without harm. “Tout est conspirant” (everything breathes together) is Leibniz’s way of say- ing that the components of experience make a world for each other, and that to participate in this world is to conspire or breathe with them (1898, 106). This breathing-with is the second, kinesthetic process foregrounded in the core gameplay: one has to playfully participate in the complex relational field that the game software constructs to modulate it so that it will allow for a presence that is negatively prehended at all times, and thus is “safe” in gameplay terms. The mechanics of the game provide a variety of techniques and tools to accomplish these core gameplay tasks, two of which will be emphasized in the following: first, the distribution of the player’s agency across the game environment and, second, the modulation of the smart environment through series of small diversions and minor deviations that compose or concert alternative macroperceptions for the surveillance matrix.

In WDL, the player’s input can be distributed across what one might call human-technology assemblages. Even though one can only play as one team member of the DedSec collective at a time (more about this in a moment), the avatar’s zone of action can be extended to several digital devices at the same time. While the player hides their active operative in a safe spot, for instance, they can deploy a “spiderbot” to take out an enemy and access servers and other devices remotely (see figure 4.3). While the spiderbot is largely bound to the floor and moves mainly horizontally, drones can be a further addition to the operative assemblage and allow for vertical explora- tion and various other hacking interventions. The deployment of simulated human-technology assemblages in WDL is one more way of getting a feel for how the algorithmic environment folds digital prehensions into a func- tional whole. It foregrounds the aesthetic aspect of technostealth, insofar as it enables a tentative and ongoing testing of how prehensive and responsive the simulated game space is. Indeed, in particularly difficult stealth chal- lenges, one has to experiment with exactly how far one can go or how much time one has to execute an action without drawing attention. Here, stealth gameplay rejoins baroque aesthetics because, as Ndalianis says quoting Omar Calabrese, its aesthetic principles “stretch against the limit of a system, thus testing ‘the elasticity of the border, but without destroying it’” (2004, 1992). Given that video games are software that renders output (i.e., image, sound, vibration) by algorithmically processing player input, these observations can

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 63

be rephrased to assert that a stealth game like WDL effectively trains players in perceiving the prehensity of digital algorithms.

Playing a stealth game is about finding out what counts as an input value for the software and how this input is processed. It is in this specific sense that stealth games problematize the tremendous prehensive capacities of digital technology. Furthermore, the elements of the human-technology assemblage—avatar, spiderbot, drone—can remain in use at the same time to make targeted interventions in the environment. Even though the interface shows the point of view of only one of these elements at any given moment and requires the player to quickly switch between them if they are to move in concert, the fast and skillful switches between these centers of action cre- ate the impression that one can effectively act in several places at the same time. By way of multiplying centers of action in this manner, the player can modulate the algorithmic environment in complex ways, distracting a guard over here and disabling a laser detector over there to create safe passage.!!

What exactly a player can do in any given situation also depends on the operatives whom one has recruited into the DedSec resistance. To develop their own play style for moving through such a hostile algorithmic environ- ment, the player in WDL is tasked with establishing a network of DedSec operatives. WDL marks a departure in the series because, instead of playing as one main character with proper psychological depth and development, one has to build a team by recruiting fellow Londoners into the DedSec resistance. Indeed, almost every nonplayable character (NPC) whom the player encounters in London can be recruited for one’s “team.” Once they have joined the team, these characters become playable, and one can switch between operatives at almost all times (except in the middle of a mission). Importantly, these operatives have certain characteristics or perks that set them apart from each other. For example, if you recruit a police officer or medical professional, they can get an operative out of jail or hospital more quickly. (The hospital or jail is where your team member goes when they “die” in the game. Shorter stays at either institution mean that the team member becomes playable again more quickly.) The perks that potential recruits would bring to the team can be easily viewed by scanning London- ers (see figure 4.3). So the technostealth of WDL uses the city’s smart sen- sors to infiltrate its main vulnerability: people. In WDL, the population itself becomes a network of potential allies, each with something to contribute

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

64 Chapter 4

to the roster of team members. Against the all-encompassing web of sur- veillance technology, then, WDL pits a heterogeneous collective of engaged civilians. This is the “legion” referred to in the title of the game. From a gameplay perspective, this foregrounds the strategic aspect of technostealth. A productive deployment of one’s team requires that the player always think strategically in terms of which team member’s affordances are helpful in any given situation. In a video game, these affordances are often relatively minor algorithmic procedures that modify the range of player input: a hacking perk might allow the player to hack keycards more quickly or from a greater dis- tance, for instance. Importantly, though, WDL sports an impressive range of perks that modify the gameplay in myriad minor ways, from the mundane to the eccentric. While a particularly fast getaway vehicle is useful when stealth fails, it is also much more conventional than a magician’s ability to hyp- notize enemies and turn them against their allies. The important point to note is that the gameplay mechanics of WDL provide the payer with a large set of techniques and manners that downright require them to develop an individual play style. There are so many perks and gameplay modifiers that most players are bound to fail at trying all or even just the majority of these digital affordances. Instead, one tends to gravitate toward those that reso- nate well with the player’s general disposition. For a stealthy play style, one may want to recruit a beekeeper with a swarm of robotic bees. If you’re in a nerdy mood for ridiculous gaming antics, you may recruit a Londoner who constantly gives away his position to enemies due to his unfortunate flatu- lence. The game also has spontaneous beatboxers and pole dancers ready for recruitment. The point really is to experiment and see what will happen, how a certain trait or procedure informs the digital environment. These perks and gameplay modifiers are the minute inflection points that wait to be cre- atively folded into the more encompassing macroscopic processings of the game software. Thus, the particular challenge that WDL formulates for the player is to explore the vast trove of minor gameplay perks and modifiers to build their own network of distributed digital affordances and deploy them selectively to exploit the vulnerabilities of the fictional smart city.

WDL’s dystopian smart city narrative may be quite conventional. But the aspects of its gameplay highlighted here indicate an interesting “algorith- mic imaginary” that is preoccupied with digital prehensity (Bucher 2017). By means of the multiperspectival exploration and modulation of the envi- ronment, the game enables an involutionary engagement with its software.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 65

Change of Heart © RESCUE the Hostage

Russell Anghel Smuggler Guatidin$=Pérry Harris - ‘edeve@opment

Matarhorn Routerunner Personal Utllity Vehicle

Key Steal Unlimited Range

Figure 4.3

The player has deployed a spiderbot to navigate the game space while the human avatar stays in hiding. The spiderbot is hacking an enemy to reveal relevant informa- tion: if recruited to the player’s team, this NPC would contribute the perk “Key Steal” to the team, meaning that hacking access keys for restricted areas would become easier. The interface also indicates that this enemy can be eliminated by using the spiderbot’s “shock” weapon. Screenshot from Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft 2020).

Figure 4.4

Screenshot of the brief transition moments between hacks. Instead of a regular repre- sentational image (as in figure 4.3), the interface renders the spiderbot and the sur- roundings through neon-colored frames and hatchings.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

66 Chapter 4

As the player moves through and tweaks the digital environment in myriad minor ways, they come to understand the responsiveness of the gaming soft- ware from the inside out. By grasping the algorithmic logic that renders the interface, players learn to build burrows into the surveillance matrix. As they fold digital affordances for imperceptibility around their processual presence, they can effectively immure themselves in the digital environment itself. That WDL wants players to understand the audiovisual interface as the aes- thetic surface of the underlying game software is not only evidenced by the fact that the in-game London functions like a smart city, but also by other design choices. In the quick switches between cameras and other hackable devices, the space rendered by the interface is briefly reduced to basic geo- metric shapes (see figure 4.4). This temporary reduction of London to “data frames” is reminiscent of The Matrix’s green “digital rain” aesthetic, in which material reality is revealed to be composed of cascades of green code. Another case in point is that the game was critiqued for its lack of character develop- ment and character-driven story arcs. None of the many procedurally gener- ated Londoners that one can recruit have any psychological depth to speak of. This is a technical necessity because the game’s main story—including all spoken dialogue—has to be compatible with all potential recruits. As a result, the playable characters populating London are easily perceived as polygo- nous husks for a few particular digital affordances. The interface of WDL is dataphanous, so to speak, conveying that interacting with the video game is indeed a matter of working with the complex algorithmic affordances of a gaming software.

In this algorithmic imaginary, engagement with the game’s software and interface—but also resistance to the smart mandate more generally—consists in modulating the digital environment through series of “minor gestures” distributed across the game space and enhanced by small strategic game- play modifiers (Manning 2016, 20). Like many other open-world games, WDL provides its player with a “sandbox,” meaning that it allows gamers to engage in free and inventive play by providing a malleable material basis and flexible interaction design. Indeed, the game is built for emergent gameplay moments, in which the familiar game mechanics are concerted in such a way as to produce unforeseen effects that the game software in turn processes in unexpected ways. Players are invited to develop their own singular play styles because they are manners of intuitively introducing spontaneity into

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 67

the game’s algorithmic environment. When a player is “in the zone,” they sense the potential for a certain effect as the appetite that certain mechanics or techniques may have for one another precisely because their concerta- tion is as yet unknown or appears ludicrous. Experiments toward emergent gameplay often fail or fall flat, but they can also create series of digital pre- hensions that diverge from the rule-based responsiveness of the game engine and shift it to novel ways of prehending and processing player input. Indeed, moments of emergent gameplay in WDL are contingencies orchestrated with the cybernetic system of capture. In this way, the game affirms what one might call a mannerist disposition toward the digital. This may be taken in two related senses.

In aesthetic theory, mannerism refers to the “self-conscious stylization” of an aesthetic idiom, often one that is beginning to be perceived as his- torical or traditional (Vidal 2012, 29). Mannerist moments and movements are invested in the perceptual surfaces rather than narrative or psychological depth. In this focus on surfaces, mannerisms tend to reproduce received aes- thetic principles with a distorting twist and a penchant for exuberant artifice. Conventional forms are exaggerated, distorted, or fractalized to reach toward the immanent limit of a principle’s productivity (32). Hence, there is also the involutionary appetite for a proliferation of fragments and details that never completely loses sight of the larger scaffold of principles that enables and accommodates its own internal complication. Mannerist art is often described as excessive and extravagant, even vulgar. “Less is a bore,” the man- nerist architect Robert Venturi famously quipped (1992, 17; see also 2004).

In light of these observations, WDL can easily be seen as mannerist in this first sense. The game stylizes the already tired open-world formula established by Ubisoft itself and internally complicates it through the DedSec recruitment system and a panoply of other gameplay modifiers (Delaney 2021). It draws attention to the fact that the dataphanous interface is an aesthetic surface developed by the dynamic concertation of interlocking algorithmic princi- ples. This ostentatious dynamism makes the game’s overall algorithmic and aesthetic shape relatively indeterminate or open to infinite creative deforma- tion. Finally, the game fosters the exploration and serial implementation of minor digital gestures to produce novel and astonishing macroscopic effects.

In a second and philosophical sense, the technostealth of WDL affirms what Didier Debaise has called a “universal” or “cosmological mannerism”

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

68 Chapter 4

(2017, 64). Working toward the concept of a universal mannerism, Debaise first engages with Whitehead’s concept of the superject to rethink subjectiv- ity as a collection of manners:

This [the subject as “superjacio”] could be translated in a variety of ways: “to throw above,” or “to hurl toward.” It no longer refers to a fully realized subject but rather to a tendency: “The aim is at that complex of feeling which is the enjoyment of those data in that way.” It is in the interior of feeling itself, in its forms, that this latent subjectivity is situated. It is, as Whitehead puts it, the manner in which feel- ing deploys itself. This subject is essentially a manner, the manner in which an experience is fashioned, the manner in which something is felt, the manner of witnessing. Each feeling is characterized by its own manner, a tonality that distin- guishes it from all other feelings. (Debaise 2017, 57)

It is important to immediately note that precisely because “there is no dis- tinction between subject and manner” (58), the subject as superject does not simply choose or adopt certain mannerisms: “The subject does not project onto nature, onto its experience, the manners that it will make its own, on the contrary, it is the local manners of prehending, of capturing and integrat- ing, that form the conditions of individuation for an experiencing subject. Manners are therefore immanent to novelty, they are required for the pro- duction of a new subject” (Debaise, 2017, 65).

Each domain of existence is already composed of local manners and pro- cessual modes that give that domain relative consistency. And these manners are expressions of the feeling or affective tonality that govern that domain. This is what Debaise means by “universal mannerism”: not a mannerism that is true or valid anywhere anytime, but the universe thought as an immense constellation of manners of being that processually interlink. A most impor- tant manner for participating in the universe as a mannerist superject is to heed the universe’s “sense of conformation”; that is, to anticipate the “con- formation of the future to the present” (2017, 46). Simply put, in a processual universe, change is bound to occur, and one must proceed in a manner that allows the integration of one’s existence with the attending universe. One has to conspire. This means, as Debaise points out, that one’s subjective exis- tence is conditioned on the universe’s mannerism as locally expressed.

Following this conceptualization, the technostealth of WDL is a tactical mode of operation that engages with the existential manners of that part of the universe which we call “the digital.” And it engages with these manners of the world to invent new superjective modes and procedures for negative

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Technostealth 69

prehension in a hostile environment. This means that the mannerisms of stealth are first and foremost a project of world-making. Indeed, in an era so strongly shaped by digital technology, one is inclined to consider WDL’s technostealth as an instance of what Deleuze, following Leibniz, calls the “game of the world” (2006, 75; translation modified). Different from Nietz- sche, for whom the playfulness of the world is tantamount to the affirmation of chance, Leibniz’s game of the world affirms the “proliferation of princi- ples,” where the task is to know “what hidden principle responds to any given object” (77; translation modified). In sandbox games generally, and in stealth games of this kind in particular, productive moments of play are “executed through excess and not a lack of principles” (77).

The numerous small procedures—perks and gameplay modifiers—that inflect the game’s algorithmic procedures are so many principles whose effi- ciency exceeds their immediate purpose or usefulness. Creatively linked into functional series, these digital manners allow for emergent gameplay that develops solutions unforeseen even by the developers but enfolded in the software as affordances to be activated. In other words, then, the digital art- work provides a finite set of techniques and procedures that can be infinitely concerted into divergent series of worldly prehensions, each fold inflecting how the world comes to experience itself. By moving with the algorithmic logic and procedures of the cybernetic system, the player can maintain a divergent manner of being in the midst of the system’s optimizing pressures, to affirm an exuberant singularity against all odds. As in baroque art, the software envelops procedural folds that can be infinitely developed to under- mine the prehensive ubiquity of the digital architecture. In stealth gameplay, as in the baroque game of the world, the point is to skillfully “conjure a void without giving way to absence” (Deleuze 2006, 77). That is, one staunchly affirms one’s presence in a hostile environment, but in such a way that hos- tility finds nothing on which to project itself. In this way, stealth becomes a “nonbattle”: “You don’t catch your adversary in order to reduce him to absence, you encircle his presence to neutralize him, to make him incompos- sible, to impose divergence upon him” (77). Indeed, later chapters of this book will show that stealth as a mode of world-making can be conceived and practiced as explicitly peaceful.

This peace or harmony is something to remain suspicious of. After all, the harmonization of worldly processes by means of ubiquitous prehensity is also the stated goal of the smart city. In the tout-est-conspirant of the smart city, the

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

70 Chapter 4

targeted harmony is an interested one that pursues the extraction of value from private individuals, as well as the transformation of political action into gestures of optimization. More important, however, is the immense prehen- sive asymmetry that constitutes the digital world as we know it and that con- ditions the desire for stealth. The feeling or affective tonality that pervades the cultural processing of the digital is characterized by distrust, apprehen- sion, and fear. Much as Leibniz did, Debaise explicates the universal manner- ism through the example of “an alert animal” (2017, 70). He emphasizes that it is not so much that the animal “has” fear, but that fear is distributed across the animal’s domain of experience. It is the manner or mode of existence of the animal’s world: “It is only by pure convention that we say that an animal has a fear, as it is clear that the fear is in each of its actions and, more often than not, has taken possession of the acts before the animal is aware of it. We should say, rather, that the animal is possessed by fear and this posses- sion is not something general, as it is situated in particular acts. Each action is inhabited by a modality of fear” (Debaise 2017, 70; emphasis in original).

Stealth as a political practice and cultural fantasy is premised on such atmospheric fear. It seeks harmonization with a potentially hostile and vio- lent milieu, be it “only” the violence of extractivist data capitalism. The man- ners of stealth are imbued with the apprehension of involuntary exposure. And the harmonization toward a nonbattle comes at a price that some find hard to pay: the active production of negative prehensions of one’s existence. And yet, as later chapters will show, stealth harbors the promise that, in the interstices of a surveillance matrix, a micropolitics may take shape that prag- matically refashions the dominant order from within.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

5 The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then: An Interlude

Chapter 4 argued that contemporary stealth aesthetics have a particularly baroque inclination. But what political difference does that make? How do aesthetic principles and conventions process and inform political outlooks on the world?

Walter Benjamin has answered these questions for the German baroque drama, or Trauerspiel. In his book The Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Benja- min shows that the main characteristics of baroque dramas by Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, Andreas Gryphius, and others—among which a preoccupa- tion with appearances and their maintenance, convoluted schemes, and an “intriguer” who sows confusion—negotiate a concept of sovereignty and a social theory for their time:

Of all the deeply torn and divided epochs of European history, the Baroque is the only one to occur in a period of unshakeable domination by Christianity. The medieval avenue of rebellion—heresy—was closed to it, in part precisely because Christianity maintained its authority with such tenacity, but above all because, in the heterodox nuances of doctrinal teaching and practice, the ardor of a new worldly will could not even remotely come to expression. Since, therefore, neither rebellion nor subjection was religiously viable, the collective energy of the epoch was directed toward a complete revolution of the content of life under the orthodox preservation of ecclesiastical forms. This had to lead to the suppression of genuine, direct human expres- sion. (Benjamin 2019, 65-66; emphasis added)

The seventeenth century in Europe experiences a strong thrust of seculariza- tion in the fields of science, culture, and politics, but it cannot yet shake off the powerful network of religious institutions that governs many aspects of society. So even though this epoch develops and formulates new values to guide German society, religion nominally retained its authority and must be reckoned with. To avoid conflict with these archaic institutions, the age

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

72 Chapter 5

required people to obstruct the “genuine, direct expression” of their thoughts and feelings, the deeper-seated “content of life,” so to speak. For Benjamin, the Baroque obsession with aesthetic surfaces is a cultural expression of this social situation. Art that foregrounds the creation of efficient appearances also rehearses the crucial social challenge that consists in satisfying a poten- tially punitive prehensive network while beginning to foster alternative rela- tions in various social domains.

Under these circumstances, the intriguer or schemer becomes a central fig- ure of the Baroque Trauerspiel because they understand politics as a matter of human affects, that is, ultimately, a matter of prehension: “[The intriguer’s] depraved calculations interest the spectator of the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen all the more surely insofar as the latter recognizes here not only a mastery of the political machine but also an anthropological, even physiological knowl- edge that stirs him deeply. The superior intriguer is all intellect and will” (Benjamin 2019, 85; emphasis in original). The intriguer is the one whose thinking is thoroughly invested in feeling. They understand that affects are the drivers of human behavior and that these affects constitute a “calculable engine” (Benjamin 2019, 86; translation modified). Thus, in an explicitly Machiavellian lineage, the baroque art of politics consist in the manipula- tion of affects. A related consequence, according to Benjamin, is that baroque drama has no interest in notions of moral virtue: “Since, in the understand- ing of the age, all historical life has deviated from virtue, the latter became meaningless also for the inner life of characters in the drama. Never did it appear less interesting than in the heroes of these trauerspiels” (80). Human action then is only apparently guided by rational principles or moral com- mandments when, really, it seeks to tactically affect the surrounding world to conform it to its will (to power). This does not mean that individuals and groups do not have any values or virtues, but rather that society harbors values and virtues that are so at odds with each other that they cannot publi- cally and peacefully coexist.

Importantly, from the specific perspective of the Baroque epoch itself, this overall outlook is not specific or contingent to the seventeenth century. Rather, the political aesthetic of the Baroque is this epoch’s specific transla- tion of “the world-historical dynamic into political action” (Benjamin 2019, 86; emphasis added). In this view, the politicality of perception is an aspect of world history in general, but how different epochs engage with the per- ceptual or aesthetic aspect of world history may differ. Radically new social

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then 73

ideas—as empirical science and the bourgeoisie with its ideas of constitutional government were at the time—often need to propagate clandestinely before daring to expose themselves publicly. It is well known, for example, that the establishment of so-called modern democracies heavily relied on secret societies and conspiracy thinking, both to protect new political thinking and to undermine the political status quo (see, e.g., Assmann 2014, 95-112; and Dean 2002, 47-78, and chapter 7 of this book). Indeed, the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that novelty needs to shroud itself in a process of “becoming-imperceptible” to weather the conservative drag of established institutions (279-309).

The question arises, then, of how the transhistorical investment in matters of perception and affect have contributed to the development of our cur- rent political culture. Previous chapters have highlighted that the cultural technique of stealth is facilitated by digital technology. It was also indicated how the contemporary politics of perception develop into an aesthetic pre- occupation with technological prehensity. But how does all this relate to developments in political culture? To what extent does stealth inform certain fundamental notions of our political imaginary? The following chapters of this book will provide various divergent answers to these questions, always in relation to concrete media examples. This interlude attempts to provide a more general historical frame for the subsequent arguments.

The history of stealth since the 1970s can also be told as a story of remarkable transformation of the “content of life” under the “orthodox preservation” of the forms of life: the successful implementation of neoliberal agendas throughout the world has subsumed most areas of public life to economic principles while maintaining the hollow forms of social democracy. Similar to Benjamin’s argument regarding the seventeenth century, then, people’s lived social reality has dramatically changed, even though the reassuring framework of authoritative political institutions is largely intact. This is no small feat, which requires that the concerns of aggressive world-making be articulated through a public discourse that insists on the conservation of political institutions and heritage. As a result, political life itself is hollowed out and reorganized according to economic principles. This furtive intru- sion of economic thought into political life is the reason why, according to Wendy Brown (2015), neoliberalism’s “undoing of the demos” constitutes a “stealth revolution.” This view is supported by the historian Nancy MacLean,

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

74 Chapter 5

who, in her book Democracy in Chains, provides a detailed account of the role that institutional secrecy and surreptitiousness have played in the neolib- eral transformation of political culture. Tracing the long history of American radical libertarianism from its nineteenth-century lodestar John C. Calhoun to its present-day paragons like James M. Buchanan and the Koch brothers, MacLean shows that this libertarian elite developed what the author calls a “stealth plan for America,” which was successful precisely because it circum- vented public scrutiny and transparency (2017, vii). The purpose of this plan was indeed to transform the workings of democratic societies while leaving their representative institutions intact. How was this done? What does this imply concretely? In answering this question, the point here is not to pro- vide a thorough account of neoliberalism’s economic principles. Rather, the focus is on the strategies by which an economic paradigm with deleterious effects for a majority of people—effects such as the erosion of social security systems, the deregulation of markets, the increasing precariousness of labor and the dependence on debt—has been able to establish itself as a leading paradigm in the political sphere. Three key aspects will be highlighted.

The organized resurgence of liberal and libertarian thought in the US in the second half of the twentieth century can be seen as a reaction to both the New Deal and civil rights movements, which temporarily improved the dis- tribution of wealth within society, as well as access to collective resources. By a liberal elite, such costly developments were seen as “coercion of the [rich] minority, a violation of the liberty of individual taxpayers” (MacLean 2017, xxiv). While politicians could well be lobbied to support special interests, this strategy ultimately tended to be thwarted by that cumbersome democratic burden of majority rule, especially after suffrage was extended to women and people of color. “Faced with majority opinion as expressed in votes, politi- cians could not be counted on to stand by their stated commitments. Even those who previously had pledged fealty to state sovereignty, individual lib- erty, and free enterprise would buckle, owing to their self-interest in reelec- tion” (71). Note the analogy to the military motivation for the initiation of the Stealth project (outlined in chapter 3): there, a fundamental change of military strategy was necessary because the Soviet troops and arsenal outnumbered those on the American side. Here, analogously, the libertar- ian movement saw itself in a “numerical minority” that had to be protected “against ‘exploitation’ by majorities of their fellow citizen” (MacLean 2017, 3, 2): “‘Since we are greatly outnumbered,’ [Charles] Koch conceded to the

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then 75

assembled team, the movement could not win simply by persuasion. Instead, the cause’s insiders had to use their knowledge of ‘the rules of the game’— that game being how modern democratic governance works—‘to create winning strategies.’” (MacLean 2017, xxii). Not unlike Leibniz’s game of the world (discussed in chapter 4), the radical libertarian movement began look- ing for the more obscure principles of political process to inflect the workings of democratic governance in its favor. Initially, then, the radical liberal move- ment withdrew from its direct involvement in representational politics and invested secrecy as a political strategy. Indeed, for the libertarian project to succeed, James Buchanan stressed in a speech held in front of a group of early confidants, “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential” (117).

After this important strategy shift, Buchanan and Charles Koch thus set out to build an “effective counterintelligentsia” that would be able to slowly but steadily convert public opinion (116). More important, this group would have to be well organized and fully dedicated to the cause. For this purpose, Charles Koch and the economist Murray Rothbard in particular relied on the writings of Vladimir Lenin:

You cannot understand the influence of the stealth movement that is transform- ing America today without understanding this critical turning point. “We came to realize,” Rothbard later reminisced, “that, as the Marxian groups had discovered in the past, a cadre with no organization and with no continuous program of ‘internal education’ and reinforcement is bound to defect and melt away in the course of working with far stronger allies.” Training was crucial so that the cadre’s members could “make strong and fruitful alliances” with partners who might at the time of the alliance be stronger than the cadre without fear of the cadre’s going over to the temporary ally. (MacLean 2017, 141)

A telatively small but very loyal cadre networked through existing libertarian organizations like the Institute for Humane Studies, as well as newly founded ones such as the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation, would have to lead the cause toward success. This cadre based in newly emerging think tanks went on to produce a body of research—based on thought experiments more often than empirical studies—that provided small-state advocates with scientific credentials and influenced the policies of Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s governments. Further instructed by Lenin, this network understood that meaningful change would not come from the transparent elaboration and defense of its worldview in general. It became clear that a

more efficient strategy consisted in introducing minor policy changes in a

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

76 Chapter 5

piecemeal fashion “by privatizing one function after the other, selling each move as justified for its own sake rather than waiting until the majority of the population is convinced of the case for a libertarian utopia,” as Robert W. Poole Jr., cofounder of the Reason Foundation, put it (MacLean 2017, 144).

Finally, this reliance on minor interventions by an opaque network also allowed the growing movement, which soon labeled itself “neoliberal,” to strategically shift its alliances with major social groups and political par- ties. These shifty arrangements with majoritarian groups are made in the interest of managing appearances that introduce neoliberal policy behind smokescreens of changing social and political causes. For example, MacLean points out that libertarians initially targeted young urban professionals and catered their rhetoric to their presumed lifestyle: “In that early purity, [the] Cato [Institute] often shocked the nation’s conservatives, as when it criticized American military intervention in other countries and called for legalizing drugs, prostitution, and other consensual sex. That unique stance, its first president said, made it ‘the think tank for yuppies’—those who liked social freedom with their economic liberty, and never caught on to where all this was headed” (2017, 142).

This allegiance has waned and, especially since 2008, been replaced by a thorough investment in conservative grassroots movements. Ultimately, these efforts enabled what MacLean refers to as the “Koch team’s most important stealth move”: the transformation and take-over of the Republi- can party (2017, xxix). While ostentatiously catering to racist, antimigrant, Islamophobic, and transphobic sentiment under the guise of a populist agenda, President Donald Trump’s arguably most important domestic policy change consists in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which delivers signifi- cant benefits to the wealthiest households, thus serving the neoliberal and libertarian agendas. The crucial point here, however, is the ways in which that economic agenda has strategically changed how it appears in public to draw support from people of various sociopolitical convictions. Political dis- course becomes a matter of appearances as the renewed discussions around fake news, disinformation, and propaganda indicate. This strategic use of political issues as a front for economic transformation is partly what Wendy Brown refers to as “neoliberalism’s hollowing out of contemporary liberal democracy” (2015, 17).

More important, however, Brown emphasizes that the insinuation of eco- nomic logic into political discourse results in the changed valence of certain political concepts themselves. Take the notion of liberty, for instance. In a

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

The Politicality of Imperceptibility, Now and Then 77

social democratic tradition, the notion of liberty usually refers to the free- dom from oppressive social hierarchies, and thus domination of one social group by another. Consider Murray Bookchin’s definition of political free- dom as “the equality of unequals” (1982, 9). Following this view, freedom— for all, that is—is achieved through “a freely given, unreflective form of social behavior and distribution that compensates inequalities and does not yield to the fictive claim, yet to be articulated, that everyone is equal” (9). Here, freedom is the freedom to participate in society, regardless of one’s socioeco- nomic standing. Such a definition, which explicitly formulates equality as a goal to be achieved, also presumes a willingness of the individual to contrib- ute to society. This is anathema to neoliberal reasoning which, in its most forceful articulations, denies the very existence of such a thing as society. Yet, liberty is of course crucial to neoliberalism. James Buchanan, one of the architects of neoliberal thought, defended freedom in the following way, as related by MacLean:

“T want a society where nobody has power over the other,” Buchanan told an inter- viewer early in the new century. “I don’t want to control you and I don’t want to be controlled by you.” It sounds so reasonable, fair, and appealing. But the story told here will show that the last part of that statement is by far the most telling. This cause defines the “you” its members do not want to be controlled by as the majority of the American people. And its architects have never recognized eco- nomic power as a potential tool of domination: to them, unrestrained capitalism is freedom. (2017: xxxiv)

Here, liberty becomes the freedom from any social obligation toward fel- low citizens, grounded in neoliberalism’s well-known emphasis on the indi- vidual and its rights and responsibilities. This allows neoliberal rhetoric to affirm foundational concepts of democratic political thought while bend- ing their semantics to serve its own agenda. The result is an ingenious twist by which any “coerced” contribution to society, for instance in the form of taxes, becomes an infringement on the individual’s freedom and self- determination. Thus, “as the province and meaning of liberty and equal- ity are recalibrated from political to economic, political power comes to be figured as their enemy, an interference with both” (Brown 2015, 42). In this way, the neoliberal agenda succeeds in both “eviscerating the democratic imaginary” and remaining relatively “illegible” while doing so (28, 38).

As previously mentioned, the foregoing account of neoliberalism’s “stealth revolution” is not meant to provide an adequate account of neo- liberalism itself. Its purpose was to demonstrate that general sociopolitical

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

78 Chapter 5

transformations analogous to those which, according to Benjamin, led to the emergence of the Baroque aesthetic of the seventeenth century can also be observed in the recent past. Those sociopolitical transformations are not mainly concerned with economic policy, but rather with the more general reliance of political culture on the management of perceptions, the virtu- oso modulation of appearances, and the harnessing of opaque principles as techniques for achieving undisclosed goals. Similarly, then, the aesthetics of stealth articulate an understanding of contemporary political culture. To fur- ther establish this link between media aesthetics and the politics of stealth, the following chapters return to TV shows, digital games, and video art that are preoccupied with strategic appearance and concealment.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

6 Sneaking Stealth: The Tracking Shot and Relational Imperceptibility

A Contemporary Tracking Shot

The TV series True Detective sports a much-discussed six-minute tracking shot, in which cop Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) accomplishes a double escape from both the criminal gang that he investigates without authoriza- tion and his police colleagues who might find out about his rogue investiga- tion (Pizzolatto 2014). For five minutes and fifty-four seconds, the camera moves behind and around a body that is precariously placed within an urban battle zone. As the fronts multiply to include opposing gangs and the police, Cohle, whose affiliations to these fronts are temporarily broken, must evade all of them.

This sequence is remarkable for a number of related reasons. First, it stands out for its technical and aesthetic virtuosity. True Detective’s tracking shot stands in a long tradition of carefully composed “unbroken shots” that com- bine a tracking camera movement and the duration of the long take, a tra- dition that spans from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) over Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) and Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1988) all the way to Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) and Alfonso Cuar6n’s Gravity (2013). In fact, the single-take movie in the tradition of Rope has made a noteworthy return in recent years, with films like Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), Ale- jandro IfAarritu’s Birdman (2013) and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015), to name only a few (see Gibbs and Pye 2017). In all these examples, the long-take tracking shot requires an extraordinarily complex orchestration of all elements of production, including camera movement, sound recording, changing lighting conditions, and, of course, the actors’ performance. All these components must be perfectly attuned to each other. For this reason,

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

80 Chapter 6

this chapter will first suggest, the long-take tracking shot can be said to facili- tate the composition of an aesthetic milieu.

More specifically, True Detective’s tracking shot is closely tied to the pro- tagonist’s body and moves with him through the associated aesthetic milieu. As a result, the abovementioned virtuosity of the successful tracking shot is experienced as the extraordinary skill of Rust Cohle. This particular type of tracking shot participates in a modification of the figure of the TV detective: no longer an uninvolved outside observer who reestablishes social order by means of forensic investigation and rationality, the detective is utterly entan- gled in a complex social field whose management puts his own existence at stake. The mode of action to be favored in a situation thus changed is that of stealth, furtive action that is efficient mainly because it remains impercepti- ble. The contemporary detective no longer seeks open confrontation with his opponent in a clear-cut distribution of the “good” upholder of the law and the “bad” criminal. Rather, the stealth detective accomplishes their mission by acting below the threshold of the perceptible and beyond the rule of law. In that, contemporary law enforcers—at least as the media imagine them— are suspiciously close to criminals. This ethico-aesthetic shift of the detective figure, this chapter will argue, astutely renders an aspect of contemporary political culture that the political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse have called “stealth democracy,” a term that indicates the “sup- port for business-type approaches to governing” that should be accountable on demand but need not operate publicly or transparently otherwise (2002, 138). As suggested in the previous interlude, such an attitude supports an approach to political action that considers democratic practice as an incon- venient but necessary facade that must be upheld but may be neglected when one isn’t publicly scrutinized.

And finally, the scene is remarkable because it imports into television the aesthetics of third-person video games. True Detective’s long tracking shot is clearly informed by the aesthetics of the third-person action-adventure and, more specifically, the stealth game. To trace this lineage, this chapter first sets out to establish some general aesthetic features of the stealth action- adventure. By first looking at the video game series Splinter Cell (Ubisoft 2002-2013) and then comparing it to the televisiual tracking shot from True Detective, it will become clear that the securitizing secrecy of stealth is an aes- thetic trend that works across media and art practices. To further establish this point, the argument will conclude by looking at Hito Steyerl’s single-channel

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Sneaking Stealth 81

video “Guards” (2012), which addresses the militarization of everyday life and art institutions in particular, also by means of tracking shots.

Third-Person Point of View and Associated Milieus: Splinter Cell

The Splinter Cell series consists of seven video games and seven novels, all published between 2002 and 2013. The series protagonist, Sam Fisher, is an elite agent within a black-ops division of the National Security Agency (NSA) called “Third Echelon.” In the first novel from the series, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Fisher describes his occupation as follows:

Third Echelon agents are called Splinter Cells, and I was the very first one. We physically infiltrate dangerous and sensitive enemy locations to gather the required intelligence by whatever means necessary. Our prime directive, in a nutshell, is to do our jobs while remaining invisible to the public eye. We’re authorized to work outside the boundaries of international treaties, but the U.S. will neither acknowl- edge nor support our operations. / Thus, Third Echelon, a sub-agency of the NSA, consists of an elite team of strategists, hackers, and field operatives. We respond to crises of information warfare—a war that is hidden from the media and the ordinary man on the street. You’re not going to see our battles on CNN. (Michaels 2004, 58)

Third Echelon’s agents are called “splinter cells” “because they work alone and undercover. Their own government pretends they don’t exist” (Michaels 2004, 120). In this way, the series introduces secretive physical infiltration into the context of contemporary information warfare and the fight against terrorism. This premise of the story also provides the main directives for the gameplay and aesthetics of Splinter Cell. The core mechanics of this “sneaking stealth” enable the player to accomplish infiltration missions without being detected by enemy forces: the player has to move through and create shad- ows (by disabling light sources), distract and lure enemies, perform silent takedowns, hide bodies, and find secret passages, among other things. As chapter 9 will explore in more detail, this also means that stealth gameplay is ideally nonconfrontational and potentially entirely “nonlethal.”

But how is all this action presented to the player? The interface of all Splinter Cell games presents the action in what is called “third-person point of view,” which means that the image renders a point of view usually behind the avatar (Nitsche 2008, 93). When the player moves their avatar through the game world, the “virtual camera” follows it through the space at a more

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

82 Chapter 6

or less fixed distance. This is why Michael Nitsche refers to this third-person point of view as the “following camera” (93). In cinematographic terms, then, most third-person 3D action-adventures present the game action by means of a continuous tracking shot. This manner of establishing point of view is used in most contemporary blockbuster 3D action-adventures, includ- ing the main entries in the Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto, Batman: Arkham, Uncharted, and Assassin’s Creed series. So the third-person point of view is by no means exclusive to stealth games. And to be sure, there are also stealth games in “first-person point of view,” such as the games in the Thief, Deus Ex, and Dishonored series. In the first-person point of view, the image renders the visual field of the fictional character that the player controls. Thus, camera movement corresponds to the avatar’s turning of the head and directional movements. In addition, the image conventionally shows the avatar’s hands at the left and right bottom of the screens, which also indicates the weapon that is currently equipped by the avatar. Chapter 9 looks at Dishonored: Death of the Outsider as an example of first-person stealth adventures. In this chapter, however, the emphasis is on the third-person point of view for two argumen- tative reasons. First, the third-person point of view is the video game conven- tion that True Detective picks up to create its unbroken tracking shot. It is one of the techniques that allows the aesthetics of stealth to wander across media forms. And second, it clarifies that stealth is an ecological approach to power that works through the modulation of an associated aesthetic milieu.

In this regard, the third-person point of view is crucial because it tethers the camera to the avatar and, at the same time, allows the player to explore the surrounding game space. While the distance between the avatar and the camera position is relatively fixed, the position and angle of the camera are not. The player can freely circle the camera around the avatar to scan and analyze the surroundings. As they move both the avatar and the camera,! the player engages in what Michael Nitsche calls a “double exploration” of the game space: “as hero and as detached camera operator” (2008, 98). While this formulation is technically correct, and even though inexperienced play- ers will find the required coordination of their thumbs challenging, in more advanced gamers, these two separate movements of avatar and camera expe- rientially fuse into one complex exploration of the environment in relation to the avatar. This aspect is crucial to the stealth tracking shot as it is theo- rized here: it does not foreground the two separate elements—avatar and game space—that must be considered and navigated simultaneously; rather,

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Sneaking Stealth 83

SILENCED

Figure 6.1 Third-person point of view in Splinter Cell: Blacklist (Ubisoft Toronto 2013). The fol- lowing camera is placed behind a crouching Sam Fisher.

it emphasizes the shifting relational field that these elements cocompose. To put it in the terms introduced in chapters 2-4, the third-person point of view in Splinter Cell renders an aesthetic experience of what an prehensive or event ecology is for a particular entity in that ecology: the avatar. One could say, then, that the third-person point of view articulates the avatar’s perspective of the universe because it allows for the exploration of “what the universe is for” the avatar (Whitehead 1968, 66).

To substantiate these ideas, consider a playthrough of the mission “Border Crossing” from the game Splinter Cell: Blacklist (Ubisoft Toronto 2013).” This mission tasks the player to obtain three intel files without being detected. In this particular side mission of the game, detection will lead to an “automatic fail” and respawn the player at the beginning of the mission. This means that the player has to adopt a particular play style of “pure stealth” or what the game refers to as “Ghost” mode: the player remains undetected and bypasses enemies entirely.* Indeed, higher mission scores are awarded for leaving enemy guards completely untouched. In the mission “Border Crossing,” this leads to a suspenseful calmness of the gameplay: there are no gunshots, bomb explosions, or any other noise of force-on-force combat. Instead of seeking open confrontation, the player calmly analyzes the game space as a material

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

84 Chapter 6

and perceptual ecology by repeatedly circling the camera around the stealth agent. This process of situating the avatar in its milieu not only involves the parsing of the space into, say, cover spots, but also an attunement to the posi- tion of enemy guards, the direction they look in, their movement patterns, and perceptual abilities (e.g., usually snipers are more perceptive than regular guards, who have smaller vision cones). All these factors need to be consid- ered to find openings in the perceptual field, or what J. J. Gibson would call affordances, that is, relational potentials or potential relations, for staying out of sight (2015, 119-135).* Before the avatar enters the back of the truck, the player has to perfectly time the short interval in which the four enemy posts, including one sniper, are not looking at the truck. This moment is the player’s affordance for stealth. They barely succeed: the detection warning—a white arrow that points in the direction of the guard that sees them, accompanied by a shrill sound—indicates that the sniper on the roof has almost identified a hostile individual on the premises.° A small sensory prickling of the avatar’s presence has almost constituted a macroperception. Stealth gameplay turns around this “almost” of perception. To accomplish the mission, one must very well expose oneself to the risk of detection. But one must do it in such a way as to remain just under the threshold of the perceptible.

As the video shows, the openings for stealth are constantly shifting in relation to the changing perceptual ecology (i.e., enemy movement, chang- ing sightlines, etc.). Accordingly, every moment of continued individuation through the surrounding game space must be composed with that immediate environment, the associated milieu. The remainder of the walkthrough video gives an indication of the level of complexity that such a milieu can attain: in addition to various human enemies with a range of perceptual abilities, the player encounters surveillance cameras, laser grids, land mines and—in other missions—guard dogs, all with their own sensory capacities. Indeed, the chal- lenge that Splinter Cell’s missions articulate for the player can be thought as prehensive labyrinths in movement, as first suggested in chapter 4.

This example also already shows that “pure stealth” challenges the player to consider windows of opportunity that are infinitesimally small, asymptot- ically approaching the perceptual thresholds of various other elements that compose the labyrinth. What will become clear in the following discussion is that finding a way out of this labyrinth cannot be a matter of simply making the avatar move against the environment and confront enemies. Rather, it is a matter of involution, that is, individuating by thoroughly involving oneself

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Sneaking Stealth 85

in the perceptual ecology, of actively individuating with and through one’s immediate surroundings by perceiving one’s adversaries’ perception and moving with or alongside their movements. This aspect of withness—the rela- tionality that characterizes the individual’s continued existence—is crucial.

When Gilbert Simondon proposed his concept of the “associated milieu,” it was precisely to withdraw from the conception of a preconstituted indi- vidual who exists in an already defined, mechanical space and to foreground the “chrono-topological ensemble” that constitutes a more expansive and ecological process of individuation (2020, 160). There is thus a functional distinction between individual and individuation: “In a word, what is an individual? We respond to this question that we cannot rigorously speak of the individual but of individuation; we must come back to the activity, to the genesis, instead of attempting to grasp the fully formed being in order to discover the criteria by means of which we will know whether or not it is an individual. The individual is not a being but an act, and the being is an indi- vidual as an agent of this act of individuation through which it appears and exists” (Simondon 2020, 208-209; emphasis added). By foregrounding the process of individuation, Simondon also asks the reader to expand the scope of their inquiry: individuation comprises most obviously the individual being as a temporary result and an important, indispensable agent for the intensified continuation of process. But the process of individuation also requires the consideration of the attendant world because it coconstitutes the energetic system through which individuation occurs. Simondon refers to this “con- stituting energetic system” as the individual’s associated milieu to under- score that it “should not be conceived as a new term that would be added onto matter [or the individual misconceived as an self-contained entity]: the milieu is the very activity of relation,” which allows for the preservation of the unity of process (50). So the surrounding world is not an external resource that merely fuels the individual; it relationally composes and participates in the process of individuation.

Simondon is led to this view because he considers individuation “in light of the notions of form and information” and clearly gives precedence to the latter: “The notion of form must be replaced with that of information,” with the latter also thought of as a process rather than an entity (16). Simondon defines information as follows: “Information, whether this be at the level of tropistic unity or at the level of the transindividual, is never deposited in a form that is able to be given; it is the tension between two disparate reals, it

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

86 Chapter 6

is the signification that will emerge when an operation of individuation will discover the dimension according to which two disparate reals can become a system; infor- mation is therefore an initiation of individuation, a requirement for individuation, for the passage from the metastable to the stable, it is never a given thing” (Simondon, 2020: 11; emphasis in original, translation modified). Informa- tion, the energy differentially distributed across the milieu, prods individua- tion into a next metastable state. Information—understood as the “tension between disparate reals” that is bound to appear in a dynamic, open system— is an existential problem for individuation’s unity of process and requires a resolution. It is a “difference that makes a difference,” to hark back to Greg- ory Bateson’s definition once more (2000, 315). To individuate is to engage one’s environment as a relational field and integrate the energetic existential problems in such a way that individuation can continue. In this sense, what we call the “individual” is the temporary “expression of a resolution” found at a certain moment under the attending conditions (Simondon 2020, 52). But this resolution is not a straightforward dissolution of the tensions: “The resolving individuation is one that conserves the tensions in the equilibrium of metastability instead of nullifying them in the equilibrium of stability. Individuation makes tensions compatible but does not relax them; it discov- ers a system of structures and functions within which tensions are compati- ble” (Simondon 2020, 226). Considered as a process, then, information is the systemwide act of making compatible energetic tensions without resolving them. In a digital technical object, this in-formation of the associated milieu can lead to the object’s concretization, as discussed in chapter 3. And surely, from the perspective of the game software Splinter Cell: Blacklist, every suc- cessfully accomplished stealth mission is a process of concretizing an artifi- cially abstract algorithmic system toward one particular outcome.® Engaging with Splinter Cell: Blacklist is, analogous to what was said about Watch Dogs: Legion (WDL) in chapter 4, to creatively modulate the algorithmic logic of game software via its interface. It is to test the constraints, affordances, and reacitvity of complex digital procedures. This said, the perspective of this chapter is somewhat different. Here, the focus has shifted from the technical object to the human individual, especially with regard to their imagined par- ticipation in a political process. Importantly, technical and living individua- tion individuate differently, especially with regard to concretization. While technical objects are “never completely concrete” (Simondon 2017, 39; see chapter 3), “living beings are concrete to begin with. One mustn’t confuse

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Sneaking Stealth 87

the tendency toward concretization with the status of entirely concrete exis- tence” (51).” This means that for a living individuating being, the act of mak- ing energetic tensions within the associated milieu compatible cannot be achieved through a transduction or reorganization of its internal distribution of functions. Instead, the living individual “condenses information, trans- ports it, and then modulates a new milieu” (Simondon 2020, 209).

In this conception, then, it can be said that stealth gameplay composes for the continuous and active integration—a making-compatible—of ten- sions in an aesthetic milieu. The aesthetic feature that enables this process of individuation in Splinter Cell’s digital analog of stealth warfare is the tracking shot, tethered to the body of the avatar and yet mobile. First and foremost, the player perceives the variant and invariant energy gradients in the audi- tory and optic array (see chapter 4) that prevent them from individuating toward the goal formulated by the mission. Some of these gradients can then be modulated to no longer act as obstacles to the avatar’s continued algo- rithmic individuation. The player can introduce new energy gradients into the simulated environment. For instance, the player can make the avatar Sam Fisher throw one of his gadgets, a so-called noisemaker, into the envi- ronment. Nonplayable enemy combatants within earshot will pick up on this sound, explore it, and thus be “lured” away from their regular move- ment and surveillance patterns. But the Al enemy might return to its regular movement pattern after exploring the area and finding nothing, not even the noisemaker. As chapter 10 explores in more detail, gaming AI is often artificially stupid or just unresponsive to make the software work properly as a game. And yet the more varied the enemy combatants are, the more complex the task of integrating the threatening tensions within the milieu without dissolving them into “Game over.”

This implies that, in “total stealth” gameplay, one becomes one’s AI ene- mies to a certain extent. This is not at all in the sense that one simply copies them or traces their movements. Rather, as in the video excerpt under study here, the player moves with and modulates the algorithmic enemies’ move- ment to extract from this associated aesthetic milieu a contrapuntal move- ment that constitutes a possibility of digital survival.

It is this activity of making tensions compatible and moving into the next temporary affordance for imperceptibility only to encounter new or renewed tensions within the milieu that gives total stealth gameplay its lowly pul- sating, joyful suspense. Stealth acquires this simmering intensity precisely

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

88 Chapter 6

because adversarial tensions are integrated but not dissolved. In a shooter game or lethal stealth gameplay, these tensions could certainly be dissolved by “killing” the AI enemy. But, as Simondon teaches, “Only death would be the resolution of all tensions; and death is not the solution to any prob- lem” (2020, 226). By contrast, total stealth must continuously reckon with these tensions while maintaining them in an integrated manner. Under such precarious conditions, the success or failure of stealth depends on the small- est deviations: just one miscalculated step, one badly timed move, and the entire perceptual ecology tips from imperceptibility into open confrontation (or a “mission abort” in the case of the present example) because one digital procedure has registered another one. To avoid this, the milieuwide vibrant attention of the stealth gamer encompasses the entire aesthetic milieu of the game space to find within it the microscopic opening for disappearance, the split second where the next vanishing act can occur. One could say that stealth gameplay is a bit like a virtuoso walk on a tightrope to the extent that both can be interrupted by just the smallest mistake. The difference is that, to avoid that mistake, stealth gameplay actually requires a lot of variable movement, course corrections, and detours. The particular aesthetic achieve- ment of the third-person point of view in combination with the following camera is to enable this relational exploration of a process of individuation (including the individual and its associated aesthetic milieu), the aesthetic attunement toward smallest deviations, and the modulation of the environ- ment to ensure continued individuation.

Stealth Democracy: True Detective

This desire to avoid smallest mistakes constitutes a parallel between the aes- thetic of the stealth game and the televisual tracking shot in True Detective.® As was stated at the beginning, an extended tracking shot like the one in True Detective requires a concerted effort to integrate all elements of produc- tion. The smallest mistake will lead to a “cut,” and the take will have to be repeated from the very beginning. Of course, many extraordinarily long one-takes are not actually shot continuously. Like Hitchcock’s Rope, recent continuous takes have included moments of darkness or extreme close-ups of monochrome surfaces that allow an edit to go unnoticed; or they are largely animated, as in the case of Gravity’s opening scene. In all these cases, though, the aesthetic continuity of the shot is maintained across technical

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Sneaking Stealth 89

discontinuities.’ This is important for the one-take’s aesthetic efficacy because it draws much of its suspense from this apparent capacity for perfect integra- tion of maintained tensions. The holding of the same though mobile point of view for several minutes can create a variety of affective intensities relat- ing to paranoia and imminent threat (The Shining), claustrophobia and the impossibility of escape (Children of Men), or commanding force and power (Goodfellas). The suspense of True Detective’s tracking shot arises, much like a successful walkthrough in a stealth game, from the continued individuation of the protagonist through an overwhelmingly complex environment and a cascade of adverse events.

The unbroken sequence begins as an attempted robbery. The Iron Cru- saders, led by gang member Ginger and Rust Cohle in an unauthorized undercover operation, want to rob the members of a rival gang. However, the robbery soon turns into an open shoot-out. When the cops arrive, chaos breaks loose. Cohle is in a most precarious situation: both the rival gang and the police want his neck, the latter for his unauthorized policing methods. To escape with valuable information, he decides to blow his cover with the Iron Crusaders and takes Ginger prisoner. His task is now to subdue his cap- tive, who tries to escape from Cohle’s escape, and evade the two rival gangs as well as the cops. Aesthetically, this sequence is rendered through a tracking shot that is tethered to Cohle’s body in the same way that the camera of a third-person stealth game follows its avatar. Although the camera is allowed a somewhat wider range of distance from the protagonist than in Splinter Cell, Cohle is clearly the center around which the camera revolves as he moves through space. Indeed, the camera freely circles around Cohle to reveal elements of interest such as approaching enemies, a police helicopter, and potential escape routes. More important, the chain of events that is presented borrows many elements from video game action, especially in the latter half of the sequence, beginning after Cohle has spoken to his partner Marty on the phone. The influence of video game aesthetics is evident in moments where Cohle has to fend off individual enemies through a combination of dodge/counter/strike, run after Ginger with an urgency reminiscent of tailing or chasing missions and their “Reduce distance to target” warnings, and take cover and hide behind bushes to wait until the threat of a police squad has passed. Like the stealth agent whose existence is denied even by their own government, Cohle’s survival strategy is to make tactical use of a complex perceptual and political ecology to find openings for imperceptibility.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

90 Chapter 6

The most important aesthetic difference between stealth gameplay as discussed earlier in this chapter and True Detective’s tracking shot consists in the divergent speeds and levels of noise that allow the protagonist to dis- appear. Stealth gameplay can be extraordinarily slow and silent. For example, consider the long periods of waiting necessary to proceed undetected in the excerpt from Splinter Cell: Blacklist; recall the suspense that emerges from the desire to avoid any kind of noise to the point that even the detection warning seems like an unwelcome, startling intrusion. In True Detective, this overall calmness and slowness of stealth gameplay are eschewed in favor of an audio- visual attack on the senses. This is mainly achieved by the sonic environment that the sequence creates without establishing a sense of order or orienta- tion. The viewer's sonic orientation is disrupted at the same time as Cohle’s when gunshots are fired in the small projects bungalow and the soundtrack is taken over by a high-pitched ringing. When Cohle’s and the viewer's hear- ing returns, it is assaulted by screams, sirens, and vehicle noise. In addition to this sonic disorder, the viewer is further disoriented by a camera whose move- ment they cannot control. Instead of following a clear trajectory, the camera erratically jerks into any direction from which light and sound assail. This happens, for instance, once the police helicopter can be heard and its search- lights enter the frame: the camera pans up and we briefly lose track of the individual that anchors the shot. In short, whereas the following camera in stealth video games suggests imperceptibility through a tentative, relational movement with the surroundings, the tracking shot in True Detective makes the individual disappear into a sea of noise. (This is a pattern of televisual stealth: Recall that the opening scene of The Americans also makes the target’s stealthy action-perception disappear into ambient noise.) This aesthetic dif- ference is immediately ethico-political in two major respects. The first con- cerns the ethical potential of the long tracking shot itself, while the second is relevant to the figure of the contemporary detective more generally.

In the essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin sug- gests that the long take might have a particular potential to activate viewers and foster in them a simultaneously more dispersed and more focused mode of attention:

[The long take or plan-séquence] affects the relationships of the minds of the spec-

tators to the image, and in consequence it influences the interpretation of the

spectacle. ... it implies, consequently, both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Sneaking Stealth 91

progress. While analytical montage only calls for him to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should see, here he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives. (Bazin 2005, 35-36)

An uninterrupted shot activates the viewer because it encourages them to freely roam the image in surface and in depth, as well as to focus on elements that speak to their own interests. No shot/reverse shot nudges them into following the conversation between two characters; no close-up of a particu- lar object patronizingly suggests “Pay attention! This will be important later on.” There is an ethics to this aesthetic because, instead of prescribing mean- ing as montage would, the long take gives both freedom and responsibility to choose how one might be concerned by the image.

One cannot simply transpose this argument about the films of Orson Welles and Jean Renoir to the context of contemporary media. The relevance of Bazin’s observations to the present account does not lie in their applicabil- ity to the following camera in video games or the tracking shot in True Detec- tive, but rather in the productive tension between these technically related procedures. If Bazin suggests that the long take liberates the viewer from the predetermination of meaning through editing, surely this is no longer the case in True Detective. It is impossible to calmly assess the various components of the image and linger on those that one might find of interest. The reasons for this difficulty lie partly in the mobility and speed of the camera and partly in the fact that the long take is indexed to one particular body within the frame. So instead of the editor, it is the camera operator and the protagonist of the sequence who restrict the viewer’s freedom of choice. But none of this diminishes the ethical stakes of this sequence. Rather, the tension between Bazin’s concept and True Detective’s percept discharges into a reconsideration of what can count as an ethics for our time. For Bazin, the ethical achieve- ment of the long take is to give the viewer agency as the outside observer of a mostly static frame filmed in depth. In today’s mobile long takes, there is no outside. Nor is there, strictly speaking, individual agency. The contemporary tracking shot foregrounds ecology and assemblage, individuation rather than the individual. The focus is on a Simondonian making-compatible of tensions to create an existential line of flight for protagonists, avatars, and viewers.!°

This concern can be articulated at various speeds: it can be slow, as in Splinter Cell, or fast, as in True Detective. In either case, it is an ethics that is

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

92 Chapter 6

no longer based on reflective judgment according to a predetermined moral standard, but one that works through immanent criteria and requires that one adapt one’s capacities to affect and to be affected in such a way as to create possibilities of life (Deleuze 1988, 17-29). True Detective suggests by way of plot development that if Rust Cohle had adhered to the moral and professional standards of the police, his crime investigation would have been unsuccessful (and the scene discussed here might never have occurred). A code of conduct formulates the sanctioned rules and methods by which law enforcement officials are allowed to proceed but, the series suggests, the very strictness of those rules may curtail the investigators’ efficacy. True Detective proposes alternatively that to achieve justice, appropriate modes of moving and behaving need to be continuously (re)invented in relation to a given situation. Establishing “the right thing to do” is always a relational practice; the proposed solution is always provisional. True Detective’s track- ing shot articulates this aesthetically by placing a vulnerable individual in a highly complex, threatening environment and by highlighting the multiple and changing requirements for survival through the mobile camera circling around the individual. In this way, the series performs an ethics on the fly for what Gilles Deleuze calls the “control society,” in which the conditions for appropriate participation and intervention constantly shift (1995, 177-182).

This changed notion of ethics becomes clearer with regard to the figure of the detective articulated in this sequence, and in True Detective more generally. Rust Cohle belongs to a group of recent detectives in televisual crime fiction whose commitment to the conventional values of transparency, accountabil- ity, and objectivity is questionable. A considerable number of contemporary TV criminal investigators—including characters like Dexter, Carrie Mathison, and Saga Norén—stand out for being so utterly involved in the complex real- ity of their cases that they are no longer able to objectively assess a situation as a rational, external observer.'! Moreover, their outstanding intelligence borders on madness and they disrespect chains of command and protocol.” It would be wrong to interpret this trend as the failure and decline of the detective on TV, for at the same time, these characters are utterly efficacious. Indeed, they are often presented as the only ones who are paranoid enough to perceive reality appropriately and unconventional enough to mete out justice. This type of detective—involved and irrational—is a reworking of the figure to the context of the control society and its increased complexity.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2474402/book_9780262380768.pdf by guest on 18 November 2024

Sneaking Stealth 93

Morally flexible detectives are able to insert themselves into a changed ecol- ogy of powers.!%

This transformation of the detective figure also produces a shift in the “dis- tribution of the sensible” that the detective conventionally articulates (Ran- ciére 2010, 36). The detective is no longer the one who makes the obscure domains of society transparent, who observes and logically deduces a preex- isting, verifiable truth from the available factual evidence to reestablish social order (Thomas 1995). Here, the detective enters the opacity of criminality and produces negative prehensions of their own existence to create new realities. The police detective becomes a stealth agent. This mediated distribu- tion of the sensible and its figure of the stealth agent also strike at the core of predominant Western discourses of democratic process. Such discourses conventionally imagine the political sphere as one in which citizens of the state or their representatives communicate rationally and deliberate on their various agendas with the aim of arriving at a viable consensus. This under- standing relies on a number of concepts that have shaped modern political thought: Citizens appear as subjects with certain rights and duties; they are represented by their members of parliament who are accountable to the elec- torate; politics fundamentally relies on the human faculty of reason.'4 Law enforcement and the judiciary are to support this understanding of demo- cratic political process. Following Simondon, this model and its distribution of the sensible are a transindividual invention that aims at organizing the collective individuation of people. Analogously to the individual’s making- compatible of tensions in their associated milieu, “transindividual action is what makes it such that