The Aesthetics of Stealth: Imperceptibility as Aesthetic Practice and Rhetoric Strategy

This article is an excerpt from the monograph The Aesthetics of Stealth (MIT Press, 2024). The first part of the article conceptualizes stealth as tactical imperceptibility and resistance to normative transparency in digital culture. The second part of the article analyzes the rhetoric deployment of stealth in political discourse. Analyzing two recent examples, the coronavirus described as a "stealth virus" and "stealth voters" during the 2020 US electoral campaign, the section argues that the rhetorical function of stealth consists in suggesting a large conspiratorial in-group and in ascribing willful deception to others.