A thought occurred to me recently, and once it appeared I couldn’t quite unsee it.
In the lore of World of Warcraft, demon hunters blind themselves so they can gain a different form of vision. The ability is called Spectral Sight. It allows them to perceive demons hiding in plain sight. Imperceptible corruption moving through the world in forms others will miss.
The cost of that sight is high. Not everyone survives the ritual with their sanity intact.
Lately, I’ve wondered whether critical scholars develop something similar.
Living inside institutions while studying their logics changes how one sees. Patterns that once felt ambiguous, sometimes what first seems benign and even natural, become clearer. Silence doing work, relationships being extracted from, decisions made elsewhere but narrated as collective.
After a while, certain things become difficult not to notice.
Perhaps this is the quiet cost of inhabiting the very institutions one critiques.
Demon hunters call it Spectral Sight.
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