by Finbarr Curtis
This one time in college I learned that if you work hard enough you can get Sonic Youth to play Eric’s Trip. It’s not that complicated. You just yell the name of the song until Thurston Moore says (pretty much to shut you up): “Okay, okay, we’ll play it.” As the third track on Daydream Nation, Eric’s Trip is an education of sorts, but not the kind offered by college. As the song tells us:
I can't see anything at all
All I see is me
That's clear enough
That's what's important
To see me
Back then, I probably found more irony in the lyrics that authorial intent would have it. Coupling “I can’t see anything at all” with “All I see is me” came across like a disavowal of anything like “enlightenment” and seemed calibrated to measure just the right amount of ironic distance native to the New York punk scene of the last millennium. But now I’m not sure. So it might be better a couple decades later to read the mantra “to see me” at something like face value. It’s a safe bet this was meant as something countercultural, a quest for interior fulfillment at the expense of conventional measures of educational, career, and worldly success.
Eric’s Trip’s pedagogical philosophy would seem, then, to be a far cry from the sober warnings to undergraduates to think about the marketability of college degrees in the humanities. In this post, I want to think about what people are seeing when they look for the “value” of humanistic education. My view is that supporters and critics of the humanities, while seemingly at odds, actually share the view that an education should satisfy what students really want, or should really want. Choosing whether to satisfy some deeper longing or material need, students can either free their minds from social constraints or happily enslave themselves to the capitalist vision of worldly success. I propose that these options miss the point by trying to figure out what the humanities give you rather than what the humanities produce.
