Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance

Tamarkin's book puts forth a number of theses about what she calls relevance, based on an impressive and disparate number of sources. Relevance is understood as (1) a property of certain objects (especially poems and paintings), (2) an emotion (“the emotional side of consciousness”) experienced by people, and (3) the acts through which anything becomes meaningful or interesting to someone. These three are not obviously compatible, and work appears to be required. Could the work be philosophical?Tamarkin's title announces a history of sorts, and then the waters quickly become too deep for comfort. In her attempt to determine the meaning of the word relevance, she resorts to etymology, to idiosyncratic uses of the term by various authors (Alfred Schutz, Dan Sperber, Emerson, et al.), to translations of translations (Derrida on Hegel), and to attestations of the word in English—all to no great avail. The relatively recent history of the term causes her to claim that “relevance . . . does not have much of a history before the nineteenth century” except in Scottish law; this claim seems self-defeating, as well as an evident case of missing out on the use/mention distinction.Each of the ten chapters is placed under the aegis of one main author. Most of them (poets, philosophers, and painters) are staple ingredients of American studies lore: Poe, Emerson, the two Jameses, Winslow Homer, Dewey, Whitehead (by adoption), Tanner (by necessity), Derrida (by mistake), and a few others. The series suggests at times a primer in Pragmatism, as Tamarkin indeed argues that truth is relevance and, with the unfailingly bizarre Whitehead, that relevance might even be God. But the book tends to associate its various heroes through a model of contingent sociability that may raise eyebrows: a shipwreck in Crane (Stephen) and a shipwreck in Homer (Winslow); an extraordinary number of Harvard faculty members; Alain Locke, a student of F. C. S. Schiller, who influenced Tanner and fought with Albert C. Barnes, for whom Dewey did work; and the New Orleans of Degas, whose well-documented attraction to dancers suggests to Tamarkin the technical term “relevé” that, via Derrida and Hegel, becomes Edgar Allan Poe's raven, which “little relevancy bore.” Indeed, anything may be apropos of something; but at the same time, given Tamarkin's decided partiality to associative logic (if logic is the word)—and as Whistler (whom she quotes) quipped—the apropos may be gone forever.