David Carroll Simon reviews Apropos of Something

Elisa Tamarkin. Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 440 pp.

28 June 2023

Review by David Carroll Simon

One distinctive feature of Elisa Tamarkin’s searching meditation on relevance is the priority it grants to the personal, the contingent, the untested, and the indefinite—to, in other words, vital intellectual and aesthetic experiences that are often excluded from the domain of scholarly propriety. Discussing Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Tamarkin writes, “And now, when I think about the raven ‘perched upon the bust of Pallas,’ ‘perched above the chamber door,’ I cannot help also thinking about the way William James likens consciousness itself to the alternate ‘flight and perchings’ of a bird’s life,” and then she explains James’s metaphor (pp. 47–48). Her choice to record what she “cannot help . . . thinking”—right “now,” as she composes these lines—conveys her sensitivity to and forthrightness about the vagaries of intellectual labor, which is messier than its devotees tend to acknowledge even when it is also painstaking.

Tamarkin’s intermittently personal emphasis points to her interest in the dynamic relationship between contingency and hard-won orderliness: this is a learned and deeply researched book that establishes continuities across an extraordinary variety of materials through careful acts of interpretation, and yet it is also an exploratory essay that does not disguise the role of fortuitousness in assembling its archive. Tamarkin’s discussion ranges from Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson to William James, John Dewey, and Alain Locke; it also includes painters such as Winslow Homer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Edgar Degas. The ingenuity with which she reads across these disparate objects signals the book’s status as an example of what it describes, for the connections she traces exemplify James’s point that “importance is made” rather than simply discovered (p. 4). Throughout, she presents art and criticism as fundamentally concerned with this project of making things matter. Her fondness for puns can be understood in this light. If, for instance, “The Raven” is about “a lover in mourning making meaning on a wing,” and if the incidental association of this bird with James’s avian consciousness enriches Tamarkin’s developing interpretation, then mental and linguistic noise has become an integrative resource, knitting the object together with her account of it and shaping the other readings that are eventually made to fit the total structure (p. 48). This book is as much a writer’s achievement as a scholar’s, and it builds a mind-expanding argument for why this should be so.

Tamarkin’s interpretations locate their objects in illuminating cultural and intellectual contexts; in this respect, her argument is historical. Yet she is more contemplative than most historicists. Her focus is not the material conditions of art and thought but the philosophical questions about relevance raised by her sources—questions about how a person takes an interest in this rather than that, or about how something comes to matter against a background of alternatives. She thus proposes an atypically philosophical conception of history that embraces the fleeting and the mental; such a history is what this book ultimately, wonderfully delivers. However, she occasionally makes sweeping historical pronouncements that do not reflect this ruminative method. For example, she writes: “No one thought about relevance and irrelevance before the nineteenth century aside from their limited use in Scottish law for determining evidence or pleading a case” (p. 5). Is that true? To my mind, Michel de Montaigne is already, in the sixteenth century, a philosopher of relevance who gives careful thought to what matters to him and to the contingency and changeability of those determinations. Tamarkin calls Emerson “our greatest philosopher of making the irrelevant count,” but Montaigne, a favorite of Emerson’s and the author of an essay entitled “Of Thumbs,” is just as good a candidate (p. 62). Sometimes Tamarkin seems interested in the history of the word “relevance,” but this is not really her topic; Emerson, she observes, does not use it much, and it is among this book’s virtues that it explores the wide range of issues the word calls to mind (p. 61). Tamarkin does not really defend the claim for historical novelty, which reinforces my sense that it is out of place. Though periodizing gestures are infrequent and, in my view, marginal to the book’s project, they are worth reflection because they risk interfering with one of Tamarkin’s accomplishments. She offers an inspiring redescription of the world as inexhaustible in its potential to matter, examining the emergence of unanticipated urgencies from what was once perceptual background. The underexplained historical narrative risks writing off centuries of thinking, writing, and making, with all their ongoing promise.

Perhaps, in place of the firm demarcation, there is something more to say about the changing significance of relevance as it can be measured by explicit awareness, direct attention, and sustained theorizing. This question of self-consciousness is an important if often implicit element in Tamarkin’s account, which demonstrates the difference self-consciousness makes to the experience of relevance. Her readings of paintings are especially good at showing how this works. She does not simply bring awareness to the viewer’s experience of what matters as it plays out in time. Rather, she tends to read paintings as allegories of relevance; they do not just entail but are in fact about this experience. In Winslow Homer’s Moonlight, Wood Island Light, for instance, she explains that “the point” is to discover the “point of red pigment on the horizon,” which is the titular lighthouse: “If we look long enough at Homer’s picture, that minute thing in the background comes to the surface at the limits of perception and gets meaningfully activated. And that is the point” (pp. 160, 160–61). In centering the centering of relevance, the book shows how attention to a familiar experience can change it. Such a shift might be understood as a rethinking of the target of evaluation—a decision to zoom out from the aesthetic object to encompass the scene of perception, conceived here as dynamic, world-embracing, introspective, and dense with affect. This is a book to which I will return, in part because it trains the mind to relate to things with an enlivening seriousness of purpose that counters the strained neutrality of normative scholarly practice.