Apropos of Something

Before roughly 1800, nothing was irrelevant. Not because everything mattered equally, but because the very concept of irrelevance had not yet been invented.

A Concept With a Birthday

Relevance feels like a timeless logical relation, the kind of thing that must have always existed. Tamarkin's central provocation is that this feeling is wrong.

Relevance as a broad intellectual category is a nineteenth-century Anglo-American invention, born from legal procedure and then expanded into philosophy, art, and social thought.

The Word Carries the Argument

The root verb means to re-elevate, to lift something up again. That etymology is not a curiosity; it encodes the whole idea. Making something relevant is an act of rescue, not a recognition of inherent worth.

This reframes countless everyday judgments. When we call an old painting or an unfashionable idea irrelevant, we are not describing it accurately; we are declining to do the work of elevating it.

How Attention Made Relevance Necessary

The invention of relevance tracks a broader crisis: the recognition, sharpened in the nineteenth century, that consciousness is selective and cannot hold everything at once.

Emerson named a version of this problem: experience arrives as an overwhelming succession of impressions, and the mind must somehow organize them. Once thinkers accepted that attention is always choosing, the question of what earns attention became urgent and unavoidable.

The Mistake of Treating Relevance as Fixed

The most common error is assuming relevance is a stable property that objects either have or lack permanently. In practice, relevance is relational and revisable. What was dismissed yesterday can become central tomorrow when circumstances shift, and treating irrelevance as final forecloses exactly the re-elevation the concept makes possible.

Lifting the Forgotten Into View

The deeper mechanism runs through attention itself. Tamarkin draws on William James and phenomenological thought to show that consciousness is not a neutral receiver but an active filter.

Relevance

=

A historically invented relation in which something overlooked or inert is actively re-elevated into present attention and concern.

Irrelevance

=

Not an inherent property but a condition produced by neglect, the failure or refusal to perform the act of elevation.

Attentional community

=

A group that shares norms about what deserves notice, making relevance a social achievement, not only a private perceptual one.

Because any theory of relevance is also a theory of attention, it cannot be purely individual. Groups develop shared habits of noticing, and those habits determine what seems obviously pertinent and what recedes into background noise.

When Legal Procedure Became Cultural Theory

Relevance had a narrow earlier life inside Scottish legal procedure, where it named the question of which evidence bore on a case. Tamarkin traces how that technical use was the only prior foothold before the concept expanded.

This expansion matters because it means the humanities inherited not a logical primitive but a cultural tool, one that can be examined, contested, and redesigned.

Putting the Idea to Work

1. 1Identify the current frame: Ask what assumptions about importance are organizing the field, conversation, or institution right now.
2. 2Locate the overlooked: Find what has been set aside not because it failed on its own terms but because no one performed the act of re-elevation.
3. 3Do the lifting: Articulate explicitly why the overlooked thing connects to present concerns. Relevance does not assert itself; it requires argument.
4. 4Expect resistance: Attentional communities have invested norms. Reorienting shared attention is a social act and will meet the friction that social acts meet.

The Harder Edges of a Historical Concept

If relevance is historically invented rather than logically primitive, some troubling questions follow immediately. The most pointed is whether relevance judgments are ever anything more than the preferences of a dominant attentional community dressed up as necessity.

Tamarkin's implicit reply runs through the ethical dimension of the argument. The act of re-elevation is not arbitrary because it is directed specifically toward what is weak, frail, or marginal rather than toward what is already powerful.

Second-Order Stakes for the Humanities

The book's argument doubles back on itself in a productive way. The humanities are themselves perpetually accused of irrelevance, and the very framework Tamarkin builds to historicize relevance is also a defense of humanistic study as the discipline most practiced at performing re-elevation.

Old books matter not passively but because someone makes them matter.

This is not a comforting circular argument. It means the burden of relevance-making falls on practitioners, not on the objects themselves. No text or painting earns its place by sitting there.

Edge Cases That Test the Limit

• What about things that resist re-elevation permanently? The framework implies they remain irrelevant, but that risks naturalizing neglect when structural barriers, not lack of effort, are the real cause.
• Relevance built around crisis can be unstable: something urgent in one moment collapses back into obscurity when the precipitating condition passes, suggesting relevance can be fragile rather than cumulative.
• Attentional communities can perform re-elevation for bad objects as well as good ones; the act of lifting is neutral with respect to the quality of what is lifted, so normative guidance must come from outside the mechanism itself.
• The legal origin of relevance imported an adversarial logic: evidence is relevant to a case in contest. When that logic persists in cultural argument, relevance debates can become zero-sum rather than genuinely expansive.

These edge cases do not defeat the argument but sharpen its demands. A theory of relevance adequate to its own ambitions needs an account of structural obstacles to attention, not only an account of what effortful attention can achieve.