‘Relevance is God’: An Interview with Elisa Tamarkin

Earlier this year I came across a remarkable book by the literary scholar Elisa Tamarkin called Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (2022). It is a study of the idea and logic of ‘relevance’, in which Tamarkin calls for shifts in our forms of attention and perceptions of importance with enormous stakes. Along the way, Tamarkin engages with an extraordinary range of critics, poets, artists, philosophers, pragmatists, phenomenologists, and linguists.

Although its focus is largely on Anglo-American culture of the nineteenth century, I found myself constantly discovering resonances with much more contemporary questions – about the attention economy, ‘context collapse’, or the fate of the humanities, among others.

I spoke to Tamarkin about the book over Zoom in September 2025. What follows is an edited transcription of our conversation.

Mike Sperlinger: I think one of the things that was most surprising to me when I first read your book was the realisation that relevance was not at all what I thought it was. For example, I think intuitively I’d conceived of relevance as being a concept which emphasises the needs of the present. But you return repeatedly to a formulation that you take from the philosopher John Dewey, where the temporality is much more complex: ‘The revelation of meaning in the old effected by its presentation of the new.’ How would you begin to define relevance as a concept?

Elisa Tamarkin: Relevance derives etymologically from a verb that has fallen out of use, to ‘reelevate’, meaning to lift up or to raise as if into relief. But with the prefix ‘re-’, it means not simply to raise or lift up, but to lift up again. I think the sense of making something relevant is really important there. Relevance is the idea of bringing something into visibility, something that hadn’t been active in consciousness before – not that it wasn’t there, but simply that it wasn’t regarded. So relevance is very much something that is made, and the question becomes how to make it.

That idea of the revelation of meaning in the old effected by its presentation in the new derives from a quote from John Dewey’s Art as Experience: the sense that what seems old or remote, obstinate to our understanding, recalcitrant, might still come to matter. Ralph Waldo Emerson had a similar concept of relevance in his journals: the miracle is that every day, some object creates awareness. Coming from literary studies, this concept of relevance absolutely bears on me the way it bore on Emerson, which is to say: what does it mean to continue reading these old books that we might think are inconsequential to our present moment, books that may no longer be in the public consciousness at all? Why do we keep returning to things that don’t immediately seem to bear on the present? And what is so wonderful about Emerson is that sense of constant renewal, that he wasn’t looking for novelty or innovation. He was interested in resurrecting the experience of things that were old, the idea of bringing them home to us in the present. I was fascinated by his use of the word relevance, long before anyone was using it in the academy, both to describe a very short-term aspiration on Emerson’s part to enter the professoriate, but also to justify his reading of Aristophanes or Rabelais, and so on – things which might have seemed unrelated to his moment.

MS: You have a beautiful paraphrase of that Emersonian idea: ‘The search for relevance is always a way of justifying what we ultimately choose to listen to.’ Can you say more about that element of choice in the process of producing relevance?

ET: If you look at William James and the pragmatists, they were linking relevance to ideas of selective attention: in the flux of everything, how do we choose what we pay attention to? We notice in any given situation only the smallest measure of what could be noticed at any given moment. And the question, then, of making relevance is the question of noticing – but noticing is about what we choose to notice, or what we’ve trained ourselves to pick out, and so about bringing new things that were there already into awareness. This requires acts of selective attention and also perceptual shifts. How do we come to be conscious of something that had been unrewarded or disregarded? It takes a kind of dispositional training in noticing, in awareness. This is why so many of the thinkers who are interested in relevance are also interested in theories of pedagogy and education. With students, the greatest thing is if you can teach them to become aware of something that they were unwilling to pay attention to before, to change their attentional dispositions.

MS: The concept of relevance seems very rooted in a certain Anglo-American pragmatist tradition – but also very specific to the English language?

ET: F. C. S. Schiller, a British pragmatist who actually ended his career in Los Angeles, was among the first to raise the point – John Dewey certainly credits him with being the first to notice – that relevance really has no equivalent in any other language. Relevance is not the same as ‘pertinence’, for example – there are all sorts of words that suggest being material or immaterial in some way, but that’s not exactly what relevance and irrelevance suggest. The thinkers who were using relevance in the way that I’ve come to understand it were in an Anglo-American tradition that extends from utilitarianism through transcendentalism into pragmatism, by way of phenomenology and process philosophy, too. There begins to be a kind of intellectual genealogy, even as the word and concept are still being refined.

Alfred Schutz, a German sociologist, was in the process of writing a book on relevance when he died, and some of his thinking on relevance appears in his multi-volume The Structures of the Life-World, which was published in German. But it is interesting to me that the section on relevance, which he thought would be a standalone book, was actually written in English in the Colorado Rockies! There was something about the idea of relevance that suggested to him America, even the American West. And he even takes note of the fact that he’s writing in English, and that this isn’t his natural language – to actually think about the concept of relevance required an act of translation on his part, from German into English. I think this is in part, but only in part, because it required him also to think through the American philosophical tradition that is pragmatism, to develop its concepts.

MS: Could you say more about the historical conditions of its emergence? You mention that it had a limited use in Scottish law, in relation to rules of evidence, but that’s the only real presence it had before the nineteenth century…

ET: I think that there are different strains of the concept that – I wouldn’t say they converge, but they accrete. To start with, there were questions about the role of relevance in logic that thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were thinking through. Some of the first uses of relevance in the early nineteenth century were coming out of philosophical examination of the use of logic and rhetoric in both law and in parliamentary procedures – forms of argumentation that seemed to be particular to the British parliamentary tradition, as well as what became very American modes of debate within law courts. Thinking about relevancy in law becomes a way of thinking about applications of the law to government: how do we take logic – which is usually a formal, abstract, often a closed philosophical system – and think about how it can be used for governance? It seems obvious that logic used in political contexts would have to adapt to its present moment, its present occasion – that it would have to be relevant to its occasion. But in the nineteenth century, this was not an obvious use and understanding of logic itself. It actually returned them to the Sophists – to a sophistical tradition of using logic opportunistically, of seeking opportune moments within political affairs. The Sophists insisted that we need logic to help us navigate a situation that we can’t predict. Such a logic is not so much about finding truth, but rather finding the kinds of arguments and reasons that are suitable to and meaningful for the occasion, for our current needs. This is one of the enduring senses of relevance that the pragmatists later pick up on. It’s no accident that William James dedicates his book Pragmatism to John Stuart Mill, who is thinking through these questions of relevance and applicability. So that’s one strain, one tradition.

Relevance is the idea of bringing something into visibility, something that hadn’t been active in consciousness before – not that it wasn’t there, but simply that  it wasn’t regarded.

MS: It seems to be in connection with the newspaper that the usage of relevance becomes much broader?

ET: The whole project began for me, in some ways, by simply studying the newspapers. My new book that’s coming out next year is entirely about the news. There’s no getting past the fact that the sense of remaining current, of keeping up with the times, is something that came to be associated with the United States from this early nineteenth-century moment. And it is the case that the US gave birth to the daily newspaper in the form of the penny press, in which there’s a sense that new knowledge is always superseding old knowledge, and that what comes later is always more important than what comes earlier. There’s nothing worse than reading old news! At the same time, you were beginning to see people thinking about the visual and cognitive organisation of information in order of relevance. This gets instantiated on the front page of the newspaper, in the banner headlines, for example, and in the presentation of news in descending order of importance, and in the idea that the latest edition, the newest news, is the most important. What interests me ultimately about the news is thinking about how a surfeit of information must be processed or sorted. The newspaper is trying to do this for us, in one way. In William James, it’s a kind of processing of what he’d call the ‘qualia’ of everyday life. There’s simply too much to experience and know, and so the question of who sorts it for us, or who teaches us how to sort it for ourselves, is something that the newspapers were contending with. It’s also something that I think the transcendentalists were contending with, just as the lawyers in courtrooms were, as well as the pragmatists, the phenomenologists and – with Alfred Schutz, for example – finally the sociologists too. They were all concerned with how to sort and process information so as to recognise what matters. The most everyday usage of the word relevance right now is algorithmic, of course. When we are on Google doing a search, we sort for relevance, and it’s this sorting or selecting mechanism that is so crucial to understanding what relevance is.

MS: Art and literature are very central to your story, too.

ET: When I went back to try to trace the history of the idea, what was most striking to me was how important literature and art were to all of the philosophers, logicians, linguists, sociologists, phenomenologists and so on – even people like Mill who are really thinking through law and governance. Art is so central to every single one of them, which is especially striking because, again, in our everyday sense of relevance now, art seems to be utterly irrelevant! Relevance is associated with political awareness, and art is always having to justify itself as being relevant in that sense. The idea that art has any intrinsic ability to be relevant seems totally counterintuitive, and yet it is central to every single one of the thinkers in this genealogy.

There’s that line from Henry James that reappears throughout the book: ‘It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.’ They all thought that art is phenomenally good at making us aware of things we would never bother to notice otherwise, and that the work of artists or writers is to make us take an interest right where we ordinarily wouldn’t. Art holds out something that had been unapparent to us for accentuation, and it manifests it very concretely – in a painting, in a film, in a novel by Henry James. Art makes something momentous of these small, isolated moments that it raises up for us in relief – to return to the etymology of relevance – and in somehow crystallising them thus raises them for our attention. Art raises consciousness. And every single one of these thinkers held a tremendous amount of faith in the ability of, say, a painting, to do this.

MS: Another great example is Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’. You carry out this extraordinary reading of the poem, which becomes a kind of hinge for your argument…

ET: I love the example of ‘The Raven’ – and not only because the poem is really the first literary use of the word relevance that I could find, outside of that kind of limited usage in law. What is ‘The Raven’ about? It’s about a disturbance. The speaker is mourning, he has lost his love. He’s having a hard time concentrating on his reading, he’s actually almost falling asleep. And then this completely impertinent thing disturbs his thoughts and his rest. The bird is an intrusion on his thoughts. So the process of the poem is to take something that seems entirely intrusive, immaterial to the purpose of the moment – which is either to be reading his books, or to be thinking about the death of Lenore – and somehow to take that intrusion and make it relevant. The poem is premised on the fact that it is a completely impertinent bird. The raven is simply repeating this one word it has learned by rote: ‘Nevermore’. The bird means absolutely nothing by it – but the point is that something which seems to hold no meaning for us at all somehow comes to mean everything. Though what it comes to mean, finally, for the speaker of that poem is the opposite of meaning: the speaker discovers, with that raven perched on his door, that there finally is no God. It’s the devastation of the world. He stops believing in heaven, and all because of this silly bird. Nonetheless, that one word comes to speak to the occasion in the chamber. And the poem becomes a model for what is admissible into poetry, what can suddenly become relevant and meaning-making. In some ways, that poem is both the first case and the limit case of relevance in poetry.

MS: You write also about the religious background of the concept of relevance as well. There is the idea of revelation, for example, but also a form of salvation or resurrection that’s in play. Can you talk a bit about the theological aspect?

ET: The main figure who, for me, attaches relevance to religious thought is the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, though we find a religious sense at work in Emerson and others as well. What’s interesting about Whitehead is that his philosophy involves a kind of cosmology that doesn’t map onto normal notions of theology. He insists – as the kind of pragmatist, process philosopher that he is – that he is not a theologian. And yet he insists on preserving the language of God. He actually says, ‘Relevance is God’! This is a provocation – I’d almost say that it’s filled with humour, though I don’t think most people would find Whitehead funny. But it comes from his sense that religious aspiration is ultimately some sense that there must be ways of finding value beyond ourselves – and God is the ultimate figure for value beyond ourselves. The proposition of raising some idea from beyond our present circumstances, of raising that into importance for the purposes of the present moment, is for Whitehead how religion works: the finding of value and meaning from beyond ourselves to help ourselves right here and now is one way of thinking about what God is. Whitehead also calls it the ‘hold up’, which is interesting to me, of course, because of the etymology of relevance, which means to hold up or raise. Reading Whitehead alongside all of the other figures we’ve been discussing suggests to me that God, for him, is something like the store of all the universals, the truths, the facts, the potential experiences that are out there. And at certain moments, we can learn how to bring some aspect of those eternal objects or enduring objects home to us, find something out there that can be brought to bear.

MS: This relates perhaps to the wonderful chapter in the book on translation and on Jacques Derrida. Derrida is obviously part of a very different philosophical tradition than Whitehead, but there is an interesting connection through the concept of spirit, this quasi-secularised idea of spirit which Derrida takes from Hegel. You write about how Derrida conceives the concept of translation in relation to the ideal of saving the spirit while superseding the letter, which he develops through a play on this French verb ‘relever’ – could you say something about that?

ET: That Derrida essay [‘What is a “relevant” translation?’, 1998] is remarkable. It begins by wondering if ‘relever’ in French is an adequate translation for a certain word at a certain moment in The Merchant of Venice. But ultimately, the essay is about the English word relevance, and about how Derrida determines that relevance is the best, most adequate translation for one of the most famously untranslatable words in the history of language, Hegel’s concept of aufheben. Inherent in the concept of aufheben is the idea of superseding even as you’re preserving – that idea incorporated into the standard English translation of Hegel’s term, which is the neologism ‘sublation’. The concept is at the core of Hegel’s ideas of progress and history, the history of philosophy and the spirit of history: the idea of taking what had been with you, of translating that which has been superseded, in a way that is not literal, but which preserves the spirit of the past and absorbs it into the present circumstances. This idea is something that also applies to the actual act of translation from one language to another. ‘Relevance theory’ in translation studies, which Derrida builds on, suggests that translation can never literally be word for word, but rather has to observe principles of economy and efficiency. What makes a good translation is that it somehow preserves the spirit of one language in another. In Derrida’s essay, written in French, he astonishingly claims that, after 30 years of trying to find an adequate translation that preserves in French the spirit of the German philosophical concept aufheben, he has discovered that the only word in any language he can find for it is in English – and it’s relevance! That is just wonderful to me. But it also helps crystallise the basic understanding of relevance – the revelation of the meaning of the old effected by its presentation in the new – as a concept that is about spirit, that preserves a religious tone as well. In a later chapter, I think about relevance as a kind of resurrection by way of a painting, by African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, of the resurrection of Lazarus.

MS: I want to ask you the meta question about the relevance of relevance. The focus of the book is largely on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the novelist Ben Lerner, for example, in recommending your book, notes there’s no index entry for the internet. But although you resist spelling out all the analogies, the argument you develop seems intensely urgent, or relevant, to some present dilemmas. Why did the concept of relevance seem important to write about now?

The raven is simply repeating this one word it has learned by rote: ‘Nevermore’.  The bird means absolutely nothing by it – but the point is that something which seems to hold no meaning for us at all somehow comes to mean everything. <…> He stops believing in heaven, and all because of this silly bird.

ET: Part of it is simply that I find William James on relevance, for example, very moving. James suffered from terrible depression. So did Emerson – his essay ‘Experience’ is about coming to terms with the death of his five-year-old son, Waldo. But so much of James’s philosophical efforts are about ways of combating lifelong depression – of simply figuring out how to keep going. The process of discovering that things can matter is ongoing. His Principles of Psychology seems very technical when he’s talking about relevance in relation to attention, but he really believed that the perceptual shifts in attention required to raise consciousness can help us in everyday ways. That’s why the passage where he writes about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, for example, is so important for me. Pragmatism, for him, is very practical. It’s a way to keep going.

Relevance has become such a buzzword, one that’s often used against us in the humanities – we’re impractical, we don’t enhance revenue and so on. There’s always the threat that we will be the first thing cut. And what I find moving about all these thinkers contemplating relevance is that they all deeply believed art can be very practical, but not because we can actually get a job doing it, or because it’s remunerative in some way. It is practical because it can actually help us attend to the world that we are in. In some ways, when Henry James says nothing is more relevant than art, it is also a way of saying that he truly believes that there is nothing more important.

So much of the book is written to make a case for art’s importance and value, though outside of economic value, which is how value tends to be measured both within higher education and beyond. It’s not that the humanities can directly or practically help us as citizens, for example, or teach us how to think in ways that can then be applied to law, medicine, business, and so on. I’m rejecting those claims for the humanities’ practicality, but saying that they are nonetheless of practical importance, because to understand how relevance works is to understand how to create importance where there wasn’t perceived importance before. In some ways, there’s nothing more socially and politically important than thinking about what we choose to regard and disregard. The purpose of higher education might be to teach us to give our regard to things that are otherwise unnoticed – that are otherwise socially, politically, demographically, statistically ignored. When more and more in our contemporary political world falls beneath notice, the great work of art and the humanities comes in these perceptual shifts.

MS: And this responsibility of giving regard and making relevance can’t be outsourced to Google or other algorithmic logics…

ET: Right! Because the algorithms are going to make sure we keep paying attention to exactly what we were paying attention to before. Now the news is increasingly nothing but an algorithmic function, since we no longer have editors and writers of newspapers so much as tech billionaires owning and running our media outlets. The only news that we tend to see is the news that the algorithms think we want to see, and with all of us, too, on our own social media platforms. How do you ever come to process things differently when these platforms are just feeding us what we already know? Higher education should be a way of changing the rules of processing – of how we process things – working against this kind of algorithmic determinism, getting us to pay less attention to what we’ve paid attention to already and to notice what needs noticing. And this is deeply ethical work.