Within the Context of No Context

by George W.S. Trow

Long-time New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow first published the long title essay of this book in 1981, and it now appears with a companion piece, "Collapsing Dominant." Taken together, the two essays are a trenchant and often scathing examination of American culture. As Trow surveys the landscape, he observes that television has created a land of "no context," which it then gleefully chronicles. The many examples he cites of things he has witnessed in the mass media are alarming not for what he has seen--for we have all seen this stuff--but for the intense, and at times lacerating, insight with which he views the passing parade of frivolity. Within the Context of No Context is a slim book that does much to explain modern American society, and the thoughts in its pages will resonate for a long time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Cultural, History, Journalism, Sociology

Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

George W. S. Trow lives in Columbia Country, New York and Texas.

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most interesting part of this book is the book that isn’t written

This book was written in the 90’s and is essentially a time capsule into that time period. The author is forecasting that television and magazines will be the doom of us all.

As I write this in 2023, the culture has changed so rapidly from the 1990’s. Most people don’t have television, relying on Hulu, Disney +, and Netflix for their media. Before we even roll out of bed in the morning, we reach for our Smartphones. If you are hungry, just open the DoorDash, GrubHub, or Instacart app for your food to be delivered to your door. Not interested in driving? Just flick over to Uber or Lyft.

Did you know that most books consumed are now audiobooks? And the #1 audiobook supplier is Audible through Amazon. Instead of trying to order 6 CD’s and load them into a very chunky boom box without scratching them, we can just open the app and listen in seconds.

There was also a concept of being “unavailable.” When you left without your cellphone, there was a voicemail machine usually with a message like, “Hi, we are the Beckett family. Sorry to have missed your call. Please leave a message after the beep.” Now, there is an expectation of being always available.

The modern days scare me, because culture changes slowly over time. Like an animal slowly being boiled alive, one degree at a time, humanity doesn’t realize the dangerous perils all around us.

Recently, I was reading an essay from the 1960’s, encouraging indifferent spending. That would be really nice. But the culture has changed slowly over time. Now, at least in America, we have HUGE mortgages, student loan payments, car payments, credit cards, and insurance premiums. When are we finally going to say no?

A month or so ago, I was at a Galileo exhibit where I learned that Shakespeare and Galileo lived in the same time. The thought that I couldn’t shake is that would Galileo and Shakespeare have accomplished so much in modern society, if they each had a cellphone and a tablet? And are these things really helping us?

While I am booing technology, it has also evened the playing field and provided opportunities, previously unreachable. Do you want to be famous? No longer do you need to know “someone” and move to Hollywood, just start your YouTube or TikTok channel from your phone and learn a bit of video editing. If you like making custom jewelry, you aren’t strictly limited to opening a little roadside hut in your rural town, you can open an Etsy store and reach customers all over the world.

What I Paid:
Softcover Text - $11.54 on Amazon

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[Hank Stuever · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like so many others, my first encounter with Trow's "Within the Context of No Context" blew my head off in the best possible way. I was too young to know about it when the New Yorker first published it, but read it in 1997 when it was re-released. I was 28 or 29. It is simply one of the finest things I've ever read about modern American culture. It got in my head and stayed there. I could never write like this, but in some sentences, I try.

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where It All Went Wrong

How to classify this book: Memoir? Social history? Narrative of decline? Pensee? For me it is the existential and sociological background for what is fictionally chronicled by the American writer, Louis Auchincloss. Auchincloss's work is mainly about the transition from the American ruling class of the post-WWII generation to the new leadership of the Reagan years.

The former époque was still culturally 19th century Eastern, Harvardian, Jamesian. Its interests were in reputation rather than wealth, in the subtle power of accepted manners rather than the brute force of politics. In a sense it was a world that operated in parallel to that of the Robber Barons and New York's Tammany Hall, never at the centre of power but always influencing it, constraining it, sometimes even civilising it.

But this culture hid a flaw under its pseudo-Victorian facade. Its centre of manners had been replaced in the 1920's by a ritualised social Nietzschean negativism which set about culturally consuming itself. Nothing was left to agree upon except the default aesthetic of economics in all its manifestations. The Mainstream had no real content.

By, at the latest, the 1980's remnants of responsible culture had been exterminated, or at least marginalised into irrelevance. The world had become economically efficient; it had succeeded in eliminating the significance of not just old money but history itself, and therefore all that defines the uniqueness of a society.

This was the crucial step in what we now call globalisation - not the ensuing increases in international trade and investment, but the very local, parochial even, denial of the subservience of economics to human well-being. It didn't look like a revolution but that made it all the more revolutionary.

Auchincloss's work chronicles this revolution as it was occurring. But his 1969 novel A World of Profit is a pivotal description of this transition, perhaps at its precise point of greatest inflexion. Trow writes a biographical confirmation of Auchincloss's fictional intuition. For him the central point is the World's Fair of 1964/65 and the key personality is that of the monstrous Robert Moses who built the fair as he did so much else in New York.

For me Moses is an embodiment of the cultural transition, the apotheosis of the aesthetic shift from Victorian manners to Reganite 'wealth-creation'. So Robert Caro's 1974 The Power Broker, a political biography of Robert Moses, is essential context for Trow's context.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read Trow's Within the Context of No Context" a couple of times since it first appeared as an essay in New Yorker, and all these years later I still find it to be eerie and sad and evocative and often dead-on. Some critics have dismissed Trow as simply writing another disappointed prep-school boy's lament for the lost world of upper-middle-class WASP-Episcopal ascendancy--- a view that's a major mistake. Trow's lament is for a sense of the Serious in American culture, for a sense that one is brought up to take part in social rituals that matter, for a sense of value that doesn't depend merely on popularity or consensus.

Reading the essay now--- in the early spring of the Year Eleven ---I can find reasons for Trow's melancholy. It's not just that there is, as he writes, no way now to wear a fedora--- the symbol of adult codes and adult lives ---that isn't ironic. It's that Trow, writing in his forties and revising in his mid-fifties, has just lost a long-time partner, and that he can see his own life ending in a world that had no use for the idea of the Serious, for the values he was trained up in.

Read "Context", and read it in tandem with his late-90s revised forward. It's a lovely, heartbreaking, disorienting essay about a world without even the memory of a time when life was about growing up to do Serious Things.

[Laura Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm torn on this book.

On the one hand, much of it is unintelligible. There's a lot of randomness, allusiveness (and elusiveness), and flat-out weirdness. I'm not a stupid person, but there was a lot here I didn't really understand. (I'm pretty sure it was designed to be this way.)

On the other hand, there were moments of startling clarity and incisiveness. On how television makes one feel: "You can't get people to believe that they already love just anyone. You can't get them to believe that everyone else is already loving just anyone. You have start with what they do feel and tease it toward love. Interest first, novelty, skin-popping little bits of abandoned reality, building a little house out of that until it's comfortable. 'You're so comfortable! It's almost like love!'" Isn't this exactly what television is: comfort, pretending to be love?

So I'm willing to forgive much of the unintelligibility. As long as one is prepared for it, I guess.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not some elementary school essay, this is an emotional ninja attack. It speaks to you like JR speaks to you. A sample, one of my many favorite bits, his description of a dessert topping commercial:

SHOT OF FABULOUS OLD NEW ENGLAND INN. Look at the clapboards. So white. Look at that porch. So like New England, that porch. … She stands on the porch of her fabulous New England inn with her artificial dessert topping, made from lard, engine oil, preservatives extracted from offal and animal screams. Why is she there? Liaison. She’s doing liaison work. She stands on a little pivot. It’s history. What she is is the purveyor of a motif. In her case, the motif is history used in the service of the force of no-history, and no-history is the force of the share, and the characteristics of the share, and the grid of two hundred million.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fundamentally about the way that television creates, allows for, and obscures a culture empty of perspective, it’s on another level an essay about the isolation of contemporary culture. Trow’s argument is often hard to pin down, but this book is pretty amazing.

[Richard Wu · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are unaware of the fact that where you read influences how you read, pay close attention now. This is one of those books that, in order to be properly understood, must be read in a dark corner somewhere, away from other humans, preferably somewhere like a cabin in the woods, lit by candlelight, and in one sitting. Unfortunately as a resident of urban Seattle, I am not easily availed to such a feat.

Let it be aired: I am not happy when anybody imitates my style, especially when that person had been alive far long than I have, especially when he had written a great deal more than I have. What vacant sort of creature enjoys its own reflection in the mirror? One thing’s for certain, that though its life would be in all probability one worth living, its story would in equal likelihood be one not worth telling.

Or maybe solace is a more fitting response – thank you for the suggestion – that I should be happy I’m here already, much younger than Trow had been when he penned this essay at the inflection point of the postmodern modality. Now finally at ease with the footpaths of contemporary poetics, I sense by and large that whatever innovations there were to achieve in the written text have long since reached a sort of asymptotic saturation, and that future neophiliacs will have to get – are currently getting – their hits from form.

It appears that I have become the sort of person who appreciates writing like this. As it is my goal to become the sort of person for whom “sort of person” cannot be an accurate descriptor, this fact is equally disheartening. Whomever George W. S. Trow was, he certainly wrote for a sort of person, the sort of which you will find on the back cover, literary types, ineffectual literary types, the same sort Nikos Kazantzakis – he too was one of them – knowingly lambasted with his Zorba.

I mean, is it audacious to put nothing but laudatory quotes on the back? Is this how the literati mock Buffon’s needle? Let’s take a look at a couple:

Within the Context of No Context is a masterpiece of the century that belongs on a shelf next to Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

- Michael Tolkin, screenwriter

What’s really going on here is we see Mr. Tolkin putting his chips on the poker table, so to speak; I applaud the risk he has taken with this bold quote. He’s revealed to us that he is not only a similar to critic but a caliber of critic, and any good – see what I did there? – caliber of critic only gets to make a few such statements like (I’m a similar to too) that before becoming bad (or I’m a bit of both, you see), that is, like the boy who cried wolf. To wear one’s aesthetic like one’s heart upon one’s sleeve is at once romantically daring and comically unsubtle. Next.

This slim and brilliant volume cracks the code of the Media Age in which we’ve all spent our lifetimes marinating. If you want to understand why you feel the ways that you feel, you’d better read it.

– Bill McKibben, environmentalist

Oh boy, oh boy, I know this one. It’s called typical mind fallacy. Who the hell does McKibben think he is, thinking everyone thinks like he thinks, feels like he feels? Is he seriously trying to create an us-and-them dichotomy here between those eternal marinators and those like me who don’t enjoy being acidified in a pot, or is he unironically using the royal we? Which is worse?

In contrast to the other reviewers, I believe that to review the content of a book about form is less provocative (revealing) than to critique its form itself. If it chooses to refer to itself only in contours, then I say, wiggle them. What interests me now is not negation or damnation, or even, say, diagnosis, those tattered modes of historical degeneration, but the operative mode of the Big Bang. Trow, ye olde men have left us no future, perhaps not even the possibility of a future, but this vacuum must become – is becoming – my and future generations’ challenge of willing one into existence ex nihilo.

Favorite Quotes
“…the moment in which Richard Dawson, the host of a terrible program called Family Feud, asked someone what he thought the audience would say the average was. No reality whatsoever. No fact anywhere in sight. That’s real privilege, of course. When you are rewarded for knowing what your fellow citizens are likely to say their delusions are.” [p.36]

“A Fact: A child will have seen upward of four thousand hours of television before he or she ever sees a school. This is as much time as that child will spend in his or her high-priced college classroom – should he or she ever get to a high-priced college classroom.” [p.39]

“The most important programming deals with people with a serious problem who make it to the Olympics. It is the powerful metaphor of our time – babies given up for dead who struggle toward national life and make it just for a minute. It’s a long distance to come. People feel it very deeply and cheer the babies on.” [p.53]

“The important moment has been this: the orphan peeking through the window at the happy family together around the fire.” [p.65]

“Once, on purpose, I arranged for a person I didn’t like to go to the Tower of Light. I put him in the Tower of Light and went away. When I came back, he was so glum. I had a big smile. It was one of my most American moments: meeting someone who was glum because I had pretended to do him a favor and hadn’t done him a favor at all.” [p.111]

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

This came highly recommended and with a big reputation but left me pretty disappointed. There's an interesting point at the essay's heart - that TV has collapsed the "middle distance", leaving only the "grid of the intimate" and the "grid of 200m". This feels like a different way of making the point Robert Putnam made (later) in "Bowling Alone" about declining sense of community and local participation.

My problems with it:
1. I think focusing to such a degree on TV as the primary cause of modern alienation is a pretty questionable simplification. What about the role of cars and the urban planning principles which they've engendered? What about the role of changing gender roles and the effects on family structure? What about the long term divergence in income levels in the US?
2. I found the essay's style unnecessarily oblique. Trow comes at his subject via a set of tangents. You get the picture but it just all feels like style over substance. It's a little exasperating - "Just make your point!", I found myself saying...

Nice front cover though.

[Jeffreyreeser · Rating 5 out of 5]

(This is regarding the main essay, not the extended introduction "Collapsing Dominant".)

"Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million. For them, there is no distance between two grids of American life. Of all Americans, only they are complete."

"How lonely the white men are. They are not the grain that goes with the grain, nor can they bring themselves to dye their hair green."

This is one of the most powerful pieces of nonfiction I've ever read. An brutal, lyrical essay concerning American culture and media. It cuts right to the heart of the matter. Trow's insights are as confounding as they are crystal-clear... as illuminating as they are painful to process. The tabloid format makes for an addictive read (the only major slow-down is Trow's rumination on his strange days working at the World's Fair).

Few books earn the descriptor "URGENT" as fully and plainly as this one does. Trow's elegy to logic and human connection will continue to be relevant for a long time -- until it is far, far too late.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommend you do not read the 1st part of the book first since it is an update on the original which is the 2nd part of the book and the original essay printed in the New Yorker.

Billions of words have already been spilled painfully agonizing over the sequence of events that could have led to a reality in which we currently inhabit in the winter of 2017. A reality, which had it's foundations laid in 1948, in which a painfully cartoonish, marginally successful real-estate magnet, who successfully parlayed his failures and meek successes into a 'reality' TV show glorifying buffoonery and mocking sincerity, to come to inhabit the most powerful executive office the world has ever empowered.

This essay from Nov. 1980 has already explained it.

Save yourself the pain and time, and skip over the millions of shallow hot takes that will clog the inter-webs in the coming 4 years and just read this.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slim, powerful book amounts to one of the most dead solid perfect attacks on television and its perniciousness that I've ever had the pleasure of reading. What is TV? It is anti-history, anti-culture. Through advertising and audience-targeting, it manages to convince people that they're part of some age-related demographic rather than an actual place, culture - a real history.

It also accomplished a terrible project: keeping a large number of Americans on the couch, in front of the flickering light, immersed in a false context, locked in a kind of anti-reality. And all it has to do is deliver something that's just watchable enough to keep people watching. So, what do authentic contexts look and feel like? A family is one. Perhaps a neighborhood association. Civic organizations, too. Various clubs. The past. The present. Real people, real places, actual ideas.

[Raewyn]

First half: sort of like if Stafford Beer were a pop culture critic. Fewer diagrams, but just as many theories and just as offbeat and unconventionally structured. Also, frequently confusing in this specific way: an idea is being confidently espoused. The idea is: "cold childhood". It's "scale". "Non-history". "Iconography of excrement". "Matron". "Context". "Problem". "Babies". "Grid". It's not "meta-language", but it could have been. It's a noun, and it holds the key to understanding the point that is being made. Figure it out.

Second half: more like an interesting long-form article about Ahmet Ertegün which made me go "hm this probably has a lot to do with the contextless society of cold children in which I live", because I'm very smart and because I know that people normally don't just publish two things in the same book on accident

[Hassan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really torn on this book, I found it useful but with a few major flaws. There are a lot of anecdotes and tangents that seem really unnecessary at times but there are also some real moments of clarity that genuinely help to totalize the past century or so of American history. The text also really evades being cut up and taken of context. Usually when reading works of social history like this I find myself highlighting a lot and my notes are mostly quotations but with this they are mostly just musings. That's valuable in its own right it's just not particularly what I was expecting from a work often billed as the successor to Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

Maybe I was in the wrong mindset coming into it. It's a short read so I'm sure I'll come back to it but for the time being I'd just say it's a prescient but misconstructed exploration of American history with a particular focus on the effect of the television.

[Chris Tempel · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's sort of a dragged out way of describing how history was replaced with television isn't it? This is not a history itself but more of a personal essay that finds examples. Trow likes Family Feud, People magazine and the Fair for this. in Family Feud the object is to pick out what everybody else is saying apropos nothing ("survey says? you say. survey says? you say"). there's a story about working at the World's Fair at age 20, where his feeling is one that i get whenever i go to the fair:

"People didn't like the Fair. People tried to like it, though. They agreed to like it. The Fair was hard to like, but they agreed to like it. Not to like it was the same thing as to break the agreement that was all that stood between them and being alone. The message of many things in America is "Like this or die." It is a strain. Suddenly, the modes of death begin to be attractive."

It's a smart, well-written book.

[Aubrey Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took the advice of another reviewer and read the primary essay first; leaving the introduction for last. This is highly recommended.

Trow gives a harsh criticism of television and other machinations by which popular culture has remove the "context" from pretty much everything, resulting in a society which only appreciates things in small, context-free, doses.

The true wonder is that the book itself is written in a series of short blurbs (anywhere from 1 sentence to a couple pages) which themselves have no context. In the early parts (things get a little more straightforward towards the end) it's left mostly to the reader to construct the context that bridges individual blurbs together, such that, when the big picture starts to come into focus, it is clear that Trow intended the essay to be an example of his subject. Which in the end, is pretty satisfying.

[Alex Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most winning thing in this book is Trow's voice, tone, and general interest in communicating this weird feeling to the reader. He uses bullet-style writing, and it seems that his point is always between his hard returns. This creates a lingering, oppressive atmosphere, where the text is the shining light betwixt everything that Trow seems to lament that he misses.

In general the book is an exercise in the recording of an overwhelming sense of the "human infection" by means of media exploitation and "post-modernism" (a troubling phrase for all type o reasons), albeit from an old, troubled man attempting to deal with a society he thinks has been floundering since a World's Fair- which one I can't remember.

[Collin · Rating 1 out of 5]

The review I read before I bought this made it sound like the greatest thing ever ("classic!", etc). It is not. Basically it's a long essay, but this paperback includes another, introductory (read 'introductory' as 'completely unnecessary') essay that doesn't make much sense unless you've read the second essay first.

As for that second (originally solo) part, it's basically about how TV is evil, how it has infantilized society. It's the kind of essay where all the Big Ideas get capitalized, but it ended up seeming unfairly/too quickly reduced to false first principles.

I don't know; if I had had anything better to do then it would have been a waste of my time. I threw it away afterwards because I can't imagine ever wanting to re-read it or ever recommending it to anyone else.

[Cathal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently reread this book for at least the sixth time, which does not count the many dozens of times I took it off the shelf, opened it at random, and began reading. It is a short book, to be sure, so reading it cover to cover does not take much time, but a great deal is said here. Part memoir, part cultural history and criticism, it is difficult to describe what this book is "about," other than to say that it is about the way Americans thought of themselves changed with the advent of television, and that nothing good has come of that. His description of what television "does" is brief and brilliant and explains a great deal about the current state of our cultural discourse and our inability to figure out what is actually worth talking about.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly weird, personal, and thrillingly inventive reaction to the strange state of affairs that has left many Americans adrift in a moral void with nothing to grab on to but silliness and triviality. Originally written almost thirty years ago, it's one of those eerily perceptive works that somehow becomes more true the further into the future we proceed. The passage about fedora hats almost made me weep with longing and regret for the 21st century we could have had. If you read this short book and your perception of everything around you isn't altered permanently, email me and I'll bake you some cookies.

[Daphne · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read this book 3 or 4 years ago. Didn't understand it. Could not make heads or tails of it.

Picked it up last night and finished it this morning. Couldn't put it down this time. Amazing what a few years of experience in life or within oneself can do to open you up to another's understanding.

His tone is wretchedly depressive and sharp. You have to have 'the stomach for it.' Immense courage.... Trow had immense courage to express the dissolution and lostness of identity within American society, as he did. In this young country, identity has always been 'manufactured'. What he longed for and lamented the loss of never really existed.

[Geoff Winston Leghorn Balme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aspects of it seem incoherent at first, but it soon begins to gel. The final chapter about his working for the 64-65 World Fair is worth the price of admission on its own.

It is a short read and along with his Harvard Black Rock Forest a nice piece of cultural criticism.

Trow likes to remind us that PEOPLE and not unseen, uncontrollable forces are what drive our culture (the good and the bad of it) and so it is in fact understandable, and manipulable. When people turn to greed and allow the financial return to control all problems erupt and have been for a long while.

[Matt Comito · Rating 4 out of 5]

here's the kicker analogy that ties this allusive and elliptical essay together - Family Feud - before Family Feud quiz shows were about facts and factoids but now contestants were no longer being asked about what was true or factual, they were being asked what do 100 other people think might be the case

when significance has been shifted from what is true to what other people think is true we have been cut free from our moorings and find ourselves within the context of no context

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

(This is a stub.)

This book is fundamental. It's challenging to tackle on its own. This episode of The Relentless Picnic did a deep dive into its world and helped me understand it a lot more. Now often find myself seeing in Trow's "contexts."

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

For full impact, read the original New Yorker article (pdf here: https://signsoflife10.files.wordpress...) with advertisements at the center of each page. The juxtaposition is incredibly powerful.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

a bizarre book by a declining patrician fuddy-duddy that nonetheless contains some amazing insights about the future direction of american culture (which maybe anybody w/ half a brain could've made, but still). to wit:

https://twitter.com/MoustacheClubUS/s...

[Cj Rey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some light bulbs went on for me. Found some truth. Mostly, it made me embarrassed of my American culture. Made me glum.

And, I gotta admit, in a few places, I was completely lost in the ramblings.

In spite of my rating, absolutely worth the quick read.

[Marvey]

the grid of 200 million T.V watching automatons vs/ the intimacy of one, amazing 1980 American prophecy of loneliness

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating essay on television and memory. Like a John Updike character who's been transported into a Don DeLillo novel.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Like this or die."