Within the Context of No Context

by George W. S. Trow

Illustrations by Howard Coale

Within the Context of No Context, published originally in The New Yorker in 1980, explores the role of television in American life, proffering a bleak vision that seems more and more accurate with the passage of time. In style the text is unusual—some might say poetic. It concludes with a reminiscence of the author’s days as an aide in the office of protocol at the New York World’s Fair of 1964/65. The author, the late George W. S. Trow was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker. Little, Brown published Context as a trade book in 1981 [including an additional essay about Ahmet Ertegun, which is not reprinted here]. A new introduction has been added by the author for this edition. This edition adds four interpretive drawings by artist Howard Coale.

In his preface to this 1992 edition, Trow reflects:

The essay was addressed, in a defiant, rather than a plaintive way, towards our parents—the journalistic plus business-like culture of the “Liberal Arts.” That culture is gone now. Right here, right now, it would be absurd to point out what I was pointing out then—that history had become a phony history; that everything had to do with demographics; that television was the real story. I was pointing to something which was a few feet away at the time and not well recognized; this thing has since engulfed us. We are it, most of us, and those of us who are of a different substance are in it, anyway.

The 1980 original full text of this “classic essay on American society and the decline of adulthood” is available on The New Yorker website.

In 1996, Hilton Als wrote in Voice Literary Supplement:

In our current cultural environment, where the vogue for difference will eventually sink without a trace, Trow’s essay, now 15 years old, tells us more than we are willing to admit: it is an act of profound literary subversion.

The essay has continued to resonate in the decades since its original publication. Trow’s diagnosis of American—and now increasingly global—media culture has proven only more prescient in the age of algorithms, personalization, and social media. Artists and writers continue to revisit it as a landmark work of cultural criticism.

Painter David Salle remembered in Frieze in 2018:

I still think it’s the saddest book I’ve ever read, as well as one of the most thrilling. Context is a book about wonder – what it was, how it worked and where it had gone. It’s the story of America’s transition from a culture of doers – a place where character was linked to action and where individuals knew things – to a place where no one knows anything, except for the things that everyone else knows. ‘Wonder was the grace of the country,’ reads the book’s first sentence; it continues through the great levelling, the rise of demographics, the aesthetic of the hit, the illusion of intimacy – the last 50 years of the ‘American con’. Today we call it social media – the phrase says it all. The book was ostensibly a study of how television had destroyed any meaningful connection between public and private life by intensifying the contradictions in the American psyche, such as solitude versus the group. But it was also, in a way, the story of Trow’s life.

In a 2019 appreciation of the essay’s enduring relevance, Kyle Chayka wrote in The Nation:

Certain essays stand as cultural landmarks: After reading them you see the world differently; they become part of your mental landscape. For many of its readers, “Within the Context of No Context” certainly belongs in that pantheon. …

Like the work of Benjamin or Sontag, the essay seems to apply to each new moment, particularly after Trow’s solitary death in 2006 …. Most recently, it was the centerpiece for critic Christian Lorentzen’s Harper’s Magazine philippic against the Internet’s effects on contemporary book-reviewing. Trow’s work is still so relevant because everything he wrote about television applies doubly for social media. …

This book was designed by Bob McCamant, hand set in Centaur and Arrighi by Jennifer Hughes, and printed on Johannot by Jennifer Hughes. It was casebound, using Japanese rayon cloth over boards, by Trisha Hammer. 110 pages, 6 x 9 inches. Published in 1992.

From the colophon:

… edition limited to 200. The types are Centaur and Arrighi, cast by M&H Type of San Francisco. The illustrations, drawn in ink, were printed from photopolymer plates. The paper is Johannot. The book was designed by Robert McCamant, handset and printed by Jennifer Hughes, and bound by Trisha Hammer.

Martha Chiplis printed the hat inset on the cover.

Copies are numbered but not signed.

Typeset by hand

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