User:Sofia Roberts/Mammonart

Within the Context of No Context

Author	George W.S. Trow
Language	English
Genre	Essay
Publisher	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date	1981
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Followed by	My Pilgrim’s Progress (1997)

Within the Context of No Context (“Context”) is an essay by George W.S. Trow first published in The New Yorker in 1980. It was published in hardback in 1981 with a companion essay on Ahmet Ertegun and republished in softback in 1997 with an introductory essay, “Collapsing Dominant.” “Context” received rave reviews and is acknowledged as Trow’s masterpiece. The magazine article was well-known for being photocopied and passed from hand to hand.

Aim

Trow reflects on current American popular culture, finding that he (and other Americans) now live “within the context of no context.” Their cultural ambiance is now created by television. In “Context,” he does not explain what had been before. “Context” ends with a narrative memoir of Trow’s experience working at the 1964 New York World's Fair, which he saw as “the world of television imitating the world of reality.”

Specifically, Trow notes that history became demography

Style

Most of the essay is short, insightful paragraphs in a deliberately baroque style. He develops phrases and riffs on them, taking the reader into his world. Filled with brilliant and memorable phrases, the essay is more than the sum of its parts.

The essay explores from many angles the contours of the default American culture in which television is the only determinant of reality.

The voice and style are essential to distancing the reader from the material discussed. The perceiver is as important as the perceived; Trow’s critique is always informed by who Trow is and what he knows. In the sequel, My Pilgrim’s Progress, he explicitly discusses his early childhood and how it was shaped by popular and ‘official’ culture.

Quotations

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

""Adulthood" in the last generations has had very little to do with “adulthood” as that word would have been understood by adults in any previous generation. Rather, ”adulthood” has been defined as “a position of control in the world of childhood.”"

"The Exorcist and a hundred other movies openly admit the horror of the American cold childhood. Movies like Jaws and Animal House and Star Wars are powerful because they operate with a warm childishness, and thus constitute a release from the cold tease of television."

"On a television talk program it is the role of the host to frame the synthetic talk. He must do things: create a sense of intrusion and then forgive the intruders. To do this effectively he must obscure the flow of energy. He is honest when he implies that his aim is to grant access. He lies when he implies that his aim is to grant to a viewer access to a context. No context exists. There has been no intrusion. No forgiveness is necessary. The true role of the host is to grant, to a celebrated product, access to the viewer. The intrusion is intrusion on the viewer. The host is on the pivot. He does an important job. He pulls off the con."

"The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it."

"Soon it will be achieved. The lie of television has been that there are contexts to which television will grant an access. Since lies last, usually, no more than one generation, television will re-form around the idea that television itself is a context to which television will grant an access."

Cultural significance

In stating that people seek to be on television in order to feel real, Trow anticipated reality shows. Trow anticipated the rise in American culture of religious fundamentalism, with people needing a middle distance to mediate between them and the grid of celebrity.

Further reading

In his last book, My Pilgrims Progress, a memoir of the early 1950s, Trow addresses the question raised in "Context" of what television displaced--that is, what American culture was like just as television was becoming popular.