On November 1980, The New Yorker devoted most of an entire issue to a single essay. Beyond the extravagant length, the essay remains one of the strangest things the magazine has ever published. Written by staff writer George W. S. Trow and edited by the mercurial William Shawn, “Within the Context of No Context” is a fever dream of media criticism. In a fractured cascade of subtitled riffs (on “Pseudo-Intimacy,” “Experts,” “Celebrities,” “Magazines in the Age of Television”) that accrues its own manic momentum through prose-poem-like repetition, Trow analyzes how that great, fetid swamp of American culture—television—ruined our sensibilities, or at least warped them forever.
Published in book form the following year alongside Trow's two-part profile of Atlantic Records chairman Ahmet Ertegun, the essay received some new attention. The New York Times approved. But the true significance of “Within the Context of No Context” came as a kind of countercultural samizdat: The painter David Salle recalled passing a dog-eared copy of it to the writer Joan Juliet Buck in the 1980s, who spread it in turn. “We were a little society with a secret—we felt sorry for anyone who hadn't read it,” Salle wrote recently.
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. It was republished again as a standalone book in 1997, with a new introduction called “Collapsing Dominant,” in which Trow reflected on what had changed in the two decades since the original — if anything, it was all worse.
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