The Aim Is To Have Chosen Successfully: On Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow

George W.S. Trow, as featured in HILOBROW.

I never met George W.S. Trow, but Edgar’s father knew him. I bought – and read – his book Within the Context of no Context the year that Edgar and I moved in together, after we had a long and meandering conversation about how it really felt like the world was draining of meaning. I encountered him again in episode 23 of the podcast The Relentless Picnic (discussion of Trow begins about 10:26), which I listened to on my phone, a large segment of it sitting in my car on the roof of a parking garage on the Plaza after closing up the shop I used to work in, conscious of the fact that I had two hours before I had to go pick up Edgar and I could just sit there and marinate in the discussion. We’ve mentioned him before, but haven’t devoted much direct attention to him directly. There’s a very good reason for that.

Within the Context of No Context essentially read like the I Ching with anger management problems. It’s an abstract text: I’m beginning to think it best to read it more like a map than a book. It’s a work of genius and madness. Possibly, it’s the last great work of bourgeois philosophy.

Let’s consider the man himself: Trow grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, and was the president of the Harvard Lampoon and, later, an editor on the National Lampoon, and later went on to write for the New Yorker. It is undeniable that, by the standards of the world that he found himself in, he was a remarkably talented writer and a thinker of rare and penetrating intellect. This is not to say that he was not privileged: it is to say that, while he may have been privileged, his work would have been a worthwhile read anyway.

Not the least because of what I understand this essay, written in 1981 to be about. It opens:

Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment’s quiet. What was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be wonder in that? The size of the con?

The “con” is a fascination of Trow’s, the big lie that shapes modern society the way that a game structures a child’s time spent at play. It isn’t a con with any specific end in mind: it’s simply a mendacity for the sake of being a mendacity. This whole essay is a shadow – not the shadow of an object still standing, but like the residue of a nuclear bomb, a human shadow etched in stone – left by Trow realizing the contingency of the world that he grew up in.

He writes later on:

The con man does give you something. It is a sense of your own worthlessness. A good question to ask: “Does this event exist without me?” If the answer is no, leave. You are involved in a con game. When the con man tells you he is about to present you with ‘a wide range of options,’ ask for one thing he will absolutely stand behind. Or beat him up. If he has some authority, you have a right to see what it is. If he is only describing the authority he senses in you, then do as you please.

The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.

This is the passage that most clearly shows a distinct anomie – the feeling that there are no real rules that govern a situation – that underlies many of the things about which he writes. He discusses how the then-current situation was one in which “the most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements”, which is a passage I think daily while looking at the news.

RCA 630-TS, the first mass-produced television set, which sold in 1946–1947, shared to wikimedia commons under a CC BY-SA 3.0 by user Fletcher6.

What Trow identifies as the cause of the situation he decries is television, which he describes as “the force of no-history...[holding] the archives of the history of no-history.” But television isn’t really what he’s railing against: television is totemic for the cultural shift he sees happening. He was a writer for one of the most widely distributed magazines in the country (possibly the anglosphere as a whole,) and he was the son of a respected newspaper man. There was a genteel refinement to Trow and his ilk, a pedigree that they respected and tried to live up to. Fundamentally, there was an interest in objectivity. He is railing against the objective being replaced by the subjective.

Here is where my interpretation of things departs from what I’m certain Trow would say about himself: I do not feel that Trow, or his father, or any of the people who worked with him actually were objective, because I do not feel that a human being actually can be objective. What Trow and others who occupied a similar position to him had was a certain degree of univocality – they were of one voice on certain issues. What television brought about was a strict record of an emerging multivocality – different narratives were pushed forward.

He grew up in a world where the newspaper was king, and the radio, the telephone, and the telegram were its adjuncts. Information, quite simply, moved more slowly. He passed away in 2006 (a year after I joined Facebook, I note.) and the velocity of information at that time was maddening, even for people who came up in it. Everything piece of information that Trow came across was finished, it was completed. Now it’s communicated faster than it can be made. In a very real sense, the world was presented to him in the perfect tense: “This has happened”, “War has been declared.” In television, the tense becomes Imperfect “This was happening,” “War was being waged.” I can only imagine his discomfort with the world as it stands now, as a maddening, ever-unfolding mass of the present continuous “This is happening.”

Richard Dawson, the original host of Family Feud:

“You said…”

“Our survey said…”

In some sense, what Trow is railing against was empathy – many of the things that he describes in this book as terrible are things relating to putting yourself in another’s place – he has a particular dislike for Family Feud, a game show that asked its contestants to guess the answers one hundred “average” people would give to a question. There’s nothing wrong with imagining what another would think, it’s a valuable skill.

However, in another sense, what Trow is frothing at the mouth about is voyeurism – or, perhaps, exhibitionism. The bad part isn’t putting yourself in another’s shoes but doing so as a performance, as if empathy and inter-subjectivity are tricks to be performed for an audience. It’s what he would call a “false intimacy”, something that looks like, and to some extent behaves in the same fashion as, intimacy but is “cold” instead of “warm”, that is exploitative instead of constructive. The signature of television is this pseudo-intimacy.

Trow writes:

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.

Much as I wrote that culture is a machine for turning time into history, Trow might argue that television – here (I feel) a stand-in for hegemonic, centralized mass media – destroys the meaning of history and replaces it with something else: it destroys the regime under which Trow came up and replaces it with this alien ecosystem of quiz shows and People magazine.

It’s understandable that he should be angry: the world he was built for ceased to exist before he did.

I get the feeling the school would sue me for using their logo, so here’s a picture of the founder.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Trow – I feel like my life, in some ways, is the one he would live if he had been born in the latter half of the 20th century instead of the first. We both went to highly regarded schools (mine was no Phillips Exeter, but we produced a disappointing Vice Presidential Candidate, a bad Senator, and the bastard who made the payday loan situation as bad as it is.)

I sometimes wonder how Trow would respond to our present moment. I do not think that he would stress television so much: he might instead fixate on Social Media, that great bugbear of our time. I like to imagine that he would hate the fact that it destroys any notion of objective truth, much more effectively than the game show Family Feud, and without recourse to any particular human being. It does so simply by algorithmically scrambling time, and preventing you from developing any sense of the chronology of events in the world. After all, if you can’t say if Event A preceded, succeeded, or was simultaneous with Event B, whether Phenomenon X was correlated with or causative of Phenomenon Y, then how could you begin to make sense of the world?

This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that Facebook is responsible for at least one – and possibly several – genocides. It did so because it is caustic to societies that host it, and if television is caustic like urine or vinegar, or some other foul substance, Facebook is caustic the way that hydrochloric acid is caustic.

The word I’m using here – caustic – isn’t present in Trow’s original text so far as I can recall (and I have yet to find a searchable PDF of the essay to confirm,) but the tone throughout is delightfully and thoroughly caustic. By that word, I mean the effects that he attributes to television, to the emergence of no-context and no-history. Events are significant but which do not happen, they are parts of the con. Look no further than contemporary American right-wing discourse for evidence of this – and I’m speaking here not of the Fox News channel or any of the host of AM radio personalities, I’m talking about the discourse of the average person – you hear whispers that suggest that Radical Biden Supporters are going to come burn down their homes, that “Antifa” is going to do something big on such and such a date, that a secret source inside the White House is leaking information about child trafficking and treason, posting on an image hosting board widely known for protesting scientology and hosting child pornography.

I know that similar discourse exists on the left (or what passes for a left in America,) just look at the talk about the Mueller Report – which, I understand, was actually damning, but was disarmed with a boring and inauthentic summary. But contemporary information technology has sped up discourse beyond the speed of actual events. Discourse about those events contains less and less actual information, and an ever-increasing share of speculation, but the speculation is based less and less on anything verifiable and more and more on affective factors: what does the speaker want to be true?

So Trow’s univocal conservatism – marked by reserve, and taste, and a certain technocratic air – has been replaced by a multivocalic reactionary stance: the steady, considered stream of speech, where people debate over a set of shared facts, is now a jabbering torrent of paranoiac delusions and power fantasies – there’s a certain vogue for attributing this to Russian influence (and it does resemble the playbook of Vladislav Surkov. This is touched on briefly in Dark Star Rising by Gary Lachman, which is where I’ll leave it for now.) but let’s be real, it’s a bit more attributable to Rupert Murdoch than anything else: he’s been doing it since Boris Yeltsin ran Russia.

You’re not allowed to speak without holding one of these bad boys.

Of course, even now, Fox News and similar organizations are scrambling to retain power: television, though multivocal, is multivocal the way that the conch in Lord of the Flies allowed the characters to be multivocal: by passing the focus from person to person. Modern information technology allows true, simultaneous multivocality: a firehose of language that never stops and never falls into a shared structure.

Trow despaired because television appeared to liquefy attention – it started to run, and seek its own level, working its way into nooks and crannies of the culture, dripping down into places it had never gone before. I can sympathize, because in our time attention has melted into air – it has expanded to fill the volume available to it and is subject to currents we don’t understand, piped through structures that are not visible in their fullness to us.

I have a sympathy for him, but I would not wish to live in the world that he was built for: I am too much a creature of this new age, and though I dislike the institutions that have grown up to manage it, I would not turn back the clock. These are not the sort of problems that can be solved by going back.

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