In his book Within the Context of No Context, George W. S. Trow writes brilliantly odd things:

Contexts

Art requires context: the power of this moment, the moment of the events in the foreground, seen against the accumulation of other moments. The moment in the foreground adheres to the accumulation or rejects it briefly before joining it. How do the manipulators of television deal with this necessity?

1. By the use of false love. The love engendered by familiarity. False love is the Aesthetic of the Hit. What is loved is a hit. The back-and-forth of this establishes a context. It seems powerful. What could be more powerful? A love of tens of millions of people. [...]

2. By the use of abandoned shells. Pepper dresses up like a cop. Pepper dresses up like a hooker. Pepper has to dress up like a cop to dress up like a hooker. Now This. It’s about cowboys! [...]

3. By the use of ad hoc contexts. Just for the moment. We’re here together, in a little house. It makes such good sense. But just for a moment.

He here reflects on the movement of television in the US, in a poetic polemics.

The Context of No-Context

A man interviews his twelve-year-old son about his sex life. Father and son agree that the most important issue is communication.

And cannot decide where he belongs, which side of the screen he sits at, which is part of the poetics.

The Cold Child

Television is dangerous because it operates according to an attention spa that is childish but is cold. It stimulates the response of a childish response but is cold. If it were completely successful in simulating the warmth of childish enthusiasm – that is, if it were warm – would that be better? It would be better only in a society that had agreed that childish warmth and spontaneity were equivalent to public virtue; that is, in a society of children.

What is a cold child? A sadist.

Maybe it all makes some sense of what Brendan Bernhard once told us: George Trow loved America so much, he left it.

It opens our questions, if we try reach beyond Trow’s prison of television (which is our compulsion) and make sense of it within the non-contexts of the hyper-context; where the family is a screen-shadow of faces, where the cold child is the blind one, the mechanistic finger clicking. Surfing, gliding, flying have become our metaphors now. The father cannot interview his son, where the dream cannot be communication, because although they know the same language of words, they cannot speak with the right intonations, with the right colouring; they have not read the same poetry. Where art is held captive only by the context of its own impossibility.

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