In the mid-1950s, when the motif of the hands creating each other appeared in Saul Steinberg’s drawing, newspaper illustrations (the one on the left is from “The New Yorker”) were very simple. Just a line, no halftones, no shading, no nuance. Long ago, when a drawing appeared in a newspaper, it was there to sharpen, emphasise, to draw attention to something. We still like to think of drawings in this way in today’s culture. We like to think of our unnoticed everyday life in the anachronistic way. It reassures us; we rock ourselves (and others) nonchalantly in such a sentimental repetition of gestures, phrases, translations from decades ago, as if in a relaxing, personal armchair.
Scientists have already established beyond doubt that the year 2024 is not 1954, or even 1963 (when the first sketches of what we now call the Matrix appeared in the mind of the same Steinberg). It is worth remembering this, even without giving up the relaxing rocking.
In 2024, there are incomparably more people who want to draw their own boundaries, their own guiding lines, their own perspectives.
It seems to us, the spectators, that we can distinguish brighter and slightly darker visions in this tangle.
This is our small role: to observe the full spectrum of clearly detached emotions; from irritation to delight. Even without leaving our deep privacy, we participate in this collective scene, we can be seen in frame number 2024.
Let us not believe too much that the final effect depends primarily on the gestures of the main actors, on their dramatic acting: signed, unsigned, crossed out, underlined, erased.
Many of them probably believe that they are self-sufficient, like the mutually drawing hands in Steinberg’s drawing, that if they play it well, they will fill the whole frame with themselves.
Yes, it has an effect on the action, but not much more than our passive gaze.
Not all the plans, not all the contours, the signs they draw have to suit us.
And to quote the classic: “In silence, all power collapses into ruins” (Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, 2005).
