McLuhan's core analytical framework, taken from Wolfgang Köhler's Gestalt psychology — after reading it in 1964, "everything is figure and ground for McLuhan" for the rest of his working life. Where the Western tradition sought closure — vertical, through mind; horizontal, through emotion — figure and ground offers a third way: neither pole is the ground, and each can be figured on the other. New to it — start with dialogue 07 for the framework, then dialogue 08 for the spectrum and where it collapses.
Across the dialogues
Introduces figure and ground as McLuhan's third way past vertical and horizontal closure
McLuhan rejects both Western paths to closure — the vertical (through mind) and the horizontal (through emotion) are alike Gnostic; life itself is dynamic, with no closure.
"For McLuhan, there is no closure in life."
After reading Köhler's Gestalt Psychology in 1964, figure and ground became McLuhan's master key — neither vertical nor horizontal is the ground; each can be figured on the other.
"And from that moment on, from 64 until 79, everything is figure and ground for McLuhan."
The relation is recursive and reversible — what counts as figure or ground can always flip. This is what McLuhan means by metaphor.
"for McLuhan, ultimately, figure and ground is itself subject to figure and ground."
Opens it into a spectrum — and finds the extremes where it collapses
Figure and ground is a spectrum, not a binary — between poetry-as-ground / science-as-figure and its inverse lie countless intermediate configurations.
"between these two extremes, there is what McLuhan calls a myriad of other possibilities but they're all figure and ground possibilities. And they have to do with what he sometimes calls the stress, sometimes calls the preference, sometimes calls the weight of how the figure and ground are configured."
The Gutenberg Galaxy chases singular closure — a ground that overwhelms figure, or a figure that overwhelms ground; the Marconi era accepts the irreducible spectrum.
"However, it always attempts to find some ground that can overwhelm its figure, or conversely some figure that can overwhelm its ground."
McLuhan's first Tetrad (1974–75) — when figure becomes ground you get a monster: the law of etherealization.
"When figure becomes ground, it's a monster. I think it was the law of etherealization."
At the extremes figure and ground collapse into each other — the monster, the Gorgon, the Ouroboros — and the two ends of the spectrum touch.
"The spectrum collapses, and the two ends touch each other because it no longer matters which is figure and ground."
Turns it on the formula chart: image swallows technology, and the human question returns
In the holeopathic phase the ALP/HCE relation flips — image-as-ground swallows technology-as-ground; HCE becomes the virtual image-world, ALP the figures dancing on it.
"Ground as technology has been swallowed by ground as image."
The move from holeopathic cliché-probes to the Anthropomorphic Physical poses the question left in the confusion of dancing images: what is it to be human?
"What is it to be an anthropoid? What is it to be a human being?"
The full spectrum — all figure to all ground, inclusive consciousness at 50-50, the gap as tactility, and the eye/ear extremes of Take Today 22
The spectrum gets a center — inclusive consciousness sits at the 50-50 of figure and ground, with "exclusive consciousness" everything outside it on both sides.
"the inclusive consciousness for McLuhan is at 50-50, 50% figure and 50% ground."
To hold figure and ground together at once you need a gap between them — and that gap is tactility; at the extremes the gap closes and tactility vanishes.
"in order to have figure and ground, you have to have a gap between them, and that gap is tactility, as we both know."
"The key page for all of McLuhan is Take Today 22" — all experience arrayed along an eye/ear spectrum with tactility in the middle, those figure/ground points supplying the focus for investigating the interior landscape.
"there are only two extreme forms of human experience, the eye and the ear."
Grounded back in Innis — McLuhan "found in Köhler a way of talking about what he had already discovered" as center and margin, the "one insight" he spent twenty years refining; the spectrum made total, a "cloud of implication"
The spectrum restated as a rule of succession — every figure rides a ground and in turn becomes the ground of the next, so between "all figure" and "all ground" lies every relation, "including a flip"; in Bob's chart that flip is the structures "going out from themselves."
"there's no figure without a ground, and there's no figure that doesn't become the ground to the new figure which was its ground."
Bob makes the spectrum total — nothing lies outside figure and ground, so to speak precisely of anything is to place it "in terms of what it is not, but could be," the "cloud of implication" he reads off Finnegans Wake.
"there's absolutely nothing that we can think about or study or talk about that doesn't have a place in this figure and ground spectrum."
Pressed into service as the type of all reversibility — the known, trusted case Cameron leans on to certify that the cliché↔archetype flip is "essential" and "built into what humans are"
Figure/ground invoked as the type of all reversibility — Cameron uses it as the known case that certifies the cliché↔archetype flip: both are "essential," neither pole fixed as the ground, and the power of reversal "built into what humans are."
"the reversibility of cliché and archetype is like the reversibility of figure and ground."
Pushed past reversal into fusion — the two poles no longer flipping but merging into a "monster," McLuhan's recurrent 1970s figure for a world that has consumed its own ground
The relation taken past reversal into fusion — when figure and ground stop flipping and merge, they become a "monster," McLuhan's recurrent 1970s image for a world that has swallowed its own ground.
"the idea of the figure and ground merging into a monster was a recurrent theme of McLuhan"
Applied to the senses — Cameron corrects Bob that eye, ear, and tactile are not an archive but ways of talking about the archives, a matter of figure and ground
Cameron corrects Bob — eye, ear, and tactile are not themselves an archive but "ways of talking about the archives, plural" — a matter of figure and ground.
"the eye, ear, and tactile are ways of talking about the archives, plural, of human experience."
Connections
McLuhan's primary analytical tool for the last fifteen years of his life — neither vertical nor horizontal closure, but their dynamic interchange.
McLuhan took it from Köhler's Gestalt Psychology, read in 1964 — “from that moment on, everything is figure and ground.”
Barry Nevitt's gloss — Finnegans Wake “makes the ground bigger.”
McLuhan didn't discover figure/ground in Köhler so much as find a name for what Innis already tracked as center and margin — "the dynamics of center and margin when he talked about empire."
Cameron makes figure/ground the type of all reversibility — the known case that certifies the cliché↔archetype flip.
Köhler's Gestalt psychology is the explicit source of McLuhan's figure/ground framework.