German-American psychologist, a founder of Gestalt psychology. Cameron dates a turning point in McLuhan to 1964, when — just after finishing Understanding Media — he read Köhler's Gestalt Psychology and acquired the explicit ground framework that governs everything from 1964 to his death.
Across the dialogues
The 1964 source of "figure and ground" — Köhler's Gestalt psychology, which reorganized everything McLuhan did after
McLuhan read Köhler's Gestalt Psychology in 1964 — and from then until his death, "everything is figure and ground."
"One way of putting a solution is to jump to 1964. He's just finished Understanding Media, and he reads Wolfgang Kohler's book, Gestalt Psychology. And from that moment on, from '64 until '79, everything is figure and ground for McLuhan."
Figure/ground gave McLuhan a third way past fixed vertical/horizontal schools — either can be figure on the other's ground; the task is to map the range of variation.
"If we want to take horizontal and vertical, McLuhan shows that it's not that either one of those is the ground. Rather, there is a dynamic where the vertical can be figured on the ground of the horizontal, and the horizontal figured on the ground of the vertical. And what's needed is to understand the range of that variation."
Figure/ground compounds on itself — metaphor (and the Laws of Media Tetrad) is built of two figure-ground pairs.
"Now metaphor is made up of two figure and ground — in Laws of Media, he does the tetrad metaphor."
Connections
McLuhan read Köhler's Gestalt Psychology in 1964; from then on, "everything is figure and ground."
Köhler's Gestalt psychology is the explicit source of McLuhan's figure/ground framework.