Further Notes on Figure, Ground & Causality

In later life, McLuhan would talk about his use of figure and ground by presenting his work as being primarily concerned with causality, or more specifically, what McLuhan refers to as “formal causality”:

My own approach to the media has been entirely from formal cause. Since formal causes are hidden and environmental, they exert their structural pressure by interval and interface with whatever is in their environmental territory. Formal cause is always hidden, whereas the things upon which they act are visible …. This matter of formal causality and the environments created by the media is so big that I hope your new academic set-up will be able to take hold of some of it.[1]

The study of formal causality, at least as McLuhan conceived it, is the study of ground. As Eric McLuhan casts the matter, “formal cause” is the configuration of the ground and reciprocally it is the shape of the figure. Therefore a figure might have one efficient cause but has many and diverse effects (formal) that preceded it. Formal cause is found in the prior restructuring of the ground and its continuing dynamic relation to its ground.[2] “Efficient causality” on the other hand, which McLuhan saw as the sole concern of the leading lights of “communication,” is largely preoccupied with figures. As Eric McLuhan notes, efficient causality “has nothing to do with effects.” Neither does material or final. “Only efficient cause is diachronic, all others are synchronic and simultaneous. Formal cause is the only one concerned with effects and is synchronic — hence the paradox that effects come before causes.”[3]
Writing to Barbara Ward McLuhan implies that his “method” of starting with the ground is derivative of the work of Q. D. Leavis:

When Q. D. Leavis did a study of Fiction and the Reading Public, there was an uproar because she had ventured to suggest that highly literate people could lead moronic lives through most of their waking hours. It is the only study ever made, in English, of a reading public. That is, the study of ground for the figure of the novel. The ordinary study concentrates on figure minus ground, i.e. the content of the novel is studied and the kinds of readers and their relation to the novel are ignored. Visual man likes to assume a merely neutral transportation process as between the figure and the ground, ignoring the complex changes that take place in both figure and ground during all communication [handwritten addition: except for H. A. Innis's Empire and Communications.][4]

The extent that McLuhan’s thinking developed along these lines is evident in his early review of Fredrick Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. Here McLuhan takes issue with Wertham’s deliberate isolation of the crime comic from the entire culture in which it operates.[5] That said, however, merely starting from ground is not the whole of the matter. McLuhan also presents his concerns as ultimately being with the interplay between figure and ground. Writing to Jacqueline Tyrwitt, McLuhan notes:

It is this figure-ground relationship that constitutes the dynamic of any culture, and it is totally lacking in the Ekistics magazine. Ekistics is run on general systems approach … The general systems people are completely unable to relate figure and ground so they merge them by translating the cultural ground (or the ground of any situation they consider to be worth studying) into another figure by a statistical approach of fragmentation. Statistics can never provide a gestalt or a, figure-ground interface.[6]

In “The Future of New Media,” McLuhan states: “the meaning of a new medium is not merely its definition but what it actually does as a figure in its changing context or ground.”[7] An example of McLuhan’s figure and ground analysis directed at observing the “interplay” between figure and ground can be seen in “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” where McLuhan considers “writing” initially as figure, then as ground, and finally as a figure again against a new ground:[8]

In the first place, then, pre-literate societies based on a monopoly of the spoken word, are static, repetitive, unchanging. They are, as it is said, “time-bound.” Such societies find it difficult to explore space or to extend their communications horizontally. Writing is a tremendous revolution in such a world. For writing is the translation of the vocal or audible into spatial form. Writing gives control over space. Writing produces at once the city. The power to shape space in writing brings the power to organize space architecturally. And when messages can be transported, then comes the road, and armies, and empires. The empires of Alexander and the Caesars were essentially built by paper routes. But today with instantaneous global communications the entire planet is, for purposes of inter-communication, a village rather than a vast imperial network. It is obvious that writing cannot have the same meaning or function for us that it had for earlier culture.[9]

[1] McLuhan to John Culkin, 19 June 1975. It appears that while McLuhan borrowed Aristotle’s terms, he was ambivalent about Aristotle’s formulation of how the causes actually worked. As Patterson has noted, although both McLuhan and Innis were interested in “formal causality,” what McLuhan meant by formal causality was something quite different from Aristotle or Taylor, formal cause is used not in the sense of classification of forms but in their operation. Graeme H. Patterson, History and Communications: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, the Interpretation of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 135.
[2] Eric McLuhan, “The Logos and Formal Causality,” MS., 2.
[3] Ibid., 1–2.
[4] McLuhan to Barbara Ward, 9 February 1973. Emphasis mine.
[5] McLuhan, review of Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredrick Wertham, Shenandoah 6, no. 2 (Spring 1955): 53–57.
[6] McLuhan to Jacqueline Tyrwitt, 24 March 1972. Ekistics is a term coined by K. A. Doxiadis in 1942 to refer to the science of human settlement. The magazine of the same name, which became very influential in the second half of the 20th century, had its origins in a private mimeographed sheet available to only a few experts (much like McLuhan’s Network).
[7] McLuhan, “The Future of New Media,” MS., 1. Emphasis mine.
[8] In the language of drama this might be called “situational irony.” However, McLuhan is here reporting “situational irony” as an effect of speed-up in technological innovation. The effect this has on a reader might be said to be not unlike Empsons’ description of the value of double irony — that is, it combines breadth of sympathy with energy and judgement, permitting a balance among all materials being judged. William Empson. Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of Pastoral Form in Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 57.
[9] McLuhan, “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,” 161–62. Emphasis mine.