Notes on Figure and Ground

Once new tracts of or an area of “ignorance” is determined, even faintly, McLuhan tends to shift modes and begins sharpening the “discovery” for use as a probe, to provoke, initiate or stimulate further dialogue.[1]To assist in both the task of discovering ignorance and sharpening ignorance into a probe, McLuhan appropriated another set of terms in use at the seminar that had been taken from Gestalt psychology — Figure and Ground. I will defer at this point to the McLuhans who offer a more than adequate account of the terms in the Laws of Media:

“Figure” and “ground” entered Gestalt psychology from the work of Edgar Rubin, who [in] about 1915 used those terms to discuss aspects of visual perception. They have here been broadened to embrace the whole structure of perception and of consciousness. All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground), two continually coerce and play with each other across a common line or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously. Shape of one conforms exactly to the shape of the other. Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground, which is con-figurational and comprises all other available figures at once .… Ground provides the structure or style of awareness, the “way of seeing” Flaubert called it, or the “terms on which” a figure is perceived. The study of ground “on its own terms” is virtually impossible; by definition it is at any moment environmental and subliminal. The only possible strategy for such study entails constructing an anti-environment.[2]

Perhaps McLuhan’s own use of figure and ground is best seen in terms of his attempts to grapple with both the ordinary use of “medium,” and “unfortunate” use of the term “Mass media.” [3] In a later address to the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), for example, McLuhan uses the terms as general analytic principles: (a) to collapse the conventional understanding of the terms media and medium, and (b) to break the monopoly of discourse about media and medium stemming solely from concern with “efficient” cause. In this address, McLuhan notes how: “Communication is the act by which the descriptive parameters of the state of nature, including human nature at one point in space-time, are made known to another.”[4] McLuhan continues, arguing that the term communication is also used to include the means by which one set of parameters (the information) is transmitted: “The medium, in ordinary use, the term refers only to the figure, not the ground.” [5] By extension then, a point that the McLuhan’s make explicit in the Laws of Media, the respective approaches of Deutsch, Shannon and Weaver, and Weiner’s use of the terms “media” and “medium,” is problematic on two counts. Firstly, they are “frozen” and “dialectical … born of technology and quite unable of itself to see beyond or around technology.”[6] And secondly, their approach “neglects the vital environmental surround” (the ground) which extends beyond a mere geometric configuration (or more precisely, the graph of the communication net), thus failing to provide them with a real place of observation. As McLuhan notes to Edward T. Hall in 1975:

The Shannon-Weaver model of information theory (encoder, channel and de-coder) simply ignores the law of the situation, i.e. The Shannon-Weaver model is identical to the bias of Western man which excludes the possibility of environmental influence. In fact, the environment presupposed by the activity of communication is categorized as “noise” in the Shannon Weaver paradigm. Visual space is the only kind of space that is figure minus ground.[7]

McLuhan apprehended that Deutsch, Shannon and Weaver, and Weiner, as with Maritain,[8] Julian Jaynes, Levi-Strauss, and Noam Chomsky, were working: “figure minus ground in the Cartesian tradition.”[9] By contrast, McLuhan presents his own enterprise, and approach to “media,” as starting with ground:

My writings baffle most people simply because I begin with ground and they begin with figure. It begins with effects and works to causes. Once it is understood that the hidden ground of our time is information moved at the speed of light … then it becomes easy to see.[10]

Radio, then, according to McLuhan, is “merely a name for all of the electric and simultaneous services which create the instantaneous surround of information, that is itself acoustic in form and structure.” [11] Similarly, as McLuhan argues in the “The Poet and the Press,” the principles of “cinema” were discovered before the moving picture camera was perfected.”[12] The matter is stated plainly in a letter to Melvin Kranzberg: “Structurally, in figure/ground terms, the ground proceeds and includes the figure before the figure, as such, emerges to perception.” Hence, McLuhan adds, one can predict how causes will shortly follow the achievement of effects.[13] The example McLuhan uses is the relation of the bicycle to the car: “The bicycle literally paved the way for the motor car. That is the effects of the car came first, namely paved highways.”[14]

[1] See McLuhan to Fredrick D. Wilhelmsen, 18 January 1971; and McLuhan to W. K. Wimsatt, 6 March 1974.
[2] Laws of Media, 5. In “The Later Innis,” McLuhan mentions how Gestalt comes close “to our own tradition of…un-theoretical positivism,” (McLuhan, “The Later Innis,” MS., 10–11).
[3] See McLuhan, “Notes on the Media as Artforms,” 5.
[4] McLuhan also takes care to note that all communication is partial.
[5] McLuhan, “Technology and Media,” (Paper presented at the Sixth ICOHTEC Symposium, 18 August 1977), MS., 3.
[6] As the McLuhans note in Laws of Media: “Dialectics – logic and philosophy – represent in the trivium the extreme of left hemisphere operation as it uses no ground but alphabetic writing itself,” (Laws of Media, 233).
[7] McLuhan to Edward T. Hall, 26 August 26 1975.
[8] McLuhan to Anne Muggeridge, 14 February 1978.
[9] McLuhan to Edmund Carpenter, 23 March 1973.
[10] McLuhan to Franklin R. Gannon, 12 June 1973.
[11] McLuhan, “Untitled Article On The Vietnam War,” MS., 3
[12] McLuhan, “The Poet and The Press” MS., 3.
[13] McLuhan to Melvin Kranzberg, 10 July 1976
[14] Ibid.