All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground). The two continually coerce and play with each other across a common outline or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously. The 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. For example, at a lecture, attention will shift from the speaker's words to his gestures, to the hum of the lights or to street sounds, to the feel of the chair or to a memory or association or smell. Each new figure in turn displaces the others into ground. Ground provides the structure or style of awareness, the ‘way of seeing’ as 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: such is the normal activity of the artist, the only person in our culture whose whole business has been the retraining and updating of sensibility. In the order of things, ground comes first and the figures emerge later. Coming events cast their shadows before them.