Kandinsky went on to develop an account of this moment of transition or difference between oppositional forces. In the section on point in Point and Line to Plane called ‘At the Boundary’, he introduced a particular type of Doppelklang.23 The text describes how the point approaches and exceeds its outer dimensions; the point begins to disappear and, in embryonic form, the plane begins to live. Kandinsky asks when a point becomes a plane due to the amount of surface it covers, and describes this moment at which the graphic element is both point and plane as a Doppelklang. He asserts that such boundaries are ‘indistinct and mobile’ as the identity of point and, later, line is established in a relation of size to the surface upon which it stands and to other forms on the surface. The identity of each element exists as such only in relation to others and that identity, he writes, is characterised by ‘instability, … flickering tension.’24
The passage moves next to a consideration of a point’s external boundary, and describes ‘different shaped points’.25 Fig.3 of the volume (fig.4) offers a series of twelve of these. One is round; most have clearly circumscribed edges; some have quite erratic, ‘open’ edges which allow the ground to appear within the outer extremities of the point. In the latter – particularly in the case of the ‘point’ composed of vertical and horizontal lines – the relation of the figure to its ground is less clear. Fig.4 (fig.5) offers a perfectly round point at the centre of Kandinsky’s Urbild. Fig.5 (fig.6) offers an image of that point exploding, dissipating across the picture plane in a series of tiny points. These threaten to classify the relatively enormous central point as a plane, and at the boundary of the point (actually, the centre of a nebula in Hercules, according to the caption) the edge is effectively dissolved. Thus, the distinction ‘figure/ ground’ is all but lost as the identity of the central point is twice undermined – as a point that becomes a plane because of its size, and by its diffuse edge which the ground invades. Here the dual (and contradictory) identity of the point illustrates the concept of the Doppelklang.