Der ehrliche religiöse Denker ist wie ein Seiltänzer. Er geht, dem Anscheine nach, beinahe nur auf der Luft. – Sein Boden ist der schmalste, der sich denken läßt. Und doch läßt sich auf ihm wirklich gehen.¹ Wittgenstein

One of the fundamental issues posed by McLuhan’s work lies in the question: can there be some sense? That is, is it possible for some things to make sense — the sciences, say — but for other things to remain senseless?²

Or may it be that there is no such thing as some sense — either because nothing at all makes sense, or because everything makes sense?

Nietzsche makes the former case that nothing at all makes sense, most pointedly in the unpublished early fragment ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’³: 

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe (…) there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet it still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself.⁴ (…) It is remarkable that this [insight into its own nullity] was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence.

Nietzsche’s argument turns on the finding that the gap between our finite grasp of anything and that thing itself — the thing that would be grasped — can never be closed. Words are thus left hanging in the air, without achieved reference, and without any reality of their own once they themselves (‘they themselves’!) are the thing (the ‘thing’!) we would attempt to grasp:

we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, flowers [and words and ourselves] ; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things –- metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. (Ibid.)

That it makes no sense to speak of “original entities” in such a case is exactly Nietzsche’s point. Notably, it also makes no sense to speak of “metaphors” in this context since, in their case as well, these noises we make (me-ta-phor) “correspond in no way to the original entities”. Hence Nietzsche’s insight that “with the true world we also have abolished the apparent one”⁵ (aka the ‘metaphorical’ one). 

McLuhan, on the other hand, argues that it is exactly the metaphorical power of the irremedial gap between us and the things we address that is the very foundation of sense. Hence it is that truth and reality are not in his view to be found through the matching of thought/word and thing (via the collapse of the gap and of metaphor) but through making (the triumph of the gap and of metaphor). Not that human making on its own is able to achieve anything more than castles in the air — here Nietzsche was quite correct.  But McLuhan’s contention is precisely that human making is not — ‘on its own’. Instead, human making on the basis of a foundational medium of sense⁶ successfully communicates with other people and with things and even with gods. It is this foundational or grounding medium of sense that is the primal message/massage. 

McLuhan’s claim is precisely that everything ‘makes’ sense because it is sense that is the foundational ground of everything. A series of considerations may help to specify this claim. 

1. It is difficult to make the case that science fails to grasp real things. If anything, a nuclear bomb, say, seems all too real. Even Nietzsche was greatly impressed by science and thought it unreal, along with everything else, only in the absence of a cogent contrary position. Accepting that Nietzsche may have demonstrated only (only!) that certain premises are self-defeating (premises around which the world increasingly turns), the implication of the astonishing success of science in a great many fields is that sense does truly exist in some way and the resulting tasks are to specify that way and especially to understand its relation to senselessness.  

2. It is difficult on the other hand to see how a case for some sense (as exemplified by science, say) can be sustained if some massive senselessness can never be obviated. Must not such ultimate senselessness (like the foreseeable extinction of the solar system) swallow any and all purported sense over the long run? Here Nietzsche may be thought to have supplied the coup de grâce to the notion that sense and senselessness can co-exist over time (“eternal recurrence” being exactly ‘endless time’): “After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.” 

3. The remaining possibility, that sense is fundamental, seems to be the only way to account for language learning and everything that language learning enables. For children learn language, not by interpreting it in terms of their natural lights, but by interpreting their natural lights in terms of it.⁷ That this instantaneous flip occurs at all, and that it then enables all the various arts and sciences, and the myriad social dealings humans have with one another, was taken by McLuhan to evidence the fundamentality of sense and hence the very metaphysical nature of the universe:

The ideal orator will be a man of encyclopedic⁸ knowledge because learning precedes eloquence. (…) “Every letter is a godsend”, wrote Joyce. And, much more, every word is an avatar, a revelation, an epiphany. For every word is the product of a complex mental act with a complete learning process involved in it. In this respect words can be regarded not as signs but as existent things, alive with a physical and mental life which is both individual and collective. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953)

The timeless or simultaneous aspect of words leaps out at us (the literal sense of “object”) when they are used not as conventional signs but as metaphysical existents. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953)

The pattern by which one learns one’s mother tongue is now being extended to all learning whatsoever.⁹ (McLuhan to John Snyder, Aug 4 1963, Letters 291)

A child does not learn language as a series of classified meanings. He learns language as he learns to walk, or to hear, or to see. He learns language as a way of feeling and exploring his environment. Therefore, he is totally involved. He learns very fast because of this enormous sensuous involvement and the resulting depth of motivation. (The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion 1967)

In a word, that “pattern by which one learns one’s mother tongue” is the synchronic relation of human beings to sense. Were this relation diachronic — constructed — language would never be learned (and therefore never be) since, as McLuhan repeatedly cited Thomas citing Aristotle, “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form”.¹⁰ Not understanding language (“the opposite form”) can never bring about an understanding of language except via a transformation through which a completely new understanding is inaugurated. This new understanding has its basis in what is to be learned: “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form”. But for an as yet unknown form to guide the way to itself through an “opposite form”, and to ground the required transformation into it from that “opposite form”, requires that it be existing foundation. This is the synchronic medium that is the message, the medium that is the massage into new identity and new possibilities of communication. 

In the 1969 Counterblast McLuhan observes:

The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP.

By ‘content’ here McLuhan means something like: the previous medium that any medium always re-plays (re-cognizes, re-trieves, re-calls, etc), like speech by writing or movies by TV.  But the medium re-played and recalled by the first use of speech by human beings was no previous human technology, for in McLuhan’s understanding there were no humans prior to speech. Instead the prior medium to speech is the medium of existence (dual genitive!) itself — what McLuhan terms in ‘Notes on the Media as Art Forms’ (Explorations 2, 1954) “the dance of existence” or here “mental dance, non-verbal ESP”.

It is this “dance of existence” itself that first of all enables humans to speak. It is always implicated in their speech, as a sort of “content”, but (as further brought out below) in a distorted way that allows its identification only by seeing through it to the other side of the mirror.

4. McLuhan was aware that the use of language of any sort, specifically including pre-historic (ie, pre-written) oral language in what he called “tribal” societies, arbitrarily abstracts from immediate contact with the surrounding world¹¹ (‘immediate contact with the surrounding world’!) just as Nietzsche detailed.¹² Although always in the context of discussion concerning the alphabet, McLuhan repeatedly referred to “meaningless phonemes” which are, however, not alphabetic particles but sound particles belonging to spoken language:

The phonemic principle is that there are in each language a limited number of elemental types of speech sounds, called phonemes, peculiar to that language; that all sounds produced in the employment of the given language are referable to its set of phonemes; that only its own phonemes are at all significant in the given language. (Laws of Media 14, citing Morris Swadesh, ‘The Phonemic Principle’, 1934, emphasis added)

Alphabetic aka visual abstraction only extends the abstraction that is already in force in any and all language use:

The role of language itself, as of any other medium, is to translate and transform being by “participation” and perception. (McLuhan to Jane Bret, January 3 1973, Letters  460)

The phonetic alphabet also served as a paradigm for the process of abstraction, for the written word is an abstraction of the spoken word which, in turn, is an abstraction from the holistic experience. (Alphabet Mother of Invention 1977)¹³

The basis of this abstraction is the phoneme. The irreducible meaningless bit of sound which is translated [in the alphabet] by a meaningless sign, the phoneme is the smallest sound unit of speech and it has no relation to concepts or semantic meanings. The phoneme is then a thing perceived on special fragmentary terms. (Havelock & McLuhan, The Early and Later Innis 1978, emphasis added)¹⁴

According to McLuhan, language does not arise from human perception and experience, but the reverse: human perception and experience, even thought, arise from language (which is one more indication that language — either in the individual or the species — is no cumulative achievement of a supposed ‘pre-linguistic’ state lacking “thought and perception as well as communication”):

language itself is the principal channel and view-maker of experience for men everywhere. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 1954)

language structures the way in which man thinks and perceives the world. It is the medium of both thought and perception as well as communication. (Alphabet Mother of Invention 1977)

Human being and language use are, therefore, as McLuhan often observed, co-extensive. But since language inherently abstracts and irremedially distances at the same time that it illuminates

the sin committed by HCE in Phoenix park is language itself i.e. the ultimate self-exhibitionism, the ultimate uttering. This is all in the Wake around p. 506 ff. This uttering is the means of taking HCE out of the woods into the world of the self-consciousness and guilt. (McLuhan to Wilfrid Watson, summer 1965)

Because phonemes are meaningless aside from their context within languages, and because languages are social constructs presupposing what McLuhan often called a “do-it-yourself” principle¹⁵, human beings and their languages are unable on their own to establish any relation to reality. Words as agglomerations of phonemes “correspond in no way to the original entities” they would designate and therefore have, as McLuhan said, “no relation to concepts or semantic meanings”. In the event, the notions of “original entities” and of “words” (as one class of “original entities”) and of “designation” (as the relation between these unrealities) fall away, just as Nietzsche described. With them go any and all “meanings”. “The ultimate uttering” proves in this way only to be an “outering” and not meaningful “uttering” at all.

McLuhan was clear that this entire story is self-defeating (as Nietzsche himself insisted, “self-defeating” being his verdict on the human adventure) and insistently diachronic. But modern science (even social science like Saussure’s linguistics) and modern art are, McLuhan maintained, primarily synchronic. And history is replete with different notions of time than the purely diachronic — only Gutenbergian civilization assumes its exclusive domination. It follows (since the diachronic possibility is senseless and alternate accounts are available) that some other story (or perhaps stories) must be the case. 

McLuhan’s contrary suggestion was that humans have a synchronic relation to a foundation of sense and that this accounts not only for the initial learning of language, but also for the ongoing performance of language as it is exercised in human society at large and in particular in the arts and sciences. Although never capable of matching correspondence with the real (here Nietzsche was prescient), human making, while always incomplete and therefore to some degree arbitrary, achieves genuine communication with other humans and with the surrounding world¹⁶ beyond its own its constructive ability to do so — given (and only given) the medium in which and on the basis of which it operates.

McLuhan’s repeated allusion to fish being the last to recognize water was therefore no mere illustrative simile.  He thought it demonstrable that human beings are fish who do not recognize the medium in which they live and without which they could not be — the waters of intelligibility. Human history is largely the story of this remarkable blindness, Joyce’s “nightmare from which I am trying to awake”.¹⁷

It followed for McLuhan that all human perception is always a (usually unknown and unacknowledged) retrieval or replay of the original synchronic relation to the foundational ground or medium of sense through which language is first learned and then exercised in human “thought and perception as well as communication”:

The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so; but with Edgar Poe and the symbolists this central human fact was taken up to the level of conscious awareness. It then became the basis of modern science and technology. That is what Whitehead meant when he said that the great event of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters 1954)

5. It is the fundamentality of sense that continues to enable human beings, throughout their individual lifetimes and throughout history, to be addressed by language, and indeed by things, instead of merely addressing them in the RVM (rear-view mirror).¹⁸ As evidenced first of all by the learning of language, and then by all the arts and sciences that arise through language, humans beings are not restricted to the mere reception of things on the basis of what they already know (or think they know). Instead, human beings can be, and are, freely trans-formed and in-formed — massaged — by words and things in such a way that they come to learn what those words mean and what those things are.¹⁹

The first section of Through the Vanishing Point begins:

The word itself as evocative power, not a sign.
Fusion with the natural process. “Weed in a river am I.” An artist might have said: “Used by the words, am I.”
There is no question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy.²⁰

It is this fundamental “free flow of corporate energy” — the ubiquity of sense — that McLuhan saw as underlying all human culture including, especially, modern culture: 

In Mallarmé the Word has no theological overtones. It is rather a return to the pre-Christian doctrine of the Logos which included ratio et oratio and was the element in which all men were thought to move and have their being. Mallarmé did not approach this question as a speculative one, but as a practical matter of poetics. (T. S. Eliot [Review of Eleven Eliot Books] 1950)

6. What then to make of senselessness if it is not all-annihilating, as Nietzsche argued, but also is not some independent power competing with sense? If McLuhan did not take sense to be limited by senselessness, did he believe that the senseless death of a child (for example) might ultimately be seen to make some kind of terrible sense? No, McLuhan had, if anything,  a clearer view of human folly and the general reign of senselessness than the rest of us. But he also saw that senselessness, indeed the very possibility of senselessness, arises through the seriousness with which sense or meaning entails relationship and relationship entails plurality:

Nothing has its meaning alone. Every figure must have its ground or environment . A single word, divorced from its linguistic ground, would be useless. A note in isolation is not music. Consciousness is corporate action involving all the senses (Latin sensus communis or “common sense” is the translation of all the senses into each other). The “meaning of meaning” is relationship²¹. (Take Today 3)²²

Sense restricted to itself would not be sense. “There is no question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy.” Hence the association continually stressed by McLuhan of ‘sense’ with ‘extension’. As implied by its etymological ties to ‘direction’,²³ sense inherently ex-presses itself out to, and with, another: it ex-ists as dia-logue. It is essentially “corporate”. But the extreme extended other of sense is — senselessness. Hence it is that sense and meaning, as inherently dia-logical, do not remain in some crystal palace of purity, but utter/outer themselves in “free flow“ to, even as, the possibility of senselessness:

dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (Take Today 22)²⁴

It is this inherent creativity of sense — the “process of creating the new [that] came before, and goes beyond” — which opens the possibility, even the necessity, of senselessness. But this ex-pression of sense (objective genitive) so little contradicts or empties sense that it is the sign of sense (subjective genitive). This ex-pression out of itself is what sense is. “There is no question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy.”

7. This free dramatic structure of sense is synchronic, not (or not only and not first of all) diachronic. When sense ex-presses itself outwardly to the extreme of senselessness it does not utterly (outerly) lose itself or, contrariwise, initiate an historical process through which it eventually comes to itself. Instead, its free outflow is immediately its assured inflow: “The timeless or simultaneous aspect of words leaps out at us (the literal sense of ‘object’)” (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial 1953).

Sense as dramatic dia-logue is what it is in the “timeless or simultaneous” creation and   maintenance of compound difference which yet remains in communicative correlation:

The “meaning of meaning” is relationship.

So it is that a foundational synchronic dynamic of identity and difference — aka, of sense or meaning — structures all the contrasted pairs considered by McLuhan:

eye / ear
visual / oral
visual space / acoustic space
diachrony / synchrony
print / speech
left hemisphere / right hemisphere
civilized / tribal
cliché / archetype
concept / percept
C/M / C-M
mechanical / electric
figure (without ground) / ground (with figure)²⁵

Some observations in The Global Village concerning visual and acoustic space and the hemispheres of the brain apply to all these pairs:

visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation, even if Western civilization has (…) tamped down our awareness of the acoustic. (GV 55, emphasis added) 

No matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there is always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres… (GV 62, emphasis added)²⁶

In each of the listed pairs, an uncollapsible difference is installed via a “gap” between the two; but both of the two are always present in their irreducible plurality and they always remain in dynamic relation with one another. Such is the synchronic medium of sense on the basis of which all things occur. There is always both plurality and relation:

no sense can operate in isolation from all the others and no medium can exist by itself. (Title VII Research Abstract [Report on Project in Understanding New Media], 1961)

the concentric pattern is imposed by the instant quality, and overlay in depth, of electric speed. But the concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight, and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media. (UM, 26)

8. Human beings are subject to this gapped medium of sense in an extraordinary way. For humans have a free or distanced or gapped relation to it. “We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes” (UM 25).  This is the motor of diachronic history, the story McLuhan tells of the diachronic trajectory from “the tribal” through the alphabet and Gutenberg to “the electric” — a diachronic trajectory which yet never fails to observe its underlying synchronic law of identity and difference.

This gapped relation of humans to the gapped ground of sense means that we are its sign — in humans and in humans alone sense manifests that extreme outreach into senselessness whereby beings attempt to take over sense on their own. This is another story McLuhan tells — of Babel — to which McLuhan returned again and again.

Only in humans is it possible and indeed usual to emphasize or prefer or stress one of the two elements in McLuhan’s pairs — pairs whose explicit consideration goes back to the Greeks and whose implicit consideration is what human society ceaselessly goes on about.

Humans as the extreme senselessness of sense can never escape the role they play within the need of sense to go “beyond the exchange of ‘equivalents’ that merely reflect or repeat the old”. Human being, exactly in its failure to respect “equivalence”, is the kenotic fulfillment of this need of sense for that plurality or distance from itself through which it synchronically maintains itself in and as “dialogue”.

Here is McLuhan to Jackie Tyrwhitt Dec 23, 1960: “irrelevance is a needed margin for any kind of attention or center. In the field of attention²⁷, a center without a margin is the formula for hypnosis, stasis and paralysis” (Letters, 278). The “irrelevance” of humans is the “needed margin” in which the the “stasis” of sense is definitively overcome in dynamic outreach.

One peculiarity of center-margin relationships is that when freedom of interplay between these areas breaks down in any kind of structure, the tendency is for the center to impose itself upon the margin. In the field of attention which we call perception, when the center enlarges and the margin diminishes beyond a certain a certain point, we are in that induced state called hypnosis. The dialogue has ended. (McLuhan to Serge Chermayeff, Dec 19, 1960)

Hence McLuhan’s citation from the I Ching regarding creativity or innovation or “the free flow of corporate energy” that

“does indeed guide all happenings, but it never behaves outwardly as the leader. Thus true strength is that strength which, mobile as it is hidden, concentrates on the work without being outwardly visible.” (Take Today 22)

The “true strength” of guidance has its mobility in its not “being outwardly visible” to and in humans.