In L’Idée Fixe (1932), Paul Valéry observes that

the mind (…) has to be supplied — with disorder! (…) And it takes its disorder where it finds it. Inside itself, outside, everywhere . . . It requires an Order-Disorder difference to function.¹

On this view, the crooked timber of human being — the unrivaled source of disorder on the planet (and now beyond it) — may be said to be a prerequisite of mind.  So whereas our 401k nihilists moan about a semantic disorder that threatens to disable the very idea of meaning (or at least their very idea of meaning), in fact disorder and mind are mutually implicating — and are not at all incompatible with meaning.  How have meaning without mind?  And how, asks Valéry, have mind without disorder?

Now McLuhan cited Valéry repeatedly over his career from the 1940s to the 1970s, but especially between 1949 and 1954.² His friend Allen Tate, whom he visited at home in Sewanee (Tenn) in 1944 and with whom he published many of his early articles in the Sewanee Review, was a leading American champion of Valéry’s work. And Valéry was often discussed by T.S. Eliot, of course, whom McLuhan began studying in Cambridge (if not before) and then intensively read in the late forties with Hugh Kenner when the two were working on a book on Eliot together.

Another source of McLuhan’s interest in Valéry may have been S.I. Hayakawa. Hayakawa was from Winnipeg³ and graduated with a BA in English from the University of Manitoba, six years before McLuhan.  He then preceded McLuhan at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, graduating with his PhD in 1935 — the year before McLuhan arrived. During McLuhan’s one year in Madison, Hayakawa was teaching away from Madison in UW remote locations and it may be that they never renewed their acquaintance there.  But even if they didn’t meet at UW, McLuhan would certainly have heard in the English department of someone he knew from Winnipeg, who had just completed his PhD and had published an interesting article on one of McLuhan’s main interests, T.S. Eliot.⁴ Later, in the early 1940’s, it may have been Hayakawa who called McLuhan’s attention to Korzybski’s ‘general semantics’ via his popular book, Language in Action (1941).⁵ Then, in 1943, Hayakawa founded (and edited for decades) a journal for general semantics, ETC, whose fall number for 1948 featured the abbreviated translation of L’Idée Fixe cited above.