The decisive scheme is that of inclusion and exclusion. In all communicative processes, it follows from the previous considerations, who or what comes into question as an Address and who or what does not.
Communication cannot avoid deciding whether something in its environment may be regarded as self-referential (i.e., as a subject that demonstrates a behavior by which communication and information can be distinguished) or as an object that, because it does not maintain a self-reference, can at best be thematized.
At this fundamental level, Things are sharp, even switch-like [⇒ Flip Operation]: inclusion includes world occurrences as candidates for addresses, exclusion excludes them.
Animals or trees are candidates or not, strangers and barbarians are candidates or not, the severely mentally handicapped are candidates or not.
Fundamental is this level of Inclusion/Exclusion because it has dramatic consequences in case of Exclusion. It fundamentally excludes someone/something from communication and thus blocks their possibilities of Consciousness.
Without connection to communication, there will be a consensus about this, all possibilities of self-designation and self-distinction will be erased.
For the case of Inclusion (a world occurrence is treated as addressable) things are different. The schema side of exclusion cannot, of course, be deleted. It re-enters the inclusion/exclusion distinction on the inclusion side. Someone/something is addressable and to that extent included, but in the process of inclusion, exclusion and inclusion are again distinguished. The communicatively elaborated address is, as one might say, describable as a more or less specific inclusion/exclusion profile. No one is addressable in all communicative respects, and everyone is included/excluded in different ways in all communicative contexts accessible to them. It is obvious that students, professors, room attendants are included in the university system, but also that they are included in different ways, with very different opportunities, included here and there, excluded here and there. If one takes a look at society, it also becomes clear that students, professors, and room attendants are addressable for the duration of their existence in far fewer social contexts than there are social contexts.
This can be deepened even a little bit: No one could be communicatively included if he were not simultaneously and always also excluded. The talk of the address is the talk of an inclusion and a separation. The talk of a profile (a contoured address) would make no sense if it were not distinguished and designated in the distinction, that is, if the profile did not have the recesses that made it visible, as it were, as a figure before a ground. The address is the positive in the negative of exclusion. The elaboration of the address through communication is for this very reason the core of generality and singularity or in more common terminology: of individuation and participation at the same time. It might be worthwhile to illuminate this process a little more closely by what in former times might have been called the ontogenesis of an individual.
IV
One will not claim, without wanting to take on too great a burden of proof, that an infant already has consciousness. Undoubtedly, he uses in a certain sense a free-floating, differentiated attentionality, but this does not already justify the assumption that he could distinguish himself from himself and others. And it is also plausible that his perceptual world is not yet interspersed with distinctions and designations that would be eavesdropped on communication. He processes differences, not observations.
But be it as it may, instead of recourse to an inner world that eludes any observation, one can ask about the communication processes that put inclusion and exclusion into action. It is striking that (with the exception of the cases Peter Fuchs mentioned) the Child is assumed to be self-referential from the very beginning.
⇒ Child
V