The difference between Inclusion and Exclusion refers to the way in which a society permits individuals to be persons and therefore to participate in communication.
The concept of the Person describes neither the consciousness nor the body of the individual, which are independent autopoietic systems. Rather, it is located at the level of communication: “person” is a social structure allowing society’s finding of addressees for the continued production of →Communication. As such, the reference to a person facilitates the attribution of communicative responsibility (for utterances) and the localization of possibilities of understanding. In this sense, persons are not systems in the way that conscious systems and bodies are, but rather artifacts of communication. They identify individual contexts that generate expectations of limited possibilities of behavior [→Identity/Difference], and in which each individual is faced with the alternative of confirming these expectations or surprising the communication with unexpected stimuli. The choice between confirming and surprising has a different meaning for the psychic and for the social system; it may have decisive consequences for the history of the consciousness, but remaining irrelevant for the history of communication.
Persons and their characteristics, which can be observed socially, emerge from the unstable circularity of →Double Contingency: ego and alter observe each other reciprocally, and this being observed leads to stabilizing the personal traits that can be expected both from the person herself and from other persons. Thus, the way in which we are observed determines the type of personality that can serve as the addressee of a communication.
Inclusion and exclusion are manifested in different forms depending on the structure of the society [→Differentiation of Society] in which persons are observed. In segmentary societies, inclusion consists in belonging to a segment, for instance to a tribe or to a village. Exclusion from a segment can occur through relocation to a different tribe or a different village, though it is practically impossible to survive outside all segments (which means outside society).
In the stratified society, belonging to society is organized by social layers, and belonging to a layer is determined primarily by ancestry. Exclusion is practiced predominantly through the endogamous closure of the social layer, which determines who is worthy of participating in layer-specific communication and who should be treated differently. Stratification is structured in households, or alternatively in corporations, armies, universities, convents and the like. Life outside a household, or its equivalents, is extremely difficult, although there are certain opportunities for survival, for instance, as a vagabond or, in a borderline case, as a pirate. In these cases, however, the normal reciprocity that secures the future and stabilizes expectations is interrupted; the relevance of situations and events is shifted away from a “normal” process of communication, and onto the critical alternative between salvation and damnation.
Functional differentiation means that the typical differences of stratificatory rank lose their primary relevance. A social structure emerges to take their place, which proceeds from the assumption that, in principle, everyone can participate in all forms of communication, and potential differences are not retained within this form of differentiation. Everyone can be economically active, can be educated, found a family or experience equal treatment in a court of law. In this sense, modern inclusion finds its semantic correlate in the postulates of freedom and equality: Equality describes the conditions for social contacts — i .e., the lack of predetermined discrimination — whilst freedom describes the fact that establishing social contacts requires an individual decision. Differences in the use of this freedom can only be justified within each subsystem and not by society as a whole.
The postulates of freedom and equality are the semantic correlates of inclusion and have little to say about the structures that determine inclusion and exclusion. Compared with stratified societies, for instance, a structural change can be recognized chiefly by the fact that the person’s quality and worth (dignitas) can no longer function as selection criteria. Having dissolved the typical hierarchical differences, modern society had to come up with an alternative and equivalent solution. This consists in observing persons on the basis of their biographies: **the temporalization of the person is constructed as a Career.** Expectations relating to persons are primarily based on the biography-centered differentiation between past and future. Any anticipation of the future can only proceed from the expectations permitted by the past, while ascribed factors play only a very marginal role and are anyway — in principle — not acceptable as selection criteria for participation in communication. For instance, Schooling for the whole population can be seen as generalized inclusion in the education system. Reorienting the criterion of inclusion towards the career leads directly to the early stages of biographies becoming imbued with significant meaning, since they constitute the past that will in future serve the career. However, because it concerns one of the most important career phases, the school career is constructed in such a way that it does not limit too strictly what can be done afterwards; everyone’s individual school history allows a certain capitalization of the past, which is not determinative, but can be recombined according to the needs of each current situation.
In a certain sense, modern society simultaneously includes and excludes all persons; although everyone can participate in every communication, no one can be fully integrated in a subsystem. There are no human beings who are only economic or only scientific. The difference between inclusion and exclusion is also addressed within the subsystems through formal →organizations of communication, which are needed in the subsystems. For instance, the economy can only reproduce itself when there are companies, and education could not exist without schools. Whilst each subsystem generally includes everyone, formal organizations include people only in a limited way: in a company, only members can make internal organizational decisions; in a school class, only pupils and a teacher are included. Though subsystems have no reason to exclude someone, formal organizations cannot make everyone a member; thus, this difference between subsystem and organization constitutes a modern version of the difference inclusion/exclusion.
Compared to older societies, modern society changes the criterion for inclusion above all in one respect: exclusion from one subsystem does not mean inclusion in another. If, in stratified societies, belonging to one social layer implied exclusion from the others, then in modern society the connections between the different subsystems are looser; a good education does not say much about a person’s occupation in the economy or other domains. The modern form of inclusion implies a significant loosening of social integration, since inclusion in one subsystem says nothing about inclusion in another. The opposite phenomenon can be observed instead for exclusion, since exclusion from one subsystem sparks a kind of domino effect that can quickly make an individual as a person irrelevant to society. Should a person lose her job, it becomes difficult to keep a flat and health insurance, or vice versa; in extreme cases, it also becomes impossible to guarantee education for children in school. This close integration of exclusion can lead to observing individuals as being less and less valid as possible communication partners. In the case of slums or favelas, it goes as far as observing individuals only as bodies, which are subject to completely different conditions than persons are (e.g., problems of survival, violence, disease).
The difference between inclusion and exclusion is meaningful for the →self-description of society because it is the instrument through which the criteria for access to communication are determined: the inner side (inclusion) describes the conditions and possibilities for participating in communication and therefore demands care and attention; the outer side, exclusion, describes what remains and forces society to reflect. Today, this has become visible in the meaning taken on by, on the one hand, careers and an orientation towards success, and, on the other hand, by situations in which the opposite conditions are valid, such as, for instance, the ghetto, famine, overpopulation. [G.C.]
Wie ist soziale Ordnung möglich? (1981: in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Seman- tik vol. 2: 195-285); Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus (1989: in Gesell- schaftsstruktur und Semantik vol. 3: 149-258); Inklusion und Exklusion (1994); Theory of Society (2013: Ch. 4.3).