Inclusive and Exclusive: On Essential Ambiguity

In a letter to Jung from October 26, 1934, Wolfgang Pauli writes (in translation):

Might it not be preferable to advocate the view that the unconscious and the conscious are complementary (i.e., in a mutually exclusive relationship to each other), but not that one is part of the other?¹

The use of the word ‘exclusive’² here is the exact opposite from McLuhan’s usage. Pauli uses the term to mean that the unconscious and the conscious each must be taken on their own, excluding the other, “not that one is part of the other”. Yet the two precisely in that exclusivity also form a “complementary (…) relationship” with each other. The two relata and their relation are equiprimordial.

Now this is just what McLuhan meant by an ‘inclusive’ relation. Meanwhile, the ‘exclusive’ was used by him, in contrast, to designate a relation in which the reality of one of the relata is greater than that of the other and hence greater also than their relation. The weaker of the two must ultimately succumb to being “part of the other” such that both it and their relation would be consumed in that greater reality.

For McLuhan, an exclusive relation is ultimately a monism, while an inclusive relation is ultimately at least triadic — like Pauli’s “mutually exclusive relationship to”.³

It is noteworthy that Pauli and Jung were applying complementarity to consciousness and the unconscious only a few years after the notion was developed in quantum physics in the mid 1920s. But in fact Jung had been exploring the autonomy of the unconscious for decades already before then, such that complementarity may have been applied in physics only after it had appeared in analytic psychology, and in other areas in the humanities, and was consequently in the air from them as a new kind of possibility.

A similar sort of foresight may be seen in Jung’s October 29, 1934 answer to Pauli’s letter:

It was inevitable that the systematic investigation of the unknown center of the atom, which has led to the conclusion that the observed system is also a disturbance caused by the observation, would show that the essence of the observing process will be perceptible in the disturbance caused by the actual observation. To put it simply, if you look long enough into a dark hole, then you perceive what is looking in. Hence this is the principle of perception in Yoga which derives all perception from the absolute emptiness of consciousness.⁴ This method of cognition is thus a special case of the introspective exploration of the psychic in general. (Letters, 9)⁵

Compare McLuhan’s repeated appeal to what he called the ‘Heinrich Hertz law’: “The consequences of the image will be the image of the consequences”.⁶ That is, as Jung put it, “the essence of the observing process will be perceptible in the disturbance caused” by it. Hence, “effect before cause”, as McLuhan insisted in another of his mantras.

Furthermore, Jung applied these insights to the perception of “a dark hole” and today, ninety years later, the idea that the information seemingly lost into a black hole might somehow be read in complementary fashion from its Hawking radiation or other means is ‘on the frontier’ of contemporary astrophysical research.

One of the ways McLuhan’s ‘new science’ is applicable to quantum physics may be seen in Jung’s observation that “the principle of perception in Yoga (…) derives all perception from the absolute emptiness of consciousness”. And this is, he continues, “a special case of the introspective exploration of the psychic in general”. Everything depends here on whether “absolute emptiness” is taken inclusively or exclusively.⁷ If exclusively, then “absolute emptiness” will be taken as the originary and/or final state of the universe. If inclusively, it will be taken as the “intermediating”⁸ basis of complementarity, a ‘medium’ that can never be objectivized as a ‘message’ without transforming it from dynamic ground to empty figure. Inclusivity is fundamentally transitive, exclusivity fundamentally intransitive.

The purpose of McLuhan’s new science is to expose such ambiguities and to initiate their collective investigation such that their effects or properties are known in advance of their deployment — just as chemical materials are known in this way. Physicists of course take account of known chemical properties in everything they do. How could they not? And, the prediction is, physicists will do so just as much, and just as unremarkably, once they become aware of their existence and effects — with the laws of media.

1. Atom and Archetype - The Pauli-Jung Letters 1932-1958, 6. Original in Wolfgang Pauli und C. G. Jung: Ein Briefwechsel 1932–1958, 10: “Ob man nicht lieber die Auffassung befürworten sollte, daß Unbewußtes u. Bewußtsein komplementär (d. h. in einem einander ausschließenden Verhältnis zueinander) sind, nicht aber das Eine ein Teil des anderen ist?” 

2. The exact term used by Pauli here is ‘ausschließenden’ = ‘excluding’.

3. “In einem einander ausschließenden Verhältnis zueinander” — ein Verhältnis von einander aus und einander zu.

4. Compare Wheeler: “Existence thus built on 'insubstantial nothingness'?” (314); “everything from nothing, all law from no law.” (315)

5. “Der consequenten Untersuchung des unbekannten Atominnern, welche zum Schluss gekommen ist, dass das Beobachtete auch eine Störung durch das Beobachten ist, konnte es nicht entgehen, dass das Wesen des beobachtenden Vorganges in der durch die Beobachtung hervorgerufenen Störung wahrnehmbar wird. Einfacher gesagt, wenn man lange genug in ein dunkles Loch hinein schaut, so nimmt man das wahr, was hinein schaut. Dies ist datum auch das Princip des Erkennens im Yoga, welcher aus der absoluten Leere des Bewusstseins alles Erkennen ableitet. Dieser Erkenntnisweg ist also ein Spezialfall der introspectiven Erforschung des Psychischen überhaupt.” (Briefwechsel, 12)

6. War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, 16.

7. ‘Inclusively’ is used here in McLuhan’s sense = Pauli’s ‘exclusively’. The striking ambiguity of these terms illustrates the importance of McLuhan’s graduate study in the Cambridge English School in the 1930s at a time when ambiguity was taken to be the central mystery of language in general and of poetry in particular. Hence Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and Richards’ experiments to mitigate ambiguity with ‘basic English’.

8. ‘Intermediating’ — a term used by both McLuhan and Wheeler.