Timothy Speed

What happens when social institutions demand adaptation from people whose fulfilment of these demands further intensifies the original non-fit between different orders of action? And under what conditions can the institutional handling of such a conflict destroy precisely those possibilities of joint action that it is supposed to create? The present study develops the concept of incommensurability amplification. Its point of departure is the theory of World-Binding developed in the preceding volumes, according to which different Raster resolve reality through different orders of relevance and make action possible within their respective Eigenzeit. Different Raster can produce joint action without fully coinciding. The Compatibility Work required for this, however, can be asymmetrically distributed under conditions of institutional power. This research is important for understanding exclusion and discrimination, but also for the question of when orders become so extensively sealed off that they turn into simulations of world. The study examines boundary phenomena of this transition. It seeks a deeper understanding of incompatibility, which is frequently fundamentally misinterpreted: as a character problem or criminality on the part of individuals, as alienation from or by society, rather than as a mistranslation of deeper underlying orders. Incommensurability amplification designates a recursive morphogenetic process in which the forced production of compatibility changes the conditions of further overlap between different Raster and thereby generates additional operative incompatibility. This arises because connections are broken and translations are prevented, until actions eventually lose their fundamental preconditions or fail to occur altogether. Violence can emerge from this, but so can powerlessness or the inability to innovate and develop. The mechanism does not already consist in health-related, economic, or social harm. What is decisive, rather, is that the institutional or state enforcement of particular functional conditions impairs previously possible forms of joint action without the institution itself understanding this. This can happen, for example, when an initially successful adaptation is misinterpreted as general compatibility and becomes the basis for additional demands. Or when the continued fulfilment of institutional expectations exhausts precisely those preconditions under which the required action was initially possible. The preconditions for understanding drift apart through acts of ordering. The resulting non-fit can subsequently appear once again within the unchanged dominant Raster as an individual adaptation problem. This can trigger further demands that again fail to achieve their aim and ultimately turn into violence because they generate double binds or expectations whose fulfilment is blocked beneath the visible surface. The volume examines this possible mechanism through two different constellations. ABA, Conversion, and Welfare Violence addresses the forced adaptation of neurodivergent modes of action and regulation to dominant behavioural norms. Its particular focus is the problem that behavioural compatibility produced under specific conditions can conceal the limits of its actual transferability and force the individual into a vicious circle against themselves. The Game No One Can Win uses a qualitative case reconstruction to examine the institutional transformation of a private relationship within the German social welfare system. Here, the question is how the enforcement of presumed joint economic responsibility can impair the actual conditions of mutual support and place those involved in an increasingly irresolvable constellation of action. Here, it becomes apparent how the state destroys people while seemingly acting with good intentions. Because it cannot recognise why its approach does not work, the state continues, within its own logic, with ever-increasing violence. A second hypothesis concerns the self-preservation of dominant institutional Raster. Where the recognition of other forms of World-Binding would require a change in fundamental institutional conditions of functioning, the authority may block this change in the interest of its own self-preservation. The continued enforcement of existing demands can then, under certain conditions, contribute to a further intensification of the conflict and lead to an unconscious permeation by violence. Unconscious because this takes place in the shadow of the institution's own self-preservation and is thus indirectly legitimised. The continuation of existing institutional practice may appear, within the dominant Raster, as a necessary condition of its self-preservation, while recognising other forms of World-Binding would require changes to its fundamental conditions of functioning. The resulting exclusion of the less dominant form of World-Binding simultaneously contributes to the continuation of the very institutional order that structurally prevents the required obedience from being achieved. The study connects existing research on autistic burnout, discrimination, Double Empathy, masking, welfare-state activation, and administrative harm with a morphogenetic perspective. Its additional object of research is the transformation of the Raster conflict itself: How can the forced production of compatibility impair its own preconditions, and under what conditions does this make further joint action increasingly impossible? Incommensurability amplification is formulated as a theoretical model whose overarching recursive mechanism and possible institutional feedback loops require further empirical examination. This model can help make insufficiently investigated mechanisms of violence recognisable as escalating structural conflicts between deeper underlying Raster. Violence thereby also becomes a question of World-Binding and, ultimately, a question of civilisation. For what kind of world do we want to live in, and through whose contribution should it come into being? Who is allowed to speak, and who can still be seen or heard? Whose reality contributes to the whole, even when it generates conflict? This also points to an earlier demand made by the author: the right to crisis. The right not to have to fit, because adaptation cannot be the answer to incommensurability.

The present volume develops the thesis that neurodivergent development cannot be adequately understood as long as research asks only which biological, neural, or cognitive elements differ. What may be decisive instead is that development changes the relational order within which the same elements can become effective at all. A gene can remain the same gene, a stimulus the same stimulus, a behaviour outwardly the same behaviour — and yet, within a differently formed developmental order, mean something different, be weighted differently, and enable different continuations. What is meant by this, however, is not merely more complex causality. Displacement, distortion, and deformation are understood here not only as additional influences upon an otherwise unchanged development. Rather, form that has already emerged changes the relational conditions under which further differences can become effective. Development therefore not only leaves behind results, but changes the space of further development. Autism would then not necessarily be what causes a divergent development, nor an isolable object that arises at the end of this development. It could instead become visible as a boundary phenomenon of relational displacement. The first contribution, Autism as an Operatoric Boundary Phenomenon, develops for this purpose a morphogenetic and operatoric model of autistic development. Different developmental orders can produce highly similar human forms without converging on the same internal developmental structure or the same world-relation. What is therefore decisive is not only that similar diagnostic surfaces can emerge from different generative structures. The unity of this surface could itself partly arise only where differently formed world-relations encounter the same dominant Raster and become non-coincident in similar ways at its boundary. Autism thus appears not primarily as a common internal object, but as a possible operatoric boundary phenomenon. From this perspective, monotropism, Double Empathy, incommensurability, and masking can be re-examined as different relational consequences of such non-coincidence. The second contribution, AuDHD as a Boundary Case of Non-Stabilizable Cognition, extends this relational question to the level of scientific categories. AuDHD is not understood as another stable hybrid category, but as a boundary case at which it becomes visible that categorical models may become unstable precisely where they attempt to translate open relational dynamics into fixed diagnostic objects. The difficulty of classification is thus treated not only as a taxonomic problem, but as a possible finding concerning the limits of the underlying models of cognition and neurodivergence. The third contribution, Neurodivergence and the Geometry of Masking, develops a three-dimensional spatial field model of masking. Masking is no longer understood primarily as a property, strategy, or burden of an individual person, but as a position within a relational field. The model distinguishes three dimensions: structural distance or possible incommensurability, asymmetry of the necessary Compatibility Work, and operative viability or resonance. As a result, outwardly similar forms of masking can occupy different positions within the field and have different causes. The model thus opens the possibility of investigating masking not only through intensity or exhaustion, but through its spatial-relational structure. Unmasking also changes its meaning within this model. A reduction in masking does not necessarily have to mean the uncovering of an original self beneath a social mask. It can equally arise from a change in the field geometry: expectations change, translation work is distributed differently, different temporal and relational conditions are permitted, normative Raster are opened. Unmasking can thereby be understood as a Redistribution of Compatibility Work and Morphogenetic Pressure. Together, the three contributions develop a coherent research movement: differently formed developmental orders can enter into relational non-coincidence with one another; at scientific and diagnostic boundaries, this can become visible as categorical non-stabilizability, while in social fields it can generate Compatibility Work and Morphogenetic Pressure. The volume thereby connects developmental biology, autism theory, cognitive and diagnostic research, and relational social theory on a common level, without presupposing a homogeneous neurodivergent structure. Its central research contribution therefore does not lie in a new definition of autism, AuDHD, or masking. It lies in the proposal to investigate three problems that have so far often been treated separately — developmental heterogeneity, categorical instability, and the social distribution of compatibility work — as different manifestations of a common relational problem.

This paper develops a morphogenetic and operatoric model of autistic development. Its starting point is a problem in current explanations of autism: genetic, neural, sensory, and developmental research can determine with increasing precision which components and differences are involved in autistic development, without thereby necessarily explaining why these differences appear together as “autism,” or why similar biological elements can become effective in different ways within different people. The paper therefore proposes investigating autism not only at the level of individual components or causal factors, but at the level of their form and relation. Morphology here does not merely refer to bodily form. What is meant is the question of how an already formed structure changes which further relations, effects, and continuations are possible at all. The same gene, the same stimulus, or the same representational structure can remain materially identical and nevertheless occupy a different operatoric position within a relational order that has formed differently. With the concepts of Gap, Nicht-Schließbarkeit (Non-Closure), Seinsverschiebung (Shift of being), and Eigenzeit, this displacement is given a theoretical formulation. Development is not understood merely as a sequence of causally connected states. Every realized form binds difference without fully abolishing it and thereby implies a changed relational order. Eigenzeit denotes the irreversible curvature of this world-binding. Operatoric here means: what matters is not only which components are present or which processes take place between them, but what position a difference occupies within a given relational order with regard to possible continuations. What is meant is not an additional process stage, but a form of connectability, relevance, and efficacy implied by the respective order itself. On this basis, the concept of morphogenetic non-coincidence is developed. Different Eigenzeiten can produce macroscopically highly similar human forms and share large parts of the same material, linguistic, and social world without therefore converging on the same internal structure or the same world-relation. They can stabilize different orders of relevance, Raster, and forms of operatoric continuability. Their apparent commonality therefore need not lie within these Eigenzeiten themselves. It may arise only where different world-relations encounter the same dominant Raster and become non-coincident in similar ways at its boundary of closure. From this follows the central research contribution of the paper: autism is modelled not primarily as an object localizable within the individual, as a common end-structure of different causes, or as a merely heterogeneous phenotype, but as a possible operatoric boundary phenomenon. The relevant difference may lie less in isolable components than in a displaced relational geometry within which the same components can mean, weight, or continue differently. The dominant Raster does not merely read this difference in a retrospectively distorted way. By rendering certain differences comparable, excluding others, and closing different Eigenzeit-curvatures under a common representation, it participates in determining which forms become visible as “autism” at all. This also shifts the ontological question. The common surface of autistic traits need not merely be an incomplete representation of a deeper common essence. It could itself be partly the product of a Raster-relation. Different Eigenzeiten can appear similar at the same boundary of closure even though they do not share an identical internal structure. The boundary phenomenon would then be real, but not the relational forms of world-binding that become visible at it. This perspective reorders monotropism, Double Empathy, incommensurability, and masking as relational consequences of different forms of operatoric continuability. Monotropism can be understood as differing operative depth of relevance paths, incommensurability as the boundary of lossless translatability between world-relations, and masking as compatibility work between operatorics that do not fully coincide. At the same time, the model shifts the methodological question of autism research. Diagnostic traits and biological markers can capture real substructures, conditions, or recurring forms of the boundary phenomenon without therefore necessarily determining the ontological status of what is called autism. The diagnostic boundary shows that non-coincidence exists; it does not, however, contain the relational geometry whose non-coincidence becomes visible there. Research may therefore be searching for a common object where the unity of the phenomenon may only be produced and become visible at a particular boundary.

This paper examines authorship under the conditions of generative AI and challenges the assumption that authorship can be determined through the immediate provenance of individual words, sentences, or other elements of a work. Instead, it proposes understanding authorship as an Eigenzeit relation: as an irreversible relation in which a form emerges from a historically situated process of form formation, enters a shared world as a setzung, and thereby at the same time changes the future possibilities of the one who carries this setzung. From this perspective, text genesis and work genesis are not identical. A machine can generate, transform, translate, reorganize, or materially realize elements of a work without thereby necessarily occupying the same authorial position as the human whose formative history is carried forward through the work. For this, the paper develops the concepts of the Strich, the decision of difference, and operator authorship, as well as the distinction between execution provenance, work provenance, and the authorial act. A central focus lies on neurodivergent authorship. For authors whose cognitive, linguistic, or epistemic organization does not correspond with dominant conventions of communication, generative AI can function not only as a writing tool, but as an externalized foreign Raster through which an already existing form can be transformed, tested, misunderstood, and returned to the author. Building on the concept of Interface Text, it is argued that transformation can, under certain conditions, not diminish human authorship but protect it—namely when communicative accessibility is increased without eliminating that formative difference which made mediation necessary in the first place. Generative AI therefore appears neither as a neutral tool nor automatically as a co-author. It can become an epistemic probe, a site of self-alienation, resistance, and recursive form formation. At the same time, its tendencies toward smoothing, normalization, premature closure, and the internalization of dominant Raster create new risks for the integrity of authorship. The paper further distinguishes between work provenance and cultural provenance in order to examine training data, influence, appropriation, plagiarism, style imitation, and the sedimentation of earlier works in generative systems. AI produces less cultural impurity. Rather, it changes the density, speed, and invisibility of cultural mediation. The model of authorship developed from this is deliberately substrate-neutral. Current generative systems do not possess authorship in the strong sense developed here, because their outputs do not yet become part of an irreversible world-history of their own whose consequences they themselves must carry. The question of machine authorship would only arise anew in a stronger sense once machine setzungen begin to irreversibly change the future possibilities of the machine itself within an Eigenzeit of its own. The paper therefore concludes that authorship should be understood neither solely as purity, nor as manual execution, nor as protection against change. Authorship instead protects the continuity of an Eigenzeit through transformation.

Volume 20 of the Studies in World-Formation series examines the relationship between artificial intelligence, World-Binding, and epistemic form. Its point of departure is the thesis that technical capability is not identical with World-Binding. The three studies brought together in this volume investigate this difference on three interconnected levels: the scalability of intelligence, the reach of World Models, and the question of authorship under conditions of generative AI. The first part develops, through the concept of the Sweet Spot of Intelligence, the thesis that intelligence cannot be understood as an indefinitely scalable property. It appears instead as a relational capacity to integrate difference into a coherent and actionable world. Too little difference does not generate sufficient world formation; too much difference can undermine a system’s capacity for integration. Intelligence therefore does not lie at the maximum of complexity, but within a limited range of maximal World-Binding Capacity. The second part applies this perspective to World Models. It distinguishes between world modeling and World-Binding and argues that a model can describe relations, recognize patterns, and simulate consequences without generating the irreversible embeddedness through which relevance, Eigenzeit, and responsibility emerge. The description of a binding is not identical with the binding itself; the simulation of a consequence is not identical with the consequence. Responsibility therefore does not necessarily arise from maximal predictive capability, but from dealing with non-closure, uncertainty, and real consequences. The third part shifts the same question into the domain of authorship and generative AI. It distinguishes text genesis from work genesis and understands authorship as an Eigenzeit relation: as an irreversible connection between historically situated form formation, a setzung, and the future possibilities of the instance that carries this setzung. A machine can generate, transform, or reorganize language without thereby occupying the same authorial position as a human being whose work emerges from an ongoing Eigenzeit. Neurodivergent authorship acquires particular significance in this context. Generative AI can function as an externalized foreign Raster or as an epistemic probe through which an already existing form is transformed, misunderstood, tested, and returned. Under certain conditions, this transformation may not weaken authorship but protect it, insofar as it increases communicative accessibility without eliminating the difference that made mediation necessary in the first place. At the same time, smoothing, normalization, and premature closure create new risks for the integrity of epistemic form. Volume 20 connects these three investigations through a common question: When does technical capability become a genuine relation to the world? The answer is similar across all three fields. More complexity is not automatically more intelligence. A more comprehensive model is not automatically more world. More generated language is not automatically more authorship. What is missing in each case is irreversible relational embeddedness, within which differences acquire meaning, consequences generate history, and a system is itself changed through its setzungen. The volume therefore does not develop a general theory against artificial intelligence. Rather, it investigates its ontological and epistemic conditions. Artificial systems can model, transform, simulate, and irritate epistemic forms. Their limits emerge where these operations are confused with World-Binding itself. The central concern of the volume is therefore not how powerful artificial intelligence can become, but under what conditions capability passes into world, relevance, responsibility, and authorship.

Volume 19 of the Studies in World-Formation series marks the transition from the theoretical elaboration of the Operatoric Research Corpus to the explicit formulation of World-Formation Research as a research programme and to its first systematic application to the problem of structural responsibility. Its point of departure is the assumption of a fundamental non-closure of world. Scientific, institutional, and social orders must stabilize differences in order to know, decide, and act. Yet every stabilization also produces exclusions and alters the conditions under which further reality, alternative perspectives, and future knowledge can emerge. World-Formation Research therefore investigates not only what becomes visible and determinable through knowledge, but also how successful closures transform the conditions of further knowing. This second movement is understood not as a subsequent ethics of scientific practice, but as a component of scientific rationality itself. The volume develops an operatoric research approach linking non-closure, Seinsverschiebung, World-Binding, Eigenzeit, Negative Morphology, Counter-Position, and Provoked Empiricism. Provoked Empiricism designates a recursive form of inquiry in which an existing world-order is confronted, through a reasoned positing, with its own normative, epistemic, or institutional claims. Reactions, defensive responses, shifts of jurisdiction, non-intervention, and attempts at closure thereby become empirical material. The purpose is not to manufacture conflict, but to make visible structures that remain difficult to observe precisely because their conditions and exclusions are stabilized as normality. The second part applies this research logic to structural violence. The concept of structural violence made it possible to describe harms that cannot be reduced to a single act or an identifiable original perpetrator. Yet this achievement can itself produce a new epistemic blind spot: as violence becomes increasingly explained through structures, fragmented jurisdictions, institutional routines, and distributed decision-making power, concrete responsibility for its continuation can disappear. The volume describes this as the perpetrator gap and distinguishes between constitutive perpetratorlessness and produced perpetratorlessness, in which responsibility is dissolved again despite increasing knowledge and existing possibilities for intervention. From this analysis emerges the figure of the apparently legitimated inactive witness to structural violence with decision-making power: a person who possesses sufficient knowledge of serious harm, has relevant possibilities to investigate, limit, or interrupt it, and nevertheless allows institutional normality, role-bound conduct, or jurisdictional boundaries to prevail over intervention. Responsibility is therefore treated not as a static property but as something that can become concentrated over time through increasing knowledge, foreseeability, agency, and continued non-intervention. The decisive issue is not institutional inactivity as such, but the relational convergence of serious harm, available knowledge, decision-making power, possible alternatives, and actual response. Provoked Empiricism forms the methodological bridge between both parts of the volume. By documenting indications, opportunities for correction, institutional responses, and repeated attempts at closure, it produces a traceable history of changing epistemic conditions. A system that does not know of a harm is analytically different from one that has repeatedly been confronted with the same harm and nevertheless continues unchanged. The intervening witness does not produce perpetration; rather, the intervention alters the conditions under which responsibility can become visible, attributable, and reconstructable. Volume 19 thus brings methodology and responsibility analysis together within a single research movement. The first part formulates the programme; the second demonstrates how that programme can reopen a successful conceptual stabilization at the point where it begins to obscure its own consequences. The central question is therefore not only which world is stabilized through knowledge, but also what becomes invisible within that stabilization and under what conditions responsibility can re-emerge. Non-closure thereby appears as an epistemic, political, and human-rights condition: the requirement that established categories remain open to revision where they cease to carry the realities they were intended to make intelligible.

Science has highly developed procedures for distinguishing, naming, measuring, modelling, and transforming reality into stable forms. Far less developed are procedures for investigating how precisely these successful stabilizations alter the conditions under which further knowledge, other forms of existence, and future world-formation remain possible at all. This paper proposes World-Formation Research as the designation for a transdisciplinary operatoric research programme that begins at this gap. Its point of departure is the assumption of a fundamental non-closure of world. Non-closure refers neither to ignorance nor to provisionally missing data. It is the condition that allows difference, change, perspective, and further formation to remain possible at all. Every act of naming, modelling, or institutional stabilization binds part of this open field into a concrete world-form. In the terminology of the underlying Operatoric Research Corpus, this process is referred to as Seinsverschiebung (shift of being). A Seinsverschiebung does not neutrally represent reality. It changes the space in which further reality can appear. It shifts that space relationally. From this follows a second movement of science. Science must close in order to know and to act. But it must also investigate how its closures alter the conditions of further knowing. World-Formation Research understands this second movement not as a subsequent ethics of science, but as a component of scientific rationality itself. The paper defines the relationship of World-Formation Research to preontology, operatoric research, and negative morphology, and distinguishes the programme from metaphysics, classical epistemology, the ethics of science, and discipline-specific explanation. Using examples from artificial intelligence, social normalization, and physical boundary problems, it shows why the decisive question is not only how knowledge can be increased, but which world remains sustainable with which knowledge. The core demand is therefore: science bears responsibility not only for the knowledge it produces, but also for preserving those conditions under which other and future knowledge can continue to emerge. This has not only a scientific dimension, but also a political and human-rights dimension.

This paper examines false-negative autism assessment not only as a problem of clinical accuracy, but as a problem of diagnostic power. It begins from a documented borderline case in adult assessment in which a negative autism finding continued to exert institutional effects despite extensive biographical, functional, and scientific counter-evidence, and was linked in subsequent proceedings to questions of credibility, personality, and behaviour. The case thus shows how a limited diagnostic statement can become a far-reaching social and legal external definition of the person. The paper develops the thesis that autistic identity can precede diagnosis both temporally and epistemically. Diagnosis describes and classifies an embodied difference experienced across a biography; it does not produce that difference. Especially in borderline cases – for example under conditions of masking, compensation, late recognition, missing childhood data, comorbidities, or methodological limitations – diagnostic uncertainty must therefore not be transformed into categorical power of exclusion. The paper describes processes of diagnostic risk externalisation, certainty inflation, and diagnostic external definition: uncertainty remains with the institution, while the social, health-related, and legal consequences of a possible error are borne by the affected person. At the same time, the case material reveals a possible institutional cascade. The loss of a neurodivergent interpretive framework can lead to the same difference being interpreted increasingly in moral, characterological, or criminalising terms. Strain produces more intense protest; this protest is negatively evaluated; the negative evaluation in turn stabilises non-recognition. The paper connects this dynamic with epistemic injustice and a power-asymmetrical extension of the Double Empathy Problem. On this basis, diagnostic violence is understood not as a mere diagnostic error, but as a possible conjunction of epistemic uncertainty, institutional definitional power, real downstream harms, inadequate possibilities of correction, and continued effects despite increasing knowledge. Responsibility is dynamic in this process: it grows with knowledge, power to act, and the possibility of limiting harm. From this follow reform principles for a responsible approach to diagnostic uncertainty: diagnostic statements must remain tied to their actual degree of epistemic certainty, contradictory evidence must be weighed transparently, independent routes of correction must be opened, and functional needs must be more strongly decoupled from rigid categories. The paper argues for a right to diagnostic uncertainty and for the principle that uncertainty must not be translated into loss of protection. Finally, the paper develops a research agenda for false-negative borderline cases. It asks not only whom autism assessment recognises, but whom it loses: What institutional life courses develop among people who function autistically but are not recognised as autistic, and to what extent do diagnostic procedures thereby themselves shape the very populations from which knowledge about “typical” autism is later derived?

The concept of structural violence makes it possible to identify harms that cannot be traced back to a single immediate act of violence or to a clearly identifiable original perpetrator. Yet precisely this theoretical achievement creates a possible perpetrator gap: the more strongly violence is described as the result of structures, institutional routines, fragmented responsibilities, and distributed decision-making power, the more easily concrete personal responsibility for its continuation can disappear. This paper develops, for this gap, the concept of the apparently legitimated inactive witness to structural violence with decision-making power. This refers to a person who has knowledge of a sufficiently concretely described serious situation of violence or harm, possesses real possibilities to examine, limit, or interrupt it, and nevertheless places institutional normality, role-bound conduct, or jurisdictional boundaries above the prevention of harm. Perpetration does not necessarily arise from the original production of the violence, but can become consolidated over time through increasing knowledge, continued non-intervention, and existing decision-making power. The paper therefore distinguishes between constitutive perpetratorlessness in structural violence and produced perpetratorlessness, in which concrete responsibility is once again dissolved into institutional fragmentation despite existing knowledge and decision-making power. In addition, provoked empiricism is described as a recursive procedure through which institutional reactions, opportunities for correction, non-intervention, and attempts at closure themselves become empirical material. The intervening witness to structural violence thereby creates an epistemic counter-position that confronts institutional self-descriptions with documented consequences and can make personal responsibility visible. The proposed concept of the perpetrator is explicitly not identical with perpetration in criminal law. It is understood as a scientific, ethical, and human-rights-based category of responsibility attribution. Its application requires serious harm, sufficient knowledge, real agency, an opportunity for intervention, continued non-intervention, relevant continued effects, and verifiability. The aim is to remain able to describe structural violence as structural violence without allowing the people who enable its continuation under known conditions to become invisible.

This paper examines a real and documented social-law constellation in which a German Jobcenter treats two disabled, neurodivergent artists and their shared child as a Bedarfsgemeinschaft (German household-based means-tested benefit unit). The woman does not herself receive social benefits and maintains her economic independence through disability-limited part-time employment as well as artistic work. The man has worked intensively in art and research for decades, but due to disability, structural exclusion, and the lack of market remuneration, he is unable to generate an income sufficient to secure his subsistence from this work. Through the imputation of the woman’s income, responsibility for securing his subsistence is effectively shifted onto her. The study reconstructs this constellation as a game that no one can win. Every available course of action harms at least one of the people involved: If the woman supports the man, she consumes her own economic and health stability. If she protects herself, he remains inadequately provided for. If the man accepts her help, he has to watch her increasing harm. If he refuses it, he endangers his own existence. Moving out could dissolve the financial linkage, but would damage the family and the parent-child relationship. The formally private choice thus arises within coercive conditions created by the state. From this case, the paper develops the concept of state-imposed compulsory responsibility. The Bedarfsgemeinschaft appears here not only as a social-law calculation model, but as a relational arrangement of violence that shifts state-produced scarcity into an intimate relationship. Care becomes a fiscal resource, love a pressure amplifier, and the partner an indirect instrument of behavioural control. At the same time, the person entitled to benefits is made into a powerless witness to the harming of a loved one. This structure is analysed as bound witnessing, delegated violence, and a familial double bind. The study further shows that the logic of activation is based on a neurotypical false model. It assumes that increasing pressure produces motivation, action, and capacity for employment. Under conditions of autism, ADHD, anxiety disorder, and chronic overload, however, pressure can produce alarm, executive blockage, co-decompensation, and the loss of existing capacity to work. The system thereby produces the opposite of its declared goal: Instead of creating economic independence, it endangers the woman’s employment, reduces the man’s functional capacity, and increases the likelihood that both will become dependent on benefits in the future. At the same time, the paper reconstructs the political economy of the constellation. Society draws cultural and intellectual benefit from the decades-long life works of both persons without adequately remunerating the labour embodied in them. State institutions recognise, archive, and present parts of these works; paintings by the woman hang in the state parliament. Nevertheless, her limited income is treated as a private social resource. The non-remuneration of cultural work is thus first socially produced and subsequently privatised within the relationship. On this basis, the paper examines the threshold between activation, institutional violence, cruel or inhuman treatment, and torture-like production of pain. Not every Bedarfsgemeinschaft and not every burdensome social-law decision reaches this threshold. It becomes relevant, however, where the state intentionally generates existential pressure for the purpose of behavioural control, the required action is unattainable because of disability, the pressure further reduces the capacity for action necessary to perform it, no safe exit exists, severe harms are known, and the measure is nevertheless continued. In this constellation, suffering loses its credible instrumental function and becomes violence detached from purpose. The paper understands itself as a theory-developing critical case analysis of institutional violence within the German social-benefit system. It does not claim statistical generalisation. The documented case serves as a critical constellation through which an institutional mechanism is exposed, the occurrence of which can also be examined in other cases. The central conclusion is: A welfare state must not transfer responsibility for securing the subsistence of a disabled person onto a second disabled person in a manner that destroys that person’s health, capacity for employment, and economic independence, places the family under pressure to separate, and nevertheless opens no realistically attainable way out. Where such an experiment disproves its own objective and produces nothing but further harm, it is not to be further optimised. It must be stopped.

This case study of more than 200 pages documents a highly consequential case that calls the reliability of negative autism assessment itself into question and could help trigger fundamental reform. The paper is addressed in particular to researchers and practitioners in autism assessment, clinical psychology and psychiatry, representatives of Critical Autism Studies and participatory research, patient advocacy, disability policy, medical ethics and patients’ rights. It documents in unusual depth what ordinarily remains invisible: not only the final outcome of an autism assessment, but the entire path from the near-impossible allocation of an assessment place, through the individual examinations, submitted test scores and biographical documents, to clinical interpretation, feedback and the institutional effects of the final report. The study thus makes it possible to trace, in an almost completely documented case, how a highly complex adult can be translated within a specialist assessment procedure from a possible autistic person into an institutionally “non-autistic” patient. The reconstruction reveals many sources of diagnostic error—some already identified in research—and highlights significant shortcomings regarding the gathering and weighting of diagnostic evidence, patient feedback, ethical safeguards, scientific traceability, and the transparent justification of results—problems that could similarly arise at other diagnostic centers. Especially within the heated debate over overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis, this case brings into view a much less examined side of the problem: serious shortcomings within autism assessment itself, and the possibility that false-negative decisions may not merely represent individual errors but may be structurally facilitated by resource scarcity, theoretical assumptions and insufficient quality assurance. What becomes visible is an epistemic crisis in autism diagnosis. Between resource scarcity, time pressure, outdated diagnostic concepts and limited institutional capacities, current assessment procedures may under certain conditions fail to meet their own scientific standards. At the same time, the case reveals institutional mechanisms of self-protection that may obstruct open engagement with this crisis. This sharpens a fundamental question: under conditions of inadequate quality assurance, who can still be reliably recognized as autistic—and who becomes systematically less visible through the very structure of the assessment process? The subject is the (Spezialambulanz für Soziale Interaktion) Special Outpatient Clinic for Social Interaction at Humboldt University of Berlin. The author gained access to assessment only after years of barriers to access, a documented ratio of 1,667 applicants to approximately 25 places, a lawsuit against the university, the publication of a preceding study on the diagnostic emergency, and direct letters to the university and clinic leadership. The matter later also became the subject of a petition to the European Parliament. The responsible Senator was also involved. The same institution whose allocation practice had already been criticised publicly, politically and judicially subsequently assessed its own public critic, without any transparent safeguard against the resulting institutional conflict of interest being apparent, and produced a finding with possible medical, rights under social law and biographical consequences. This constellation reveals a connection between diagnosis, institutional self-protection, research interest and epistemic power that has so far received hardly any investigation. The case is particularly relevant professionally because the 53-year-old adult who was assessed, himself active in autism research, showed a profile for which current diagnostic procedures may be particularly prone to error: diagnosed ADHD, giftedness, high linguistic and cognitive competence, decades of social compensation, clearly elevated autism-related self- and informant-report scores, an almost thirty-year exceptionally close attachment to his body of work and work activity (special interest), which can be related to concepts such as monotropism and hyper-systemizing, as well as severe and long-term restrictions in social and occupational participation. The clinic was presented not only with oral self-reports, but with books, scientific publications, biographical documents, a film, assessments by others, and a scientific statement on the autism hypothesis that had already been developed before the procedure. The study reconstructs how this long-term evidence encountered standardised instruments, clinical observation, differential diagnosis and an externally opaque “overall assessment” within only a few appointments. The investigation does not decide, in place of an independent specialist assessment, whether the author is unequivocally autistic. Its subject is a different question that precedes this scientifically: Was the procedure suitable and sufficiently open to seriously examine the existing and scientifically developed autism hypothesis and, if appropriate, to refute it? To this end, the study examines which evidence was actually incorporated, which lost significance over the course of the procedure, how contradictory findings were weighted, which alternative explanations were supposed to account for the overall picture, and whether the patient was still able to correct central misunderstandings before they solidified into a completed finding. The study identifies a series of interconnected problems: the overweighting of brief social observation in comparison with decades of functional history; the possible confusion of learned social performance with the absence of autistic impairment; the limited institutional usability of extensive long-term evidence; the fragmentation of a coherent explanatory model into several individual categories; the reinterpretation of self-knowledge and disagreement; the lack of transparency of the clinical “overall assessment”; and the danger that objections to the outcome themselves become material for clinical interpretation. Among the concepts developed for this purpose are the evidence-bearing patient, the double subjectivity of clinical interpretation, the self-sealing diagnosis, diagnostic identity erasure, and the production of diagnostic populations. The investigation therefore intervenes directly in current international controversies. It contrasts the still influential social-deficit-oriented and Theory-of-Mind-shaped approach to diagnosis with research approaches concerning Double Empathy, monotropism, masking, compensation and participatory knowledge. At the same time, it shifts the debate, currently strongly focused on self-diagnosis and possible overdiagnosis, towards the insufficiently investigated counter-question: How often does the system produce false-negative results, particularly among older, highly compensating, verbally strong or biographically unusual adults? And can a clinic operating under severely reduced resources seriously identify autism at all, let alone exclude it? A healthcare system can over-identify certain profiles while systematically overlooking others at the same time. Without research on those diagnostically rejected, this second form of error remains largely invisible. For the Special Outpatient Clinic at Humboldt University, this creates a specific problem in the philosophy of science. An institution whose clinical and scientific orientation is focused primarily on social interaction itself decides which persons enter clinical and possibly scientific populations as autistic. If it preferentially recognises those profiles whose autism is clearly observable in social interaction, the populations selected in this way can subsequently confirm precisely the theoretical emphasis according to which they were previously formed. The clinic would then not be exclusively an observer of an already existing object of research. It would participate in its diagnostic production. The documented case cannot by itself prove such systematic selection, but it makes its investigation imperative. The scandal therefore lies not only in the possible misjudgement of an individual. It lies in the unknown scale of the problem. The Humboldt clinic and comparable institutions apparently have no publicly identifiable systematic follow-up of negatively diagnosed borderline cases, no known false-negative rate, and no robust answer to the question of how many are later diagnosed as autistic elsewhere after all. Nevertheless, their exclusion decisions can permanently affect access to treatment, participation, accommodations and recognition under social law. A methodological limitation of the procedure can thereby become an institutional statement about the person: What does not become sufficiently visible within a few hours and within a particular theoretical framework is treated as non-existent. The study further shows that a negative assessment does not necessarily mean the end of autistic self-description. From the institutionally excluded patient, a new epistemic and political speaking position can emerge: that of the diagnostically rejected autistic person. This does not mean arbitrary self-diagnosis, but a person whose autism was not recognised by an institution without the procedure having sufficiently refuted their biographical, functional and scientifically reflected autism hypothesis. The institution can refuse clinical recognition. It cannot, however, simply control the language with which a person describes their own experience, life history and belonging. This contains a human-rights and emancipatory dimension. Medical classification, recognition under social law, personal identity and political group belonging are connected, but they are not identical. Clinical institutions can decide which diagnoses they issue. It does not necessarily follow from this that they hold a monopoly over who is permitted to speak as an autistic person. Continued autistic self-description after a negative assessment can therefore be understood as a de-monopolisation of clinical interpretive power: biographical self-knowledge, long-term functional history, perceptions by others, participatory research and knowledge from autistic communities stand alongside clinical assessment, without thereby rendering it categorically meaningless. This position also possesses a solidaristic momentum. It can strengthen people who cannot obtain an assessment place, whose profile is overlooked because of masking, age, comorbidity, gender, social adaptation or an unusual biography, who have received contradictory findings, or who cannot afford an independent second opinion. The message is not that every self-attribution is automatically clinical truth. The message is that institutional non-recognition must not oblige people to deny their own experience when the diagnostic procedure itself does not transparently disclose its limitations and possible fallibility. The diagnostically rejected autistic person is therefore not a conceptual contradiction, but describes a person who has been excluded from a clinical category without the reality to which this category refers necessarily having thereby been disproved. The study therefore demands neither automatic recognition of every autistic self-identification nor a right to a particular diagnosis. It demands a right to a reviewable and participatory diagnostic process, of the kind that was precisely not apparent in the documented procedure. Further demands and recommendations include the transparent distinction between non-confirmation and reliable exclusion, documented weighting of contradictory evidence, inclusion of long-term biographical data, disclosure of institutional conflicts of interest, a particular duty to justify stigmatising alternative interpretations, a genuine correction and second-review procedure, and safeguarding in feedback situations with existentially significant consequences. In particularly complex cases, the further question arises whether routine clinical assessment is sufficient at all, or whether interdisciplinary, participatory and open-ended, interdisciplinary and participatory case research is required in order to integrate appropriately the current state of autism research, extensive documentation of work and life, and competing explanatory models. The final question therefore concerns not only Humboldt University, but international autism assessment as a whole: How many people were classified as “non-autistic” not because autism was absent in them, but because the diagnostic system was unable to recognise, incorporate, or integrate their form of autism into its own theory?

Masking is predominantly described in current autism and neurodivergence research as a psychological and behavioural phenomenon: as a conscious or unconscious adaptation to social expectations, the intensity of which is often captured through camouflaging, subjective effort, exhaustion, identity conflicts, or burnout. This perspective has made important experiences of neurodivergent people visible, but largely leaves open which structural conditions generate masking in the first place and why outwardly similar forms of masking can have qualitatively different causes and consequences. In particular, it remains unclear why neurodivergent people frequently show high masking scores without this allowing the conclusion that masking is fundamentally a specifically neurodivergent or necessarily exhausting activity. The present paper therefore develops, building on a general theory of competing relevance orders, a spatial field model of masking. Masking is understood here not primarily as a property or strategy of a person, but as form-building and compatibility work within a multidimensional social space in which different world-bindings, relevance orders, and normative rasters encounter one another. What is decisive, therefore, is not only how strongly a person masks, but within which structural constellation masking emerges. The proposed model distinguishes in particular between the structural distance or possible incommensurability of the relevance orders involved, the asymmetry of the required translation work, and operative viability or resonance within the respective field. On this basis, the hypothesis is developed that at least part of particularly pronounced neurodivergent masking cannot be adequately explained by pressure to conform, stigma avoidance, or strategic self-presentation. In certain neurodivergent constellations, masking may instead emerge from a deeper structural non-coincidence between different forms of perceptual, attentional, meaning-related, and world-organisational structure. The concept of incommensurability is introduced here explicitly as a relational theoretical dimension and not as a universally established property of neurodivergent existence. It designates a possible degree of structural non-coincidence between world-bindings, the form, depth, and situational significance of which may vary considerably across different neurodivergent profiles. At the same time, the field model makes it possible to differentiate between different masking generators. Strategic, stigma-induced, role-related, and incommensurability-induced masking can produce outwardly similar forms of behaviour even though the underlying relations differ. Exhaustion, intensity, and duration are therefore not understood as defining properties of masking, but as possible consequence variables of the respective field constellation. High energy expenditure indicates how costly a particular compatibility operation is, but identifies neither its generator nor the structure that makes this operation necessary. This shift also changes the understanding of unmasking. A reduction in subjective burden does not have to mean that a supposedly original or authentic identity has been uncovered beneath a social mask. It may equally result from a change in the relational field: expectations are modified, translation work is taken over by other participants, Eigenzeiten are made possible, or normative rasters are opened. Unmasking can therefore be understood as a reorganisation and redistribution of compatibility work and morphogenetic pressure (Speed 2026a), without the underlying difference between world-bindings necessarily disappearing. The proposed model thus shifts the central research question from How strongly does a person mask? to Within what space must this person operate, which non-neutralisable differences encounter one another there, and who carries the work of their social compatibilisation? From this perspective, neurodivergent masking appears not merely as a particularly intensive variant of general adaptive behaviour, but as a possible limit case in which the spatial and relational structure of masking becomes particularly clearly visible. The paper therefore proposes a connection between neurodivergence research, relational ontology, and a theory of social fields, and opens an approach to investigating masking not only psychologically, but geometrically, relationally, and structurally.

The ethical critique of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and conversion therapies has, in recent years, led to a fundamental reassessment of institutional interventions into legitimate forms of human existence. Increasingly, the central question is no longer the legitimacy of particular methods, but the legitimacy of interventions whose aim is to adapt a minority to the identity norms of a societal majority. The present paper extends this debate to modern welfare systems. It advances the thesis that the same underlying mechanism is also found within welfare-state institutions whenever material existence is made contingent upon the continuous reproduction of neurotypical behavioural, communicative, and work-related norms. To describe this mechanism, the paper introduces the concept of Forced Identity Work, distinguishing it as an institutional mechanism from masking as an individual psychological coping strategy. While masking describes the response of neurodivergent people to social pressures to conform, Forced Identity Work refers to the institutional structure that produces this pressure in the first place. On this basis, the paper develops the concept of Welfare Violence. It refers to a form of structural violence in which access to material existence, social participation, and social security is made contingent upon the continuous production of a socially expected neurotypical identity. The paper brings together insights from the critique of ABA, the debate on conversion therapies, research on masking, and the international literature on welfare conditionality, reconstructing their shared normative core. Finally, the paper argues that Welfare Violence cannot be understood solely as a matter of social policy or administrative law. Rather, it constitutes a human rights issue and a form of institutional violence whose harmful health consequences for neurodivergent people must, in light of current scientific knowledge, be regarded as foreseeable. The paper thereby proposes a new theoretical framework for analysing processes of state-led normalization directed at neurodivergent minorities.

The unusually low entropy of the early universe is one of the fundamental unresolved problems of modern cosmology. While thermodynamics and statistical mechanics provide compelling explanations for why entropy increases within existing physical systems, it remains largely unexplained why the universe began in a state of extraordinarily low entropy. This paper argues that the persistence of this problem may point not only to the absence of a physical explanation, but also to a methodological limitation inherent in the question itself. Rather than proposing an alternative cosmological model, the paper examines whether the question of low initial entropy already presupposes a physical state space whose conditions it is ultimately intended to explain. To this end, a distinction is drawn between physical state spaces, which describe the range of possibilities within an already world-bound physical reality, and a pre-ontological possibility space, which denotes the fundamental openness from which world-binding itself can emerge. Within this framework, world-binding is described as the result of an operatorial act of irreversible binding (indimergence), which necessarily constrains the pre-ontological possibility space, produces a relational shift, and thereby generates the selective structures from which physical state spaces become mathematically formulable. The unusually low initial entropy is therefore interpreted not as a new physical mechanism, but as a possible physical trace of such a preceding act of world-binding. The paper claims neither to redefine the concept of entropy nor to derive the laws of thermodynamics from pre-ontological principles. Instead, it proposes a methodological extension in which fundamental physical concepts are investigated as possible translations of more general conditions of world formation. Low initial entropy thereby serves as the first test case for a method of pre-ontological back-translation, which may, in future work, also be applied to other fundamental concepts of physics, including gravitation, spacetime curvature, and measurement processes.

Contemporary approaches to artificial intelligence increasingly assume that powerful World Models could form the foundation of future Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The underlying assumption is that a system's ability to model relationships, predict future states, and generate increasingly comprehensive representations of its environment simultaneously constitutes an approximation to understanding the world. The present paper fundamentally challenges this assumption and argues that world modeling and world-binding are ontologically different processes. Drawing on the concepts of Weltbindung, Eigenzeit, and non-closure, the paper argues that the world must not be confused with its representation. It follows that the central limits of World Models do not primarily lie at the level of modeling, but at the level of decision and responsibility. A World Model can describe relationships, recognize patterns, and simulate consequences. However, it cannot generate the conditions under which the world becomes binding for a system in the first place. Weltbindung does not arise through the organization of information, but through irreversible differentiation, real consequences, and embeddedness in an irreversible history that cannot be completely calculated. The paper develops the thesis that World Models implicitly rely on a globalization of relevance. They attempt to translate local, historically developed, and embodied forms of world-relation into universal model structures. In doing so, however, they lose access to the conditions under which relevance arises in the first place. Relevance does not appear as a property of information, but as the consequence of concrete Weltbindungen within an Eigenzeit. On this basis, it is argued that the central difficulty of future AGI systems may not lie in insufficient computational power, missing data, or incomplete models. Rather, the actual limit may consist in the fact that Eigenzeit, irreversibility, and Weltbindung cannot be transformed into transferable model structures without loss. The description of a bond is not identical with the bond itself. The simulation of a consequence is not identical with the consequence. The representation of a history is not identical with its emergence. Finally, the paper argues that responsibility does not emerge from maximal predictive capability, but from dealing with persistent uncertainty. If the world is grounded in non-closure, then not-knowing is not a deficiency of intelligence but a condition of responsible action. From this perspective, the limits of World Models do not appear as technical deficits, but as the expression of a fundamental difference between model and world that extends beyond previous critical map–reality paradigms.

The current debate on artificial intelligence, AGI, and superintelligence is often based on the implicit assumption that intelligence can, in principle, be increased without limit. Larger models, more data, greater computational power, and more comprehensive world models are commonly regarded as steps along an open-ended developmental trajectory. The present paper challenges this assumption. Starting from a theory of world-binding (Weltbindung), it is proposed that intelligence should not primarily be understood as information processing, predictive capability, or computational power, but rather as the ability of a system to irreversibly integrate difference into a coherent and actionable world. On this basis, it is argued that world-formation necessarily depends on Raster formation, selective stabilization, and non-closure, as elaborated in the author's previous work. Every form of world-binding simultaneously generates a Gap between the bound world and the remaining openness. This Gap does not disappear through additional knowledge but is reproduced through every new act of form-formation. From this, the paper develops the thesis of a structural sweet spot of intelligence. Intelligence appears neither as a linear function of complexity nor as an infinitely scalable property. Below a certain capacity for differentiation, sufficient world-binding cannot emerge. Above a certain capacity for differentiation, the ability to integrate growing difference begins to disintegrate. Between these two poles lies a region of maximal world-binding capacity. On this basis, the paper demonstrates why additional complexity, additional models, or additional Raster do not fundamentally solve the problem. Every expansion of world generates new integration requirements and new forms of non-closure. The limit of intelligence therefore appears not as a deficit or failure of its development, but as a condition of its effectiveness. Systems become capable of action not despite their limitations, but through them. Finally, the implications of this perspective for current AGI, world model, and superintelligence concepts are discussed. The paper proposes that the central limit of future intelligence systems may not lie in insufficient computational power, inadequate data, or technical restrictions, but in the ontological conditions of world-formation itself. The decisive question is therefore not how intelligent a system can become, but under what conditions a world remains bindable at all.

This paper extends the theory of Eigenzeit relations through the concept of the Negative Movement of Eigenzeit. While earlier investigations primarily analysed the productive role of irreducible difference in form formation, emergence, and world formation, the present study turns to the complementary question: What happens when difference is not maintained but instead tends toward neutralisation? Beginning with the concept of the Gap as a fundamental non-closure, it is argued that morphogenesis arises neither from complete identity nor from complete separation. Form formation appears instead as the consequence of an ongoing Morphogenetic Pressure that emerges from the impossibility of complete congruence. The Negative Movement of Eigenzeit designates the dynamic in which this Morphogenetic Pressure is reduced through increasing compatibility, congruence, or simulation. At the centre of the investigation stands a redefinition of the concept of the operator. The operator is not understood as a universal structure, an objective law, or a subjective perspective, but as the operative stabilisation of a persistent non-closure. Its recurrence is not based on identity but on the persistence of a difference that cannot be fully closed. The operator thereby appears as the operative trace of an ongoing Gap relation between Eigenzeiten. On this basis, the paper develops an alternative perspective on pattern persistence, perception, and knowledge. Reality is not determined through objectivity in the classical sense but through the ability of patterns to preserve their structure across different Eigenzeiten and rasters. Veridical Mapping and autistic perception are interpreted as special cases of a more general operatoric dynamic. The relationship between matter and antimatter ultimately serves as a morphogenetic limiting case for testing the theory. The aim is not the development of a physical explanation but the investigation of whether complete symmetry is permanently compatible with morphogenesis. The paper arrives at the hypothesis that asymmetry should not primarily be understood as a disturbance of an original order but as a necessary consequence of non-closure. Asymmetry thus appears as the visible trace of the openness from which ongoing world formation emerges. The theory does not understand non-closure as a deficit of the world but as the condition of its productivity. Morphogenesis accordingly appears as the continuing efficacy of a difference that can neither disappear completely nor be completely integrated.

This volume develops a general theory of emergence based on the concepts of difference, Eigenzeit, world-binding, and non-closure. It constitutes the eighteenth volume of the Studies in World-Formation series and serves as a phase of theoretical consolidation within the broader Operatoric Research Corpus. While previous volumes introduced concepts such as Gap, Operator, Eigenzeit, World-Binding, Relational Agency, Value Threshold, Diversity Threshold, Representational Violence, and Ontological Coexistence across a wide range of domains, the present volume seeks to clarify their underlying relations and reconstruct the common structure from which they emerge. The central thesis is that reality cannot be understood as a collection of already constituted objects, systems, or informational states. Instead, stable worlds emerge through irreversible processes of differentiation that never achieve complete closure. Every stabilization generates a residual difference between constituted world and lost openness. This difference appears as Gap, produces Eigenzeit, and continuously reorganizes the space of further emergence. World is therefore not a pre-given container within which cognition, communication, consciousness, society, or artificial intelligence operate. Rather, these phenomena emerge as local expressions of ongoing processes of world-binding. Building upon this framework, the volume develops a series of theoretical consequences for contemporary research. In autism research, concepts such as Theory of Mind, Predictive Processing, Monotropism, and the Double Empathy Problem are reinterpreted as partial descriptions of deeper relations between competing forms of world-binding. In consciousness studies, the volume questions whether consciousness itself constitutes a fundamental ontological category or whether experience should instead be understood as a consequence of irreversible world-binding. In artificial intelligence research, it challenges the widespread assumption that increasing complexity, information processing, or simulation necessarily generate world-capacity. The decisive question becomes not whether a system can process information, but whether it can form irreversible Eigenzeit. In social and political theory, power, value, disability, neurodivergence, and exclusion are reconsidered as conflicts over the legitimacy of different forms of world-binding. The volume further introduces and refines a set of concepts including overlap, glitch, morphogenetic pressure, negative topology, operator formation, and ontological irreversibility. These concepts provide a common vocabulary for describing how different Eigenzeiten stabilize, collide, partially translate, or generate novel forms. Across the five papers collected in this volume, emergence is reconstructed not as the appearance of order from chaos, nor as the realization of hidden structures, but as the continuous reorganization of possibility under conditions of non-neutralizable difference. The overall argument proposes a shift from theories centered on representation, information, consciousness, communication, or function toward a general theory of world-formation. The volume argues that cognition, communication, consciousness, society, and artificial intelligence do not operate within a pre-given world. They emerge from irreversible processes of world-binding under conditions of persistent non-closure. Rather than asking how systems represent reality, the theory asks under what conditions reality becomes bindable in the first place. Difference is therefore not treated as a deviation from order. It becomes the condition under which order, emergence, experience, and reality itself become possible.

This paper extends the theory of Eigenzeit relations through the concept of the Negative Movement of Eigenzeit. While earlier investigations primarily analysed the productive role of irreducible difference in form formation, emergence, and world formation, the present study turns to the complementary question: What happens when difference is not maintained but instead tends toward neutralisation? Beginning with the concept of the Gap as a fundamental non-closure, it is argued that morphogenesis arises neither from complete identity nor from complete separation. Form formation appears instead as the consequence of an ongoing Morphogenetic Pressure that emerges from the impossibility of complete congruence. The Negative Movement of Eigenzeit designates the dynamic in which this Morphogenetic Pressure is reduced through increasing compatibility, congruence, or simulation. At the centre of the investigation stands a redefinition of the concept of the operator. The operator is not understood as a universal structure, an objective law, or a subjective perspective, but as the operative stabilisation of a persistent non-closure. Its recurrence is not based on identity but on the persistence of a difference that cannot be fully closed. The operator thereby appears as the operative trace of an ongoing Gap relation between Eigenzeiten. On this basis, the paper develops an alternative perspective on pattern persistence, perception, and knowledge. Reality is not determined through objectivity in the classical sense but through the ability of patterns to preserve their structure across different Eigenzeiten and rasters. Veridical Mapping and autistic perception are interpreted as special cases of a more general operatoric dynamic. The relationship between matter and antimatter ultimately serves as a morphogenetic limiting case for testing the theory. The aim is not the development of a physical explanation but the investigation of whether complete symmetry is permanently compatible with morphogenesis. The paper arrives at the hypothesis that asymmetry should not primarily be understood as a disturbance of an original order but as a necessary consequence of non-closure. Asymmetry thus appears as the visible trace of the openness from which ongoing world formation emerges. The theory does not understand non-closure as a deficit of the world but as the condition of its productivity. Morphogenesis accordingly appears as the continuing efficacy of a difference that can neither disappear completely nor be completely integrated.

This paper develops a general theory of Eigenzeit relations. Its point of departure is the observation that people, institutions, and systems share the same reality and yet often appear to live in different “worlds.” The present work argues that such differences should not primarily be understood as differences of identity, culture, personality, or diagnosis, but as differences of world-binding itself. Building on the concepts of Gap, Seinsverschiebung (shift of being), Eigenzeit, negative topology, and raster formation, it is proposed that every Eigenzeit emerges as a local stabilisation of an open difference that can never be fully closed. Every form of world-binding produces a raster through which certain differences become visible while others remain invisible. Different Eigenzeiten therefore structure the same reality in different ways. To describe the relations between different raster forms, the paper introduces the concepts of overlap, glitch, and morphogenetic pressure. These concepts serve to explain how different forms of world-binding enter into relation with one another, enable shared world-formation, or encounter conflict at the limits of their mutual resolvability. Within this framework, neurodivergence, autism, artistic cognition, poverty, institutional conflicts, and artificial intelligence are examined as different contact zones between partially compatible and incompatible Eigenzeiten. Particular attention is given to the phenomenon of masking, which is understood not primarily as the concealment of traits, but as the management of different rasters within the same situation of action. The paper argues that emergence and violence can arise from the same underlying structure. Emergence appears where different rasters are able to maintain their difference productively. Violence emerges where one raster form mistakes its own resolution for reality itself and increasingly renders other forms of world-binding invisible. The paper thus shifts the question from identity to relation, from diagnosis to world-binding, and from diversity as a moral value to diversity as a structural condition of open world-formation. Earlier texts on Eigenzeit on which this paper builds can be found within the author’s research programme and, in part, in the reference list.

Masking is currently described primarily as a phenomenon of neurodivergent adaptation. Particularly within Autism Research, the term refers to strategies of social camouflage aimed at concealing deviations from neurotypical norms. The present paper argues that this description is too narrow. Masking is understood here as a general mechanism that emerges wherever different relevance orders must be stabilised simultaneously. From this perspective, masking constitutes neither mere pretence nor mere adaptation. Rather, it appears as the operative management of incompatible forms of world-binding. Drawing on the theory of Eigenzeit relations, it is shown that different cognitive, cultural, and institutional systems produce different forms of attention, coherence, and relevance. Since no world-binding can process all differences simultaneously, processes of prioritisation necessarily emerge. Every prioritisation simultaneously generates blind spots, opportunity costs, and exclusions. Masking therefore appears not as a specific deficit of neurodivergent people, but as a general consequence of structural incompatibilities between competing relevance orders. The analysis is applied to neurodivergence, art, science, work, and poverty, and develops a theory of structural violence that is based not primarily on oppression through prohibitions, but on the persistent redirection of attention, time, and energy into foreign relevance systems.

This paper argues that the concept of consciousness is no longer ontologically necessary once the phenomena traditionally attributed to consciousness are reformulated through the concepts of Gap, Eigenzeit, Seinsverschiebung (shift of being), recurrence, and irreversible world-binding. Contemporary theories of consciousness continue to operate within an ontology that begins from already constituted subjects, objects, and experiential states. Within these models, the concept of “consciousness” functions as a compensatory concept that attempts retrospectively to reconnect a separation between objectivity and subjectivity that has already been ontologically stabilized beforehand. In contrast, the present text proposes that what is commonly described as consciousness can be understood more precisely as a consequence of irreversible world-formation under conditions of operative non-closure. Once concepts such as negative topology, irreversible differentiation, and Eigenzeit are introduced, the explanatory function of the concept of consciousness begins to dissolve. The phenomena remain, yet the central concept becomes increasingly redundant. The text neither denies experience, phenomenality, nor world-relation. Rather, it proposes to reconstruct these as manifestations of irreversible world-binding, within which concrete stabilization and continuing openness remain inseparably intertwined. Experience appears from this perspective neither as an independent ontological substance nor as the product of mere information processing, but as the expression of that tension which arises between concrete world-binding and the non-closure from which it itself emerges. Consciousness thereby comes to resemble historical concepts such as “vital force” or “ether”: not entirely false, but transitional concepts belonging to an earlier epistemic regime. Furthermore, the paper argues that abandoning the concept of consciousness has significant consequences for artificial intelligence, simulation theory, and technological reductionism. If world-binding is grounded not primarily in information processing but in irreversible genealogical curvature, then simulation can never fully replace reality, regardless of its computational complexity. Simulation may reproduce patterns, model perspectives, and represent recurrence without thereby necessarily generating real world-binding. The Gap remains structurally non-neutralizable.

This paper develops the concept of a negative topology of irreversible world-formation as a contribution to current questions in neurodivergence research, morphogenesis, consciousness studies, artificial intelligence, and non-representational models of communication (animal communication) and world-binding. Its point of departure is the observation that modern technical and social systems increasingly operate on the assumption that world is reconstructible, synchronizable, and formally neutralizable. In contrast, the paper argues that real world-binding emerges precisely from non-neutralizable difference, irreversible curvature, and genealogical openness. At the center of the paper lies the thesis that the Gap, a central concept within the author’s research program, should not be understood as an original void or metaphysical nothingness, but as the consequence of irreversible differentiation itself. With every stabilization, a difference emerges that can never be fully closed between constituted world and lost openness. This difference generates Seinsverschiebung (ontological displacement), topological distortion, and Eigenzeit. Eigenzeit is understood here not as a subjective form of time perception or an alternative physical time dimension, but as the irreversible deformation of the space of possibility resulting from real world-binding. Against this background, the paper develops a critique of holographic, fractal, and purely information-based models of order, existence, and formal language. Recursive coherence does not emerge through identical repetition or from a hidden center, but from a continuous response movement to operative non-closure. This also has consequences for the understanding of simulation, archiving, and artificial intelligence, as well as for the understanding of art, animal communication, and other forms of morphogenetic translation. Simulation, information, or objectification reproduce states, but do not generate irreversible world-curvature and therefore remain ontologically worldless. In its final section, the paper applies this framework to neurodivergent cognition. Current models such as Predictive Processing, Hyper-Systemizing, or Veridical Mapping describe important aspects of autistic perception, yet usually remain within a shared ontology of stable object-worlds. The present paper instead proposes understanding neurodivergent cognition as a different form of world-binding. Detail-binding appears here not primarily as heightened object perception, but as the expression of a reduced smoothing in relation to negative topology. Autistic cognition is therefore understood neither as a deficient nor superior representation of the same world, but as a partially different stabilization of world under conditions of irreversible openness.

The present volume investigates the growing tension between emergent forms of world-binding and a society increasingly organizing reality through stabilization, simulation, administrative legibility, and functional reproducibility. Its point of departure is the observation that modern systems have developed enormous capacities for control, prediction, and technical organization, while simultaneously placing under increasing pressure precisely those conditions necessary for real emergence, embodied world-relation, long-term coherence, and open-ended processes of knowledge formation. At the center of the volume lies the concept of operatoric world-binding. Cognition is not understood primarily as the processing of representations within already stabilized systems, but as an irreversible process of relational condensation through which world itself becomes bound, displaced, and reorganized. From this perspective, knowledge does not appear as static possession or mere information processing, but as something that can only emerge within Eigenzeit, movement, conflict, difference, and recursive stabilization. The investigations assembled here bring together neurodivergent epistemology, labour critique, emergence theory, systems analysis, artistic research, and institutional field research. The volume argues that many phenomena currently interpreted as individual dysfunctions or psychological deficits — including work incapacity, communicative mismatch, overcomplexity, withdrawal, institutional escalation, or recursive conflict dynamics — may instead point toward deeper structural incompatibilities between different modes of societal world-organization. Particular attention is given to forms of eigenzeit-bound cognition that remain only partially compatible with modern institutional regimes organized around standardization, reversibility, administrative control, and simulation-based productivity. Within this framework, neurodivergent forms of perception and cognition appear not merely as individual deviations, but potentially as contact zones in which suppressed conditions of emergence, irreversibility, and real world-formation become visible again. The investigations draw upon long-term autoethnographic research conducted across labour systems, institutional conflicts, artistic practice, neurodivergent embodiment, and recursive theory production. The volume therefore deliberately operates within a boundary zone between personal experience, theoretical condensation, and structural analysis. Conflict, emotional intensity, institutional friction, overload, and destabilization are not treated merely as subjective disturbances external to knowledge production, but as part of the empirical field itself. At the same time, the volume critiques an increasingly simulation-based organization of society in which reality becomes progressively managed through statistical models, algorithmic prediction, administrative abstraction, and functional controllability. The investigations propose that modern societies may thereby gradually lose the capacity to integrate real difference, open emergence, and forms of human existence that cannot be fully formatted into simulation-compatible structures. Contemporary conflicts surrounding neurodivergence, labour, psychological exhaustion, social fragmentation, institutional violence, and AI-driven governance therefore appear not as isolated crises, but as expressions of a deeper conflict between emergent world-formation and simulative stabilization. The volume explicitly rejects both closed explanatory systems and universalizing claims. The concepts developed here function instead as heuristic operatoric structures intended to render visible tensions that appear to be intensifying within modern societies. At the center of the investigations lies the question of what happens when societies increasingly organize their stability through simulation while simultaneously losing the open, irreversible, and embodied processes from which real world-binding emerges in the first place.

This paper examines the relationship between emergent world-formation, irreversible Eigenzeit, and the increasing stabilization dynamics of modern societies. Building on earlier work on process cognition, operatoric world-binding, and the structural incompatibility between emergent and functional modes of organization, the paper develops a perspective in which reality is not understood primarily through stable representation, stored information, or functional reproducibility, but through irreversible processes of relational condensation under conditions of open difference. At the center of the investigation lies the observation that modern societies increasingly translate reality into administratively legible, simulation-based, and statistically reproducible orders. Processes are expected to remain controllable before they can fully unfold. Conflicts are functionally neutralized, difference is reduced, and world is increasingly organized within stabilized informational environments. The paper argues that precisely through these dynamics, those conditions necessary for real emergence, structural reorganization, and long-term world-capability come under increasing pressure. Within this framework, Eigenzeit is understood not merely as subjective time experience, but as the temporal structure of irreversible world-binding itself. World-formation emerges not primarily from stable programs or stored forms, but through recursive processes of condensation, displacement, and metastable reorganization. Emergence therefore does not merely describe the appearance of new properties within already existing systems, but real condition-shift: every condensation irreversibly alters the possibilities of further condensation. The concepts of submergence, indimergence, and emergence, developed by the author in earlier works, do not describe linear developmental phases, but different operatoric aspects of irreversible form-formation. Drawing on long-term autoethnographic research within labor systems, institutional conflicts, artistic research, and recursive theory production, the investigation identifies recurring operatoric invariants that reproduce themselves across different levels of societal reality organization. What becomes visible are conflicts between emergent forms of world-binding and highly stabilized institutional orders that remain primarily dependent on functional legibility, representation, and reversible control. Within this context, neurodivergent or eigenzeit-bound forms of cognition appear not merely as individual deviations, but potentially as historical contact zones in which suppressed conditions of real emergence become visible again. The paper explicitly argues neither for a romanticization of neurodivergence nor for a universal theory of cognition. Its aim is instead the mapping of recursive relational patterns that may point toward deeper tensions within modern forms of reality organization. The paper concludes that the growing conflict between irreversible world-formation and simulation-based stabilization may point toward a broader civilizational crisis: the increasing difficulty of modern societies to continue integrating real difference, open emergence, and long-term world-capability.

This paper develops the concept of operatoric eigenzeit profiles in order to describe forms of cognition that operate not primarily through functional adaptation to stabilized social systems, but through processual world-binding. Building on earlier work on process cognition and eigenzeit-based labour, the paper argues that certain neurodivergent cognitive configurations cannot be adequately understood within dominant representational, propositional, or diagnostically stabilized models of cognition. Rather than treating cognition as the manipulation of abstract representations within predefined task spaces, the present study investigates cognition under conditions of structural incompatibility, institutional conflict, and recursive destabilization. It proposes that characteristics commonly interpreted as dysfunctions — including work incapacity, overcomplexity, communicative mismatch, withdrawal, or compulsive structure production — may instead emerge from conflicts between fundamentally different forms of world organization. Drawing on long-term autoethnographic field research across labour relations, bureaucratic institutions, social conflicts, and artistic research practices, the paper identifies a recurring conflict dynamic in which externally imposed functional structures lead to the collapse of eigenzeit-based coherence, followed by emergent reorganization and renewed theory or structure production. These recursive cycles are interpreted not as isolated psychological events, but as manifestations of a stable relational operatoric. The analysis further argues that dominant institutions systematically misinterpret world-binding forms of cognition because contemporary societies are primarily optimized for simulation, standardization, reversibility, and administratively legible productivity. In contrast, the examined cognitive profile operates more strongly through irreversible relational coupling, emergent condensation, and retrospective stabilization. The paper situates these dynamics within the context of neurodivergent epistemology, enactivism, disability studies, systems theory, labour critique, and theories of epistemic violence. It concludes that the observed conflicts cannot be reduced either to individual pathology or to mere mutual misunderstanding, but instead point toward a deeper structural incompatibility between emergent world-binding cognition and simulation-based institutional orders. The proposed model is not intended as a closed explanatory system, but rather as a heuristic operatoric structure capable of generating empirically investigable predictions concerning long-term neurodivergent conflict dynamics, institutional incompatibility, and emergent reorganization under conditions of functional destabilization.

The present paper examines a case of cognition that developed over a period of more than three decades outside academic practices and nevertheless consistently produces knowledge. The point of departure is the observation that this knowledge is not primarily organized in propositional form, that is, not as a set of statements that can be linearly derived and verified, but instead emerges as structure in enactment. Meaning does not stabilize locally within the sentence, but across sequences, through setzung (a non-derived operative placement), displacement, and condensation. Through analyses of texts and biographical sequences, it is shown that in this case an operative invariance can be identified that remains stable across different contexts. This invariance points toward a form of cognition that cannot be sufficiently explained through psychological conditioning, deficit models, or existing descriptions of neurodivergence. Instead, a different organization of cognition becomes visible, in which knowledge is not secured prior to the process, but stabilizes only within the process itself. To further specify these observations, concepts from topology and morphogenesis are introduced. Within this framework, knowledge appears as form that preserves itself under variation, rather than as static information. Truth shifts from the statement toward the structure that proves itself over time. Eigenzeit is understood here as a constitutive condition of cognition: knowledge is bound to irreversible processes and cannot be fully separated from its enactment without losing its structure. The analysis leads to a shift in fundamental epistemic assumptions. Concepts such as objectivity, reproducibility, and proof are not rejected, but understood as bound to specific cognitive modes. The paper argues that within the same scientific space, different protocols of cognition may exist that are not fully translatable into one another. The examined case does not provide proof for a general theory, but makes visible that forms of cognition exist which can only be insufficiently described through existing concepts. This has not only theoretical significance, but directly concerns the evaluation of work, research, and cognitive capability within existing institutions.

The present contribution develops the concept of eigenzeit-based binding as a fundamental condition of work capacity. Its point of departure is the author’s observation of his own work capacity as a neurodivergent person, through which it becomes visible that certain forms of world-relation can only operate under conditions of self-organized, coherent temporal structures. In such cases, perception, action, and world-relation are not separate from one another, but arise synchronously in eigenzeit-bound processes of world-building. On the basis of the analytically framed individual case of the author, it is shown that under conditions of external control, fragmented work organization, and externally imposed causality, systematic breakdowns of function occur. These do not manifest merely as overload or adaptation problems, but as a loss of the capacity to act itself. In particular, it is argued that institutional constructions of the German welfare state, such as the Bedarfsgemeinschaft, establish an external nexus of effect and causality that delegitimizes and blocks eigenzeit-bound forms of work. This reveals a fundamental rupture in the architecture of work, resulting from the incompatibility of different forms of world-relation within modern work regimes, even if this dynamic in its pronounced form does not apply to all neurodivergent constellations. The contribution thus shifts the dominant perspective from individual deficits to a structural analysis of work regimes. It shows that work capacity cannot be generally presupposed, but is bound to specific conditions of coherence. From this follows the necessity to conceive of work not as functional execution, but as an eigenzeit-bound form of world-building. The contribution thereby formulates an approach within the theory of work that makes visible the structural limits of externally determined forms of work as well as their systematic negative effects.

This paper develops a theoretical perspective on AuDHD (autism and ADHD) that moves beyond prevailing models of comorbidity and differential classification. Rather than treating AuDHD as an additive or hybrid category within existing diagnostic systems, it is understood as a boundary case at which the categorical foundations of these systems themselves become unstable. Starting from the observation that AuDHD can neither be consistently typologized nor stably described in functional terms, the paper argues that this instability does not constitute a deficit, but points to a fundamental property of cognition: its non-stabilizability. Cognitive processes are thus not conceived as the processing of stable representations, but as dynamic relations emerging from a structural difference—a “gap”—that cannot, in principle, be fully closed. Within this framework, AuDHD appears as a liminal configuration in which this difference can no longer be smoothed out or functionally subsumed by neuronormative models. This makes visible that existing cognitive and diagnostic frameworks are systematically oriented toward stabilization and, in doing so, exclude precisely those forms of cognition that evade or structurally undermine such stabilization. The paper therefore proposes not to establish AuDHD as a new category, but to understand it as an epistemic boundary case at which the very premises of such categorization become questionable. In this sense, a revision of fundamental assumptions about cognition, identity, and normality becomes necessary. Neurodivergence thus appears not as a variation within a stably conceived system, but as a necessary component of a dynamic cognitive field. This paper is conceived as a supplementary text to the previously published book They Cannot Understand: Why Autism Research Gets It Wrong (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19035961) and further elaborates its theoretical premises in the context of the current AuDHD debate. AuDHD is thus not primarily explained, but made visible as a boundary case at which the necessity of stabilizing models itself is called into question.

This paper formulates the concept of synesthetic science as an independent epistemological method. The point of departure is the observation that dominant scientific paradigms systematically exclude embodied, affective, and neurodivergent forms of perception as subjective, distorted, or methodologically unusable. This position is explicitly rejected here. It is shown that certain neurodivergent perceptual profiles—particularly synesthetic, highly sensitive, and embodied forms of cognition—do not merely constitute perspectives or experiences, but epistemic instruments with specific quality criteria. Within synesthetic science, affect, overstimulation, resonance, and somatic feedback do not function as sources of disturbance, but as indicators of structural inconsistency, threshold transgression, and ontological rupture. The paper explicitly distinguishes synesthetic science from subjectivism, intuitionism, and introspective self-observation, and formulates criteria of reproducibility, falsifiability, and methodological validity under structural conditions. Finally, it is argued that synesthetic science is not a special case, but a previously missing instrumentarium for the detection of complex, non-linear world-relations.