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.
Download: https://zenodo.org/records/23016788/files/Speed_2026_World-Binding-Vol_22_en.pdf?download=1
