Diagnostic Power and the Production of Non-Recognition: Autism, Epistemic Closure, and Institutional Violence (Studies in World-Formation, Vol. 23)

The present study forms part of the research programme Studies in World-Formation, developed across 23 volumes, which investigates the conditions of human and societal world-formation as well as the growing tension between actual World-Binding and institutional stabilization. The starting point of this programme is the question of why modern scientific, political, economic, and administrative orders are becoming increasingly capable of describing, categorizing, simulating, and managing reality, while at the same time risking the loss of their ability to respond adequately to the actual conditions of human existence, to difference, and to the consequences of their own actions. The societal consequences of this development are at the centre of the more recent volumes of the Corpus.

Volume 23 brings this question into a concrete empirical field of investigation: the institutional recognition of neurodivergent people and the power of diagnostic procedures to determine their social visibility and legitimacy. Autism assessment is not treated here in isolation as a specialized medical problem, but as a boundary case of modern orders of knowledge and society. It provides an opportunity to investigate how an institutional Raster deals with an embodied reality that may not be adequately accessible through its established categories, and what happens when the institutional decision nevertheless acquires binding social force.

The volume brings together three interconnected works: an extensive document-based investigation of autism assessment at Humboldt University of Berlin, a theoretical analysis of diagnostic definitional power and the possible criminalisation of autistic people who have received false-negative diagnoses, and an open letter to the responsible clinic director, published both as a historical document and as a scientific intervention. Together, these works reconstruct how biographical, embodied, and functional evidence can be weighted, reinterpreted, or excluded within institutional processes of knowledge production, and how the resulting decisions can have social, legal, and existential consequences extending far beyond the medical context.

At the centre is not merely the question of whether a diagnostic result is right or wrong. Rather, the investigation examines the transition from epistemic limitation to institutional definitional power. Scientific uncertainty can be translated within an institution into seemingly conclusive certainty, while the consequences of a possible epistemic error are shifted onto the affected person. Where a neurodivergent explanation is institutionally excluded, persisting differences and conflicts may increasingly appear as personal deficits, lack of cooperation, character weaknesses, or criminalisable behaviour. The reactions of those affected to this non-recognition can subsequently be used to confirm the original external definition. In this way, a recursive process may emerge in which institutional epistemic limitations are not corrected, but further stabilized through their own social consequences.

Volume 23 thus provides an empirical contribution to the problem examined in greater depth in Volume 24 under the concept of Simulation Override. This concept designates the possible tipping point at which an institutional order loses its correctability through contradictory reality and gives priority to stabilizing its own categories over the real consequences of its actions. In this context, diagnostic non-recognition is investigated as a possible mechanism of institutional self-closure: the decisive issue is not necessarily the absence of information, but whether divergent experiences, scientific objections, and documented harms can still bring about changes within the institutional Raster. The present case makes this question empirically accessible.

Theoretically, the volume connects the concepts of Non-Closure, Seinsverschiebung, Eigenzeit, and World-Binding developed within the Operatoric Research Corpus with the more recent investigations into Morphogenetic Non-Coincidence, Forced Compatibility Work, Incommensurability Amplification, and Structural Violence. From this perspective, a clinical diagnosis appears not merely as a neutral description of an already given condition, but as an epistemic operation whose institutional effects can themselves alter the conditions of future recognition, social relations, and further knowledge production. This also raises the question of the extent to which diagnostic selection mechanisms contribute to producing the very populations from which scientific knowledge about autism is subsequently derived, while people who have received false-negative diagnoses increasingly disappear from the clinical and scientific field of knowledge.

Methodologically, the investigation continues the research programme of World-Formation Research and Provoked Empiricism developed in Volume 19. The author is not merely an observer, but simultaneously an affected person, a researcher, and an intervening actor. Embodied experience, scientific analysis, documented institutional decisions, and the responses to their public criticism are treated as interconnected but distinguishable layers of knowledge. The open letter included in the volume is therefore not merely a political statement, but a documented intervention into the events under investigation. It confronts the responsible institution with scientific contradictions and the possible consequences of its actions, thereby opening up further possibilities for empirically investigating institutional responses, corrections, defensive reactions, or silence.

The investigation thus extends beyond a critique of autism assessment. It addresses the fundamental societal question of who holds the power to determine the recognition of different human world-relations, and what consequences arise when institutional orders confuse the limits of their own knowledge with the limits of reality itself. From this follows the demand that diagnostic uncertainty must not be translated into the loss of fundamental rights to protection, and that neurodivergent forms of existence must not have to derive their social legitimacy solely from their conformity with established clinical categories.

Within the Studies in World-Formation, Volume 23 thus forms a transition between the theoretical investigation of different forms of World-Binding and the analysis of institutional violence, the refusal of responsibility, and societal simulation developed in Volume 24. Autism assessment becomes an empirical field of investigation into a broader crisis of institutional world-capacity. The central question is under what conditions societal orders remain capable of recognizing a reality that exceeds their own presuppositions, and whether they can allow themselves to be changed by that reality—or whether they begin to exclude precisely those people and conditions of life that make their limits visible.

This also raises once again the question of perpetration within structural violence.

Downlaod: https://zenodo.org/records/24108905/files/Speed_2026_World-Binding-Vol_23_en.pdf?download=1