Autism as an Operatoric Boundary Phenomenon: Eigenzeit, Non-Closure, and Morphogenetic Non-Coincidence

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.