Studies in World-Formation
World-Formation Research: Non-Closure, Provoked Empiricism and the Conditions of Responsibility (Studies in World-Formation, Vol. 19)
Abstract
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. 3 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.
Keywords
World-Formation Research, Non-Closure, Provoked Empiricism, Structural Responsibility, Structural Violence, Institutional Violence, Epistemic Violence, Seinsverschiebung, World-Binding, Eigenzeit, Negative Morphology, Operatoric Research, Counter-Position, Epistemic Closure, Institutional Closure, Structural Harm, Responsibility Attribution, Perpetrator Gap, Produced Perpetratorlessness, Decision-Making Power, Inactive Witness, Intervening Witness, Accountability, Epistemic Injustice, Human Rights, Institutional Non-Intervention, Recursive Inquiry, Provocation of Accountability, Knowledge and Responsibility, Conditions of Further Knowledge Content Abstract...........................................................................................................................................3 Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 7 World-Formation Research: An Operatoric Research Programme for the Study of Non- Closure, Knowledge, and the Conditions of Further Knowledge DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22659569..................................................................................... 9 Abstract...........................................................................................................................................9 1. The Missing Second Movement of Science...............................................................................10 2. Non-Closure Is Not a Deficit...................................................................................................... 13 4 3. Seinsverschiebung (shift of being): Knowledge Changes Its Own Ground...........................19 4. Why This Research Programme Is Called World-Formation Research................................21 5. Operatoric Research Corpus and Operatoric Research...........................................................23 6. Operator, Counter-Position, and Provoked Empiricism: How a World Is Brought to Respond............................................................................................................................................ 25 The Meaning of Positing..................................................................................................... 26 Provocation Does Not Mean Escalation............................................................................ 27 Counter-Position..................................................................................................................28 Why Tension Can Produce Knowledge.............................................................................29 Operatoric Reversal..............................................................................................................30 Provoked Empiricism as a Real Response Structure.........................................................31 The Researcher as Part of the Operator.............................................................................31 Self-Use as a Measuring Instrument...................................................................................32 The Operator Does Not Produce Truth.............................................................................33 The Importance of Resistance.............................................................................................34 From Response to Form...................................................................................................... 34 The Operator as an Epistemic Probe..................................................................................35 Counter-Position as De-Monopolization..........................................................................36 Interim Conclusion.............................................................................................................. 36 7. From Counter-Position to Homology: Why Forms Become Comparable Across Fields....37 Analogy as a First Irritation................................................................................................37 From Surface to Relation.....................................................................................................38 Functional Analogy..............................................................................................................39 Structural Homology............................................................................................................40 The Structure Must Survive the Change of Field.............................................................40 Homology Is Not Identity.................................................................................................... 41 Condition Homology............................................................................................................41 Counter-Position as a Test of Homology........................................................................... 43 The Operator as an Invariance Test...................................................................................44 The Failure of Analogy........................................................................................................ 44 Homology Is Gradual...........................................................................................................45 Why This Is Central to World-Formation Research.......................................................45 The Political Significance of Homology............................................................................. 46 From the Individual Case to Structural Knowledge.........................................................47 Interim Conclusion..............................................................................................................47 8. Neurodivergent Epistemology: The Position from Which Non-Closure Becomes Visible 48 Knowledge Can Be Organized Differently........................................................................ 49 Why Closure Is Experienced Differently...........................................................................50 Neurodivergence as an Epistemic Position, Not as Proof of Identity.............................52 The Marginal Position Does Not Automatically See More.............................................52 The Observer Is Part of World-Formation........................................................................53 Autistic Epistemology as a Counter-Position to Epistemic Monoculture......................53 Dissolving Dominant Truth Does Not Mean Arbitrariness............................................54 Counter-Truth as an Epistemic Operator..........................................................................55 The Epistemic Significance of Missing the Target...........................................................55 Neurodivergent Research as Preservation of Alternative Spaces of Possibility............55 5 An Epistemic Asymmetry....................................................................................................55 From Survival to Method.................................................................................................... 56 Autistic Epistemology as a Strengthening of Scientific Non-Closure............................56 Interim Conclusion..............................................................................................................56 9. Negative Morphology: Indirect Reading...................................................................................57 Not the Form, but Its Difference........................................................................................ 58 Negative Form......................................................................................................................58 10. The Two Movements of Science..............................................................................................59 11. Delimitation................................................................................................................................ 59 No New Metaphysics.................................................................................................................. 59 Not Simply Philosophy............................................................................................................... 60 Not Only an Ethics of Science....................................................................................................60 No Replacement for Discipline-Specific Science.....................................................................60 12. Artificial Intelligence: When the Production of Difference Becomes Faster Than World- Binding.............................................................................................................................................. 61 13. Society, Normalization, and Epistemic Annihilation.............................................................62 14. Physical Boundary Cases............................................................................................................63 15. Quality Criteria...........................................................................................................................63 16. Progress as Viability...................................................................................................................64 17. Conclusion: Which World Can Carry Which Knowledge?..................................................65 Provisional Conceptual Architecture........................................................................................ 65 When Structural Violence Has a Perpetrator: The Apparently Legitimated Inactive Witness with Decision-Making Power DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22206507.....................70 Abstract........................................................................................................................................70 1. Violence Without a Perpetrator.................................................................................................71 1.2. On the Methodology of This Research...................................................................................75 1.3. On the New Concept of the Perpetrator.................................................................................77 2. The Perpetrator Gap in Structural Violence............................................................................. 78 2.1. The Necessary Discovery of Violence Without a Visible Perpetrator............................79 2.2. The Price of Perpetratorlessness.........................................................................................82 2.3. Structure Is Not an Acting Subject.....................................................................................85 2.4. Between the Immediate Perpetrator and Perpetratorlessness.........................................88 2.5. The Epistemic and Ethical Threshold................................................................................92 2.6. The Apparently Legitimated Inactive Witness to Structural Violence with Decision- Making Power............................................................................................................................. 97 2.7. Degrees of Perpetration and the Concentration of Responsibility...............................102 2.8. Perpetration Beyond Criminal Guilt................................................................................106 3. Provoked Empiricism: From Structural Perpetratorlessness to Attributable Responsibility ...........................................................................................................................................................111
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