Timothy Speed (2025)
Position within the author’s research corpus They Cannot Understand occupies a central position within Timothy Speed’s long-term research program on autistic epistemology, neurodivergent embodiment, and the structural violence of neurotypical knowledge systems. While published as a standalone book, the text functions as a core theoretical articulation of concepts that recur across the wider corpus, including the shift of being (Seinsverschiebung), non-representational knowledge, resonance-based ontology, and the critique of normative models of work, reality, and cognition. The book bridges earlier works such as Society Without Trust (Gesellschaft ohne Vertrauen) (2003) and The Physics of the Poor with later, more explicitly operator-based and legal-theoretical texts, and provides a consolidated exposition of the author’s autistic, embodied research perspective. It should therefore be read not as an isolated contribution to autism studies, but as an integral component of a larger, recursive body of work that combines artistic research, systems theory, critical disability studies, and socio-economic analysis. This open research edition is provided for scholarly reference and archival purposes and situates the book within the continuity of the author’s overall research trajectory rather than as a finalized or closed theoretical statement. About: One cannot exist and be understood at the same time – with this sentence the neurodivergent artist, researcher and activist Timothy Speed opened the research field of Autistic Epistemology – a new mode of thought in which autism is not an object but an origin of knowledge. He connects Critical Autism Studies, Artistic Research and Systems Theory into a unified ontology of the resonant. Speed belongs to the few thinkers who do not theorize posthumanism but live it. One of the overlooked systems thinkers of our time – who spoke of “resonance” long before Hartmut Rosa, unfolding an understanding of reality as cyclical, embodied interaction, which brings together economic, social and energetic processes and thus – similar to the Nobel Prize–winning economists of market and behavioural economics Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt – anticipated early on the end of linear rationality and the necessity of a relational economy. He delivers not only a contribution to autism research but a fundamental theory of perception, work and existence in the age of overstimulation. His work stands in the line of paradigmatic turns that do not speak about deviation but generate knowledge from within it – comparable to Fanon, Haraway, Deleuze or Manning. Speed reveals the ontological rift between neurodivergent and neurotypical people and transforms not only the Double Empathy Problem, but also our understanding of masking and of reality itself. They cannot understand shows that every existence is a distortion – and that neurodivergence might be the key to understanding this refraction as a creative force.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18154332
Keywords: Critical Autism Studies, Disability Studies, Posthumanismus / Artistic Research, autistic ontology, autistic epistemology, neurodivergence, neurodivergent research, autistic embodiment masking / camouflaging, autistic burnout, autistic shutdown, Double Empathy Problem, non-representational cognition, phenomenology of autism, embodied cognition, MNO-theory, ontological pluralism, monotropism epistemic, injustice neurotypical, dominance neurodiversity, politics disability, justice, capitalism & neurodivergence, Artistic Research, first-person phenomenology, enactivism perception-as-knowledge, autistic methodology
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