Timothy Speed (2025)
This paper examines work-centered social systems such as the German Bürgergeld and the planned Grundsicherung as forms of institutionally organized structural violence. At its core is the thesis that these systems are not merely burdensome for neurodivergent people, but structurally hazardous to health and therefore legally unreasonable. Illness thus appears not as individual failure, but as a predictable system effect of a normative architecture of work and performance that systematically fails to accommodate neurodivergent modes of existence. The analysis is based on a longitudinal auto-ethnographic and artistic-research dataset that has developed over more than thirteen years (“Speed’s Work”), encompassing documented interactions with multiple job centers, medical institutions, social courts, and administrative bodies, and covering various reform phases of work-centered social systems (Hartz IV, Bürgergeld, transition to Grundsicherung). The aim is not statistical representativeness, but the reconstruction of structurally invariant mechanisms of effect. The evaluation identifies six central empirical findings: (1) an institutionally invariant escalation structure that is reproduced independently of individual behavior; (2) systematically enforced masking as an existential adaptation performance; (3) pathologization as a secondary system reaction to structural overload; (4) the independence of health-related harm from individual cooperation or refusal; (5) the resulting structural predictability of health damage; and (6) the epistemic added value of an autistic epistemic position for capturing implicit normative mechanisms of violence. On this basis, an expanded concept of violence is developed that integrates structural, administrative, classist, and ontological violence. The findings are contextualized constitutionally (Art. 1 and Art. 2 of the Basic Law), in terms of human rights (UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), and internationally. The paper argues that work-centered social systems which systematically force neurodivergent people into illness-producing adaptation violate state protective obligations. Illness functions here as an indicator of a systemic misdesign that cannot be remedied through individual case corrections, but only through a structural reconfiguration of welfare-state security. This paper functions as an interface text within a larger operator-based research corpus. Core concepts are applied here, not re-derived. The underlying research operates in a non-linear, rhythmically recursive epistemic mode grounded in an autistic form of structural perception; the present text provides an interface translation for academic contexts.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17978565
Keywords: structural violence, neurodivergence, welfare state, autoethnography, Bürgergeld, Grundsicherung, disability rights, social law, state duty of care
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