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Reality distortion, psychosocial torsion, and psychological torque?


Imagining Toroidal Life as a Sustainable Alternative (Part #2)

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There is a degree of experience of being "twisted" by circumstances, of "being bent" in a manner which may well be unwelcome -- or of subjecting another to such a force. "Bending the arm" of another is a common phrase with respect to being manipulated -- as with having it "bent". The experience is beyond the focus of the natural sciences and is inadequately described, although it is clearly an effect sought by public relations, propaganda campaigns and brainwashing. As a typically problematic experience it does however offer a means of recognizing the nature and possibility of fruitful toroidal experience.

Of the greatest potential relevance to this argument are the shared associations of "torc" and "torque" -- with the latter best understood in dynamics with respect to a form of twisting. In such terms torque is what causes an object to acquire angular acceleration. As a static object, a torc could be understood as implying some such force -- if only in symbolic terms. The exploration of "toroidal life" in what follows is then suggestive of "life with a dynamic twist" -- potentially vital to enabling and sustaining change. A torc can then be considered a traditional reminder of that possibility -- and hence its symbolic importance in some contexts where change is otherwise elusive. As experienced personally, references to "psychological torque" and "psychic torque" are discussed below -- but not in the light of their potential relevance to the twisting experience of structural violence and its variants (cultural violence, emotional violence, spiritual violence).

Reality distortion: Curiously the clearest description of the problematic nature of the phenomenon may be with respect to the so-called "reality distortion field" exerted by charismatic personalities to convince themselves and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence:

Commentators now recognize the phenomenon in relation to Boris Johnson. The capacity to engender such a field may now be the essence of leadership -- and the primary requisite for those seeking that role. Comprehending the nature of such reality distortion is necessarily rendered more complex by the phenomenon of fake news (Varieties of Fake News and Misrepresentation: when are deception, pretence and cover-up acceptable? 2019). This is compounded by increasing recognition of "bullshit" and mutual accusations in that regard (Gordon Pennycook, et al, On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit, Judgment and Decision Making, 10, 2015, 6; Harry Frankfurt , On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005). This suggests the possibility of a new skill - metaphorically understood (Viable Global Governance through Bullfighting: challenge of transcendence, 2009).

Torsion and twistedness: To the extent that such psychosocial experience is described, the language for its description borrows from the dynamics of torque and torsion as well-recognized in mechanical terms. In that context, torsion is the twisting of an object due to an applied torque. The latter, as the moment, moment of force, or "turning effect", is the rotational equivalent of linear force. The power output of an engine is expressed as its torque multiplied by its rotational speed of the axis. In considering the generation of any form of psychosocial power in the implementation of a strategy -- and getting it to "fly" -- there is a case for recognizing the role of torque. Using a typical helicopter as a metaphor, its single main rotor creates torque such that its aerodynamic drag must be countered by an opposing anti-torque rotor -- the smaller rotor in the tail. The question is how such compensation is achieved in psychosocial systems -- and whether many strategies spin uselessly for lack of an "anti-torque" rotor.

The following description of a combination of socio-economic forces as "torsions" by Matthew C. Ally clarifies the matter somewhat, although lacking any reference to corresponding psychosocial forces:

Each tetrad has a tendency to pull and push in a certain direction: the first toward new varieties of economic interaction and new relations of consumption and production; the second toward novel varieties of social experience and political engagement; the third toward renovated varieties of ecological relation and pattern and process. We might call these torsions: economic torsion, social torsion, and ecological torsion respectively, twisting together from the ground up, bending the arm of the status quo. And of course the three heuristic torsions overlap, the economic, the social, the ecological, nudging and tugging at each other in complementary and critical ways through the push and pull of theory and practice... (Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water's Edge, Lexington Books, 2017 p. 485)

Quotations indicative of understandings of "psychological torque", "psychic torque" and "psychological torsion"
(emphasis added)

Psychological torque:

  • Following their lead, one can construct a decision procedure in which one computes a "psychological torque" T (this need not correspond to true physical torque)... (Tony J. Simon and Graeme S. Halford, Developing Cognitive Competence: new approaches to process modeling, Psychology Press, 2015, p. 165)
  • Yet the dynamic psychological torque in this work does not justify assimilating H. D. to the expressive subjectivity we have long associated with lyric poetry. We are not simply in the presence here of a discourse of resplendent or imperiled identity. (Cary Nelson. Repression and Recovery: modern American poetry and the politics of cultural memory, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, p. 82)
  • As is well known, the cultural travails of middle-class America in the twentieth century produced the separate, sovereign self, the final logical extension of the Protestant Reformation's psychological torque that spun toward more and smaller sects until the irreducible sect of one was eventually reached (Loren Baritz, The Good Life, Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2013)
  • I want to suggest that the unique psychological "torque" of modern rhetorical power can be explained as a mechanism "funded" by the divided character of modem self-structure. Modern forms of ethos can "divide" us from our habitual values because, as moderns, we are always, in advance, at a deeper level, divided, self-conflicted selves. (Marshall W. Alcorn, Narcissism and the Literary Libido: rhetoric, text, and subjectivity, NYU Press, 1997, pp. 51-52)
  • Ballard has long maintained that... science fiction is the only literature capable of making sense of the moment we live in. It is a moment whose psychological torque is centripetal, not centrifugal â-- a moment where "social relationships are no longer as important as the individual's relationship with the technological landscape," which is another way of saying that interpersonal psychology has been displaced by a new, cyborgian psychology: the feedback loop between human and machine (Mark Dery, 'Always Crashing in the Same Car': a head-on collision with the technosphere, The Sociological Review, 54, 2006, 1; An Extremely Complicated Phenomenon of a Very Brief Duration Ending in Destruction: the 20th Century as slow-motion car crash, TechnoMorphica, 1997).
  • ... the concept of war becomes an attempt to describe a low-intensity warfare that reconstitutes the most mundane aspects of everyday existence through psychosocial torque and sensory overload. (Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. MIT Press, 2012, p. 33).
  • The author succeeded in making his point, a realization of the evil at the center of human experience, without breaking the organic unity of his life like documentary styled narrative and without losing the psychological torque of the tale. (Debraj Moulick, Book Review: Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Intellinotions, January 2014)
  • Torque, hemispheric dominance, and psychosocial adjustment. (Donald Woods, et al, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 1980, 4).

Psychic torque:

  • So, in pursuit of being lively and clear, the sheer psychic torque of Edwards's emotional range is noteworthy. Hyperbole-like metaphor, a bit of linguistic fantasy in disguise-forces Edwards to an awareness "of the barely thinkable" (Edward Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: religious terror as memory from the Puritans to Stephen King, Routledge, 2016)
  • The empirical demonstration of Eddie Oshins' work on self-referential motion and the hunt for psychic torque. (Physics of Tao, Eco Echo Invasives Extraction, May 2017)
  • Paul (an engineer by training) and I discuss torque. He explains the mechanics, the opposing forces, the stress factor, the cause and effect â-... we talk about the psychic torque we are all experiencing â-... certainly a time shift â-... without a doubt a culture shift that intensifies the torque â-... and yet this is what allows you (if you permit it) to become part of the experience â-... (The Faces of Gujarat: Experiencing India Subliminally, The Philosophical Traveller, May 2009)
  • ... the psychic torque produced by the sheer weight of the emotional pain he confronts through the letters ultimately lays waste to every intellectual defense he can muster to distance himself from that pain. (Michael Anthony Reardon, Becoming Visionary: reading and living in the existential mode, 1994, p. 98)
  • Spillers defines this as 'a locus at which self-interrogation takes place [â-...] Its operations are torque-like to the extent that they throw certainty and dogma [â-...] into doubt.'... All these are markers of what Fanon termed 'existential deviance', which could be related to both as a psychic torque â-- a forceful twisting (into pre-made definitions of the square hole Real) â-- that can be very painful (psychologically disturbing) and, yet crucially, an opening towards hybridity. (Howard Slater, Homicidal Melancholics of the World Unite! Mute, 15 August 2017)

Psychological torsion:

  • The psychological torsion that now belongs to this 'activity' captures the precise sense of 'media' (medios, or recursos), sometimes appearing beneath an instrumental determination of aesthetic culture and sometimes as a new form of agency itself. (Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, A and C Black, 2004, p. 28)
  • ... she enacts a conflicted embodiment of the monstrosity Eliot repeatedly explores as a renunciation of the human, civilised self. Maggie's taking 'her stand out of herself' not only implies a psychological torsion (twisting towards the eccentric or demented), but also shows her arguably 'most monstrous' (Hollis Berry, Victorian Psychology Monstrous Maidens and George Eliot, Brill, 2019, p. 120)
  • This brings me to my third topic: the torsion exerted on the liberal self by finance. Specifically, I argue that financialization abstracts the formerly immediate and organic relationship between possession and ownership; as the two terms drift apart, the very basis of liberal subjectivity, what C.B. McPherson famously termed possessive individualism, begins to fray. (Matt Kavanagh, Second Nature: American fiction in the Age of Capitalist Realism, 2007)

Psychic torsion:

  • This is one of Wilde's most famous epigrams..., but, in context, it is something more than a subversion of Victorian piety. It captures the peculiar psychic torsion that structures Wildean self-fashioning, within which he recuperates a sense of will, and with it a sense of freedom. (Michael F. Davis, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Wilde's Other Worlds, Routledge, 2018).

Rather than the problematic nature of such torsion, the question is whether toroidal insight offers a more fruitful mode of engaging with that reality -- of which flow psychology is especially suggestive (Mihaly Csikszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990).

Is it appropriate to ask at this time: Does "global" reality -- and the requirement to believe in it -- involve a very particular and peculiar form of cognitive "torsion" or "twist", in contrast with the daily direct experience of "flat earth" reality?

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