The problem of inequality is one of the most enduring and prolific problems in human history. Whether we think about violent intimate partner relationships, an abusive work environment, widening income inequality, the global labor market, the immigration crisis, the unequally distributed burden of the effects of climate crisis, or the history and ongoing legacy of colonialism – one running thread across all of these issues and indeed what characterizes the nature of many of our relational structures, is inequality. Most of us would say we want a more equal world, but what that means is debatable, situational, and even a moving target complicated by individual ideas situated in a web of intersectional needs and desires. The difficulty of undertaking, or even defining such work, however, cannot be a justification for inaction because we know all too well what the alternative looks like. The purpose of this thesis document is to explore the role of art practices in altering or subverting modes of relation based on inequality by providing an opportunity to co-define as well as build the skills to operationalize equality. How do we work toward a goal that no one of us has the authority to define? It is here that poet and philosopher, Édouard Glissant’s notion of “the trace” can provide an ideal starting point. In his book, Treatise on the Whole-World, he states that “the trace is what puts us, all of us, wherever we come from, in Relation.”[1] The trace, as a methodology for thought, activism, and artmaking, can provide us with a way of both practicing and simultaneously negotiating what it means to be in relationship with ourselves, one another, and even the environment. With trace thought as an operating principle, we can achieve relationships that honor the complex multiplicities in our needs, goals, desires, and identities, while also recognizing the mutual benefit of those multiplicities.

This text will briefly examine the social theory and context for this work. The purpose is not to provide a comprehensive survey on all social theory related to inequality, but instead to think for a moment about how we got here and ask: if art can be the vehicle for social change, first what am I trying to change? In this type of endeavor, I am more interested in focusing on one possible root cause (i.e., lack of skills to operationalize our desire for increased equality) than the many possible expressions of inequality (i.e., intimate partner violence, income inequality, racism, sexism, etc.), so multiple relational contexts will be touched on, but all examples will relate back to this problem of relationships predicated on inequality in some way. My claim is not that a lack of skill is the only cause of these various expressions of inequality, but rather a persistent barrier to change for those of us who desire to do better in relationships, as well as a persistent barrier in organizing for change.

The ”Operating Principles” section of this website defines the trace as well as identifies a few other operating principles for this work. In other words, what should this particular form of art activism look like? What should these art practices have in common if they are being used for the purpose of exploring multiplicities and mutualities?

Throughout this site there are also different forms of research presented through interview, essay, and storytelling, as well as the art work, as a way of starting to apply the theory and principles in more specific and concrete terms. These efforts are small, local, and at times naive, but as Glissant says:

…these reasons, which we have seized on in the difficult passion of writing and creating, of living and struggling, are now becoming common places for us, that we are learning to share; but invaluable common places…Our common places, even though today they are of no use, of absolutely no use against the concrete oppressions that stun the world, are nevertheless capable of changing the imagination of human communities: it is through the imagination that we will ultimately conquer these derelictions that attack us, just as it already helps us, by shifting our sensibilities, to fight them.[2]

It is in this spirit that I will ask if art practices can help us explore multiplicities and mutualities in…

…the imagination

…a conversation

…a game

…a dance

…at the dinner table

…our relationship to nature.

[1] Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 9.

[2] Glissant, 8.

We, as humans, pursue things. (I am just using things as a variable. Play along for a moment.) We pursue tangible things, and we pursue intangible things. We pursue things we need, and we pursue things we desire…or things that will get us the things we need and/or desire. Some of us might pursue more things than others, but for the most part, each of us must pursue at least some things or we would die (at least sooner than we otherwise would). So, we usually pursue those things that will help us not die, and also things that will help us meet some definition of living well. We pursue food, shelter, safety, rest, parking spaces, success, job security, sex, recognition, more free time, entertainment, meaning, legacy, children, and a million other things. We could say that to maintain the conditions of living and also maximize, in our estimation, the quality of our living, we as humans move through space (physical or cognitive) towards a variety of ends, or what we will simply call things.

We as individuals, do not pursue these things on an island of one, in isolation from other humans. Furthermore, some of the things we need and/or desire to survive or live well involve other humans. We may need/desire contact or esteem from other humans, or we may have needs/desires that are best pursued in cooperation with other humans perhaps due to the scale of labor involved. We are social animals. Inevitably, however, one’s pursuit of things frequently finds itself in conflict with other humans’ pursuits of things. (This is to say nothing yet of how our individual pursuits may come into conflict with other species, the environment, or even put us at odds with ourselves).

The primary cause of this conflict is that in every social unit or group, the tangible, material things we need and/or desire exist as finite resources in the physical world. The condition of this finitude of tangible things tends to correspond to one of several realities. That is to say that depending on the thing in question there is often either: 1. truly not enough of that thing to go around, 2. enough of the thing for everyone to have what they need to survive, but not enough of the thing for everyone to have the amount they want, or 3. enough of the thing for everyone to have what they need and want, but because it is finite, people fear there may not really be enough and they act accordingly (otherwise known as operating from a scarcity mentality). It is worth noting that while certain intangible things (i.e. – esteem, respect, feelings of admiration) are not necessarily finite for all intents and purposes, we as humans often behave as though they are finite because that more closely resembles the material reality we live in. (For example, a mother may have unlimited amounts of pride – at least within her lifetime – for her children, but those children may compete for it as though it is a limited resource.) This is just one way we unnecessarily reduce or reify aspects of our existence and move to accumulate and dominate that which does not even abide by the accounting formulas of the physical world.

Still, since the pursuits of various things are at least on some level a necessary part of survival, and in other cases our perceived quality of life, and because the things we pursue are often finite, these pursuits will inevitably produce friction and create conflict. No matter what the scale is (household or global, friend groups or nations) we are in relation with one another, and those relations exist inside of a world made up of limits. This reality is the basis of conflict. It is how we deal with the conflict that matters.

So, how do we deal with that conflict? Whether it is on a macro- or micro-level, we frequently “other” those whose exact needs do not match the particulars of our own, or whom we perceive as in competition to ours. But let us say a certain person does not think that way, maybe they have a particularly adept set of cooperative skills as well as an altruistic world view. That person still exists involuntarily within systems (most notably, global capitalism) that reward, if not necessitate, destructive methods of accumulating resources for that person to remain a viable participant in the system. These systems are imposed on us, for the benefit of a few, and in opposition to a natural reality that necessitates an economic and social system in which we account for one another and our planet so that we may achieve mutually assured survival.

My undergraduate degree is in sociology, because again, I wanted to understand the nature of broken relations between people(s). What I learned in these studies is that conflict derived from the pursuit of needs and desires is a central subject of modern social theory. Structural inequalities are the ways certain groups maintain power and control with regard to the necessary access to pursue things (needs and desires). These theories have differences in what constitutes power and advantage in a society, but loosely the running theme is that we are in relation, relation involves conflict, and our social systems perpetuate certain advantages impacting who wins that conflict. Marx’s materialist interpretation focuses on the way power is organized among the proletariat and the ruling class to maintain the latter’s control of resources at the expense of everyone else.[1] Most of us are distracted from toppling this inequality because we, in our false consciousness, are consumed by our own in-fighting over resources or things.[2] Weber’s approach was more dimensional, but still described a system of social stratification in which “classes, status groups, and parties are phenomena of the distribution of power within a community.”[3] C. Wright Mills said that our social systems are derived from conflict to maintain inequality (unequal access to things) among a power elite described as the military-industrial-complex.[4] Whereas social contract philosophers envisioned the birth of government as an understood agreement naturally arising between the state and its citizens whereby those governed give up some freedom in order to have the rest of their freedoms protected by the state, conflict theorists said that these structures were in fact engendered to manufacture and maintain inequalities. Gene Sharp’s work emphasized that these power structures remain in place simply because we obey them.[5] You might say that we do not like inequality, but we keep choosing it. Why? I would argue that in part it is due to a lack of alternative visions as well as the tools or skills to organize around those visions.

[1] Ruth A. Wallace and Alison Wolf, Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), 85.

[2] Overview of the variance in the ability of the proletariat to organize around class struggle. Wallace and Wolf, 85.

[3] Lewis A. Coser and Bernard Rosenberg, Sociological Theory: A Book of Readings (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 1989), 302.

[4] Wallace and Wolf, Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition, 106–9.

[5] “The essence of Sharp’s theory of power is quite simple: people in society may be divided into rulers and subjects; the power of rulers derives from consent of the subjects.” Brian Martin, “Gene Sharp’s Theory of Power,” Journal of Peace Research 26, no. 2 (May 1989): 213–22.

The need for these skills is most evident when we look within movements for equality, which so often use the same broken tools of the oppressive system. If simply valuing equality were enough, one would expect that our various movements for equality would themselves operate as models of egalitarian organization and inclusion. In actuality, it is not unusual to find members responding to conflict within these movements using the same domineering and exclusionary practices that are foundational to the various injustices they are fighting against. Our many historical failures at organizing from a sense of class-consciousness expose this reality. Audre Lorde, among many others, wrote about problems within both the movements for racial and gender equality in that each can fail to see their mutuality, and each can privilege the focus of one issue over the other to the point of an exclusionary analysis of cause and exclusionary action toward change.[1] I think her arguments are, sadly, still relevant today.

I first noticed the schism between values and skills when I went through my training as an advocate for those victimized by intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and stalking. If you work in that field you are almost certainly familiar with “The Wheels” which were developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth, MN. In the 1980s, DAIP interviewed hundreds of women who had experienced battering in the context of heterosexual relationships. Using the knowledge from those who had lived it, patterns emerged among women’s experiences, which are described in the Power and Control Wheel (Figure 1). It is important to note that since this time, additional work has been undertaken to adapt this model to other cultural contexts (i.e. – LGBTI relationships, indigenous peoples)[2], and while the ways in which violence is expressed may vary among individuals and groups, the model remains quite useful for thinking about the central motivation of violence: a desire to maintain “power and control”, or in other words, inequality.

The wheels are so shaped to demonstrate that radiating out from that central motivation of power and control are various forms of emotional abuse; radiating out even further at its most extreme presentation are physical and sexual violence. This means that the existence of abuse is not measured in binary (yes or no) terms. It operates on a continuum from minor to severe. The converse of the Power and Control Wheel is the Equality Wheel (Figure 2). This wheel demonstrates the converse behaviors that radiate out from a central motivation of equality.

Fig. 1 Power and Control Wheel

I will never forget the experience of learning about the Power and Control Wheel with my cohort of new advocates. As we read through some of the more minor offenses, someone said out loud a version of what we were all kind of thinking, “Am I an ‘abuser’? I manipulate my husband sometimes to get what I want.” That experience put a crack in my binary thinking about “victim / abuser” when it comes to who perpetuates the problems of inequality. Sure, I was no criminal. I had never even punched anyone, but these relational models, ordered along a continuum, began to expose a common brokenness in our knowledge of how to treat the people we love while still meeting our own needs and pursuing our own desires (things).

Fig. 2 Equality Wheel

The model also exposed a need to not only value equality, but to operate from a motivation of equality. Awareness is not enough; we must be and live in a way that is antithetical to the violence of inequality. My supervisor, Ann Lowrance, reinforced this need further by pointing out how the institutions meant to serve people, even crisis centers for those victimized by violence, often mimic abusive relationships in that they too are centered around Power and Control. Just to name two examples, many shelters attempt to control if clients speak to the perpetrating partner (often their children’s father) or whether they file a protective order as a condition of their residency. This dissonance between the values of an organization and the actual experiences of its members is a common frustration. We want more than lip service given to equality, we want change to be embodied and operationalized within our relationships and institutions. Many of us remember the 1980s “Just Say No” campaign[3] which failed to prevent substance abuse because the slogan is shockingly naive about the difficulties of saying “no”, and begs the question, what do we say “yes” to? I have learned from my drug treatment colleagues that people use drugs because drugs work. Drugs are not used because they don’t work, but drugs are often destructive tools. I think we are often in the “Just Say No” phase when it comes to inequality. So much of our tools for relation are broken tools – destructive, but “effective” at getting certain needs met. Moreover, sometimes activism focuses more on calling out that brokenness than on cultivating alternative models.

[1] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 51–56. In particular, the chapter entitled “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface” outlines multiple problems of separating an analysis of cause and organizing around change (my language) with respect to racism and sexism in response to Robert Staples. More broadly, her essay, “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions” states, “I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression. I have learned that sexism (a belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over all others and thereby its right to dominance) and heterosexism (a belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving over all others and thereby its right to dominance) both arise from the same source as racism-a belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby its right to dominance.” Audre Lorde, “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” Bulletin: Homophobia and Education, Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1983. I do not quote Lorde as a means of flattening or erasing difference, but as a caution against losing sight of why certain differences are manufactured in the first place, to the extent that we lose focus on dismantling the system(s) of oppression themselves in favor of more immediately addressing the concerns that seem closer to home.

[2] “Wheel Gallery,” Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs: Home of the Duluth Model, 2017, https://www.theduluthmodel.org/wheel-gallery/.

[3] “Just Say No,” History.com, August 21, 2018, https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/just-say-no.

I worked in the field of social problem prevention on and off for over ten years. I was employed by state government and my job was to help communities devise their own culturally competent, location-specific sets of strategies, rather than dictate how they should address the issues. This seemed ideal to me after what I learned in my experiences working in the shelter. The state (powerholder) would provide resources and assistance to communities so that they could become more empowered. Not surprisingly people in the communities we worked with tended to buy into this concept, at least in theory. Frequently, however, there would be a breakdown in this buy-in as the process of developing collaborative solutions became inevitably laborious and intense. More than once, someone said to me “why don’t you just tell us what to do.” Amazingly, when we are given the power to govern ourselves, we often resent it! It’s easy to give orders; it’s easy to take orders, but it’s hard to make decisions collaboratively. Perhaps one of the biggest threats to democracy (to marriage, to friendships, to classrooms, to workplaces) is the difficulty and size of the responsibility of working together – of performing equality.

Of course, all competition is not necessarily bad, and all hierarchy is not evil. I am a parent, and I hold a hierarchical position of power over my child. She is not in charge of our household, but I think deeply about my position as a power holder. Am I maintaining power and control for its own sake? Or is my power used in a way that is commensurate with the responsibility I hold to safely raise a child into capable adulthood – empowering her at every opportunity to begin assuming more and more responsibility along the way. Power without responsibility is one dimension of entitlement after all. Power over another person who is the rightful holder of that power and responsibility over themselves is another.

One may ask, what does capitalism have to do with the structural inequality of our relations? Global capitalism is the farthest iteration on the spectrum of how we relate, the most macro in scale. It is the global system ordering how we pursue the things we want/need to survive/thrive, and it has structurally oppressed a good portion of us, while distracting most of the rest of us with a certain level of momentary comfort and privilege, an increasing level of busyness needed to remain competitive in the system, and of course in-fighting with those more or differently oppressed. The system of global capitalism permeates every facet of our culture and every type of relationship. Capitalism is the continuation of colonizer’s vision in which there is no mutuality and no need for mutual learning. In order for me to win, you must lose. Your loss does not harm or dehumanize me. The world and its resources exist for my taking. Glissant describes the trajectory from past to present in this way:

1492. The Great Discoverers hurl themselves upon the Atlantic, in search of the Indies. With them begins the poem. Also, all of those, before and after this New Day who have known their dream, lived off it or died from it…[1]

The colonizer is the ultimate image of inequality, of centering the self, while erasing the other, but much like the notion of victim/abuser, it isn’t a purely binary one. Instead, motivated by a need for power and control, colonized instincts linger and exist along a continuum, found often where one would least expect them, even among the colonized, so often because we lack better tools. How do we unify people in their oppression, resilience, or identity and promote class-consciousness without erasing the unique ways groups and individuals experience oppression, resilience, or identity? How do we de-center the self and make room for the other…and ultimately realize there is no “other”? After all, who benefits when we continue to repeat the colonizing pattern Lorde referred to as “divide and conquer” rather than “define and empower”?[2]

[1] Édouard Glissant, The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant, trans. Jeff Humphries and Melissa Manolas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xvi.

[2] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).

We are in a moment of hyper-division in the U.S., but one that is mirrored in other parts of the world, all the while the global threats are their most severe. The “us or them”, “me or you” styles of thinking only serve to exacerbate the threats and veil the mutual condition of our fates, but we are rarely taught how to negotiate our needs and their needs, your needs and my needs. Therapists Hendrix and Hunt, whose work will be explored in Part Three, conjecture that in many marriages we promise to be “one”, but in our heads we usually translate that to mean “me.”[1] On a more macro scale, democracies contain masses who struggle to cooperate and organize all the while the maintenance of power among a top few is facilitated by their comparatively homogenous needs and priorities.

We are different and diverse…and connected. The ability to negotiate conditions of mutuality and multiplicity are the antidote to inequality, which is often maintained through a narrow system of rigid classifications that do not reflect our complexities or dependencies. One of the first tasks of community work is always to offer the idea that there is no “over there” when it comes to social problems. Suffering for some can have cascading effects that extend far beyond those initially involved. Mutuality, as I am using it here, acknowledges that on a finite planet, there is no “over there.” Our political and economic systems are short-sighted and continue to leave less viability for all of us, including those who may come out on top today. Even in our micro-interactions the harm and violence of inequality dehumanizes and degrades all of us.

The concept of multiplicities is widely used in philosophy and mathematics often with a specific meaning for each theorist. For this paper, I do not want to get too bogged down by a survey of every definition and the level at which they relate here, especially when, like the term “equality”, its meaning in a given situation may have to be somewhat negotiated in relation. Overall though I am inspired by the Glissantian sense of the term. Glissant challenges us to think about unity, not of sameness or assimilation, but instead as a unity of difference, of multiplicity. Glissant, was influenced by Deleuze and Guattari and their notions of multiplicities and rhizomes[2], but he also frequently used the imagery of a creole garden or forest instead, which he equated to the rhizome[3], where plants protect and strengthen one another.[4] “The tree is a genealogy that excludes the other…I would draw a jungle or a forest, a collective, to better describe our relations between each other.”[5] When we find strength in our differences, Glissant says, “you can change with the other while staying yourself—you don’t lose because you are multiple.”[6] This is of course a theory applicable to race, but also a theory with broader applications, cutting to the heart of why and how race and other systems of classification serve to perpetuate inequalities.

Glissant provides an alternative approach to difference. “[He] offers us the language to articulate such a conception of diversity, such that the most minor human differences are acknowledged all at once, and are in equal relationship with the rest of the world. Such an open totality would lead to constant negotiation, exchange and mixing between a multitude of identities and in doing so, it would produce unknowable outcomes.”[7] When we chip away at the structures of inequality, we chip away at our sense of power and control, of knowable outcomes. If we are honest, equality is frightening. Art practices can facilitate some ease and experience at relating with these “unknowable outcomes.”

[1] “Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt: Insight-Gems for Singles,” Psychology Today, accessed October 2020, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-love/201411/harville-hendrix-and-helen-hunt-insight-gems-singles.

[2] Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, 11. See text and accompanying footnote.

[3] “This principle of the Creole Garden is the same as the principle of rhizomes…” Manthia Diawara, Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (Third World Newsreel, 2010).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Valérie K. Orlando, “Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation Dir. by Manthia Diawara (Review),” African Studies Review 59, no. 1 (April 2016): 239–41.

[7] Mara Ahmed, “Difference as Liberatory Politics,” Counter Currents (blog), March 2, 2019.