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Оглавление2. Transition: A Publishing History
Many studies of Transition begin by looking at existing accounts that may offer guidance as to what ‘it’ is supposed to be ‘about’. In this sense, the written materials produced by prominent individuals who have been continually involved in the life of Transition are the customary starting point for the sort of analytical enquiry that I distanced myself from in the Introduction. In this chapter, my goal is to show how, even if we set off from where most social scientists start in relation to Transition, we need not end up where they have. Indeed, an initial glimpse into the unfolding, dynamic quality of Transition – as a moving and not a completed movement – already shines through a synoptic reading of various introductory texts produced within the Transition milieu. If we take them separately, as is often the case, we risk missing a dynamic motion in the horizon of Transition, paralleled by the style of its presentation. This impression, that the Transition Handbook1 (the first official ‘manual’ about Transition) is only a part of the story – and a dated one at that – was reinforced by interviews I undertook with the former publisher of the Transition series for Green Books, John Elford, as well as with Rob Hopkins, one of the initiators of Transition and the author of some of the most popular reference titles about it.
In order to illustrate what I mean, this chapter sketches a short history of Transition, dotted by references to some of the accompanying literature that has been generated in the process.2 In more detail, the texts I will focus on are primarily those produced by Rob Hopkins, either individually or in a team of authors. These are: his three titles with Green Books – in chronological order – The Transition Handbook,3 The Transition Companion4 and The Power of Just Doing Stuff,5 his PhD thesis,6 the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan written by Hopkins with Jacqui Hodgson7 and a pamphlet by Hopkins and Peter Lipman with the title Who We Are and What We Do.8
Before delving into a review of these texts, however, I want to spend a little longer on the purpose of this chapter, in the economy of the narration I am trying to weave through this book. A common misconception that academic analyses bring to the study of a social phenomenon in motion is to take whatever has crystallised as an indication of what it is. So it occurs that, when trying to study Transition, most accounts rely heavily on writings produced in the early days of the Transition phenomenon, as though they clarified the essence of it. Often, however, these are just passages through which this phenomenon has appeared. They are signposts on which its unfolding has relied upon for a while, and subsequently moved on, absorbing them inside whatever continuations of the story have been subsequently enacted. In this sense, any literature originating within the Transition milieu – and this applies even more to the early one – has to be appreciated in context, recovering the tentative spirit of the early days. It is merely a snapshot of an unfolding phenomenon so that it might, in the light of subsequent progress, become too tight or too rigid to embrace what Transition is in the process of becoming.
Whenever we try to cling to these snapshots, and substitute them for the whole, we are taking a risk: a risk on which the whole possibility of ‘knowing’ through this process stands or falls. A snapshot is the picture of a motion; in fact, even a collection of snapshots is still a collection of discrete representations of that motion and not the motion itself. When the snapshots we take as starting points are not approached with a degree of self-consciousness – in the knowledge that they are crystallisations of an unfolding motion – there is a risk that what we speak about no longer exists; that Transition, for example as described in the Transition Handbook, might have morphed beyond recognition into something more complex and textured than the initial text could encapsulate. If we don’t use snapshots as a way to access the motion, but confuse them for the motion itself, we risk simply being too late. Coming armed with theories to a meeting with something that has moved on, so that we end up building scaffolding around an empty shell.
This is why I think it is important to devote an entire chapter to illustrating that any number of written accounts are to the life of Transition what past perfect is to present. Think of this section as a springboard through which to ignite our curiosity and poise our attention for taking the plunge from the pictures to the process by which the motion itself arises (or, rather, my experience of it, which I gathered through ‘accompanying’ the life of Transition in Totnes) in subsequent chapters.
Beginnings and instruction manuals
The ‘early’ writings on Transition encompass a number of texts. In 2008, Rob Hopkins published The Transition Handbook with Green Books.9 This was followed, in 2009, by a shorter pamphlet called Who We Are and What We Do, authored by Hopkins and Lipman.10 In 2010, Hopkins and Hodgson issued the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan11 and, in the same year, Rob Hopkins defended his PhD dissertation.12 I set the cut-off for these ‘early writings’ just before The Transition Companion, published in 2011.13
These are the writings that accompanied the launch of the first Transition initiative in Totnes in 2006. In fact, the ‘unleashing’ of Transition in Totnes, although marked by a discrete celebratory event, was actually a longer process woven through preparatory film screenings and other public events. These eventually culminated in what has been called – in Transition-speak – ‘The Great Unleashing’ of a new Transition initiative:14 in this case the first, in Totnes.
The months after the unleashing of Transition were particularly hectic. Not only, in fact, were members being engaged in the life of the new-born Transition Town Totnes, but they were also receiving a lot of requests for information by groups wanting to reproduce the Transition concept in their own communities. In order to respond to those requests, Rob Hopkins authored The Transition Handbook (‘the Handbook’), a first official ‘how-to’ guide to setting up a Transition initiative. This occurred with the parallel development of the Transition Network, the ‘outreach’ arm of the formal organisation of Transition, devoted to supporting incipient initiatives around the world.15
The Handbook is organised around an exposition of the Transition concept as a response to the challenges of man-made climate change and peak oil (i.e. the anticipated exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves into the future). In this sense, Transition emerges in the context of a narration about those challenges, to which it is presented as a possible solution (I dwell further on the origin of Transition in the disquiet engendered by peak oil in ch. 9). Furthermore, in the light of the need – which the book was trying to address – to provide guidance to others asking about Transition (so as to ease some of the strain on the organisational resources of Transition in Totnes), the Handbook follows the structure of an instruction manual. This is particularly evident in the setting out of twelve steps towards establishing a Transition initiative; steps that very much mirrored the way the Transition Town Totnes had been set up. These went from building awareness and organising a ‘Great Unleashing’ to drawing up an ‘Energy Descent Action Plan’.
In the Handbook, Hopkins also traces some of the ‘roots’ of Transition thinking to permaculture. This is a set of principles/orientations to guide the design of resilient, diverse systems (whether the ‘system’ be a woodland, an allotment or a more complex human community).16 Originally developed in relation to the building of self-sustaining agricultural systems, permaculture – under the guise of a design know-how – has been applied to a much wider array of pursuits than food-growing, on the assumption that ‘everything gardens’17 and can therefore benefit from the application of design principles originally devised in relation to land-based activities, such as allotment growing or smallholder agriculture:
The basic principle of permaculture is to make useful connections between different elements in a system, so that as many inputs as possible are provided from within the system, and as many of the outputs as possible are used within it. This principle can be applied to connections between human beings just as well as it can to plants and animals.18
Hopkins presents Transition as a derivation of the permaculture approach, adapted to the design of communities that be more resilient in meeting their needs in the face of the challenges of climate change and peak oil. At the same time, however, he also distances Transition from permaculture, observing that the latter has often been pursued in relative isolation, and never really went mainstream. Permaculture is therefore implicit, rather than explicit, in the Transition phenomenon,19 acting for Transition like a ‘starter’ does (this is the yeast from which sourdough bread is subsequently baked, which is transformed in the process). What this means became clearer to me as I went on to carry out interviews with members that were involved in Transition. The more testimonies I gathered, the less prominence permaculture seemed to have in their first-person accounts of how they were drawn into it. While all had heard of it, only a very small minority had actually gotten interested in permaculture as a consequence of their involvement in Transition: most simply knew of its existence, but not much more beyond that. Despite borrowings from permaculture – as I will discuss in greater depth in ch. 3 below – permaculture is hardly an explicit component of Transition as many scholarly accounts seem to give it credit for.
In response to the demands for support and information that followed the unleashing of the Transition Town Totnes, a formal ‘outreach’ organisation was set up, the Transition Network. This is the main focus of the 2009 pamphlet by Rob Hopkins and Peter Lipman. In it, they trace in broad strokes the formal organisational structure that has been put in place to offer dedicated support to incipient Transition initiatives outside Totnes. But the reason this pamphlet is interesting in the economy of this chapter is in a number of significant differences from the Handbook. For one, references to permaculture are omitted, and the formal passages of the permaculture design process are substituted with a set of ‘principles of Transition’.20 This, of course, is not because of a sudden change of heart as to the place of permaculture within Transition, but rather a further confirmation that permaculture need not be part – as it wasn’t for the Transitioners I encountered in Totnes – of an induction into Transition.
Another significant innovation from the presentation style adopted in the Handbook is the more explicit emphasis placed on the non-prescriptiveness of the guidelines on offer. In an interview I undertook with Rob Hopkins, in fact, he admitted he quickly felt – soon after publishing the Handbook – that it risked being taken too literally, so that the ‘twelve steps’ he outlined for setting up a Transition initiative would be taken methodically, as opposed to being treated as a mere form of advice, which people could be free to disregard if not needed. Overall, Who We Are and What We Do seems to try to correct the aim and lower a threshold that might have become a hurdle in fostering the birth of further Transition initiatives: namely rigid adherence to a rulebook.
The Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan (the ‘EDAP’),21 which came to light in 2010, has a slightly different function from the previous two documents: less of an introduction to Transition, and more a culmination of the original twelve-step process in relation to the Totnes initiative. Unlike the previous two documents, the intended audience of the EDAP has a more limited geographical remit, being addressed mostly to ‘individuals, the community and local service providers in the area of Totnes and District’.22 However, by virtue of being the first energy descent plan originating in a Transition initiative, the EDAP is structured as an extensive reference resource, in a self-conscious attempt to signpost the journey of Transition in Totnes for interested others.
The narration presented in the EDAP once again introduces Transition as a response to the challenges of peak oil and climate change. However, where it adds to previous literature is in setting a vision of how Totnes might achieve greater resilience to peak oil and climate change within a rough timeline (by the year 2030) and in selected areas of intervention, from food provisioning to building efficiency, down to energy security and economic relocalisation. In this sense, it is close in spirit and style of presentation to Rob Hopkins’ PhD dissertation, which has a similar concern with setting out possible pathways and milestones towards achieving resilience to climate change and peak oil.
In the dissertation – which could be read as a suitable ‘companion volume’ to the EDAP23 – Rob Hopkins unpacks various dimensions of community resilience in the face of peak oil and climate change, and relates these to the work undertaken in the ‘pilot’ initiative in Totnes. For this purpose, it seems that one of the principal concerns of that text is to assess feasibility and anticipated effectiveness with respect to a number of steps or strategies, such as liaising with local government. The dissertation also endeavours to position the Transition approach – as exemplified by the instance of Totnes – in the context of the debate about relocalisation more generally.24 In sum, the PhD appears to build and expand – for evaluative purposes – on the topics and strategies set out in the EDAP, and is once again reliant on the ‘twelve steps’ that had been introduced in the Handbook.
However, his thesis equally contains shoots of the innovations that would begin to distinguish later works on Transition from this ‘early literature’. For instance, at one point Hopkins discusses his intention to develop a second edition of the Handbook, in order to go beyond the twelve steps. He justifies this on grounds of there being ‘an emergent understanding that the 12 Steps, used to communicate Transition, fail to reflect the depth of what is emerging in Transition’, and he suggests in their stead a different communicative approach to ‘better reflect the more interconnected, systems-thinking model into which Transition has evolved’.25
This is a crucial passage, for it is here that one can witness the emerging rift between the picture of Transition conveyed by a set of instructions and its experiential unfolding. During an interview with myself, Hopkins offered the following observation, in order to explain the move away from the normativity of the Handbook. Namely, a number of accounts from fellow Transitioners beyond Totnes reported that the steps would normally be followed up to a point, and then people would begin referencing them more liberally, picking and choosing what worked. A new style of presentation was needed, therefore, to be more receptive to the variety of paths into Transition that seemed to emerge over time, beyond the original stepwise sequence. Where this change comes to fruition and is expressed in a new editorial product is in The Transition Companion.26
Recipe books and collections of short stories
The Transition Companion (‘the Companion’) was published in 2011. This new volume makes explicit the intention to move away from the twelve-step approach of the Handbook, towards ‘a more holistic, more appropriate model’.27 From the very start, therefore, it addresses the tension between the linearity of the steps and the more irregular, tumultuous coming to life of Transition. It soon emerged, in fact, that new Transition initiatives would normally be following the Handbook for the first few steps, and then proceed in a less rule-bound fashion, using this text more as a source of inspiration and examples than working their way through it in a structured manner.28 Hence the relinquishing of an instruction manual-like way of introducing Transition that risked enclosing it in a bounded, normative framework.29 (The stepwise presentation that is shed in the passage from the Handbook to the Companion, however, is the same one to which a number of academic authors still cling, given its easy adaptability to scholarly habits of exposition as it lends itself to analytical and comparative examination.)30
The Companion is therefore the point at which awareness appears to emerge about the need to achieve greater fittingness and alignment between the practice of Transition, and the ways in which that moving is communicated and re-presented. In the Companion, Hopkins is able to develop a type of narration that leaves behind the tone of an instruction manual, towards what was dubbed – in an interview with the publisher of this volume – as a ‘recipe book’ consisting of ‘ingredients’. This type of narration is one that proceeds through concrete examples, showcasing possibilities for engaging and experimenting with Transition, as enacted in a variety of disparate settings. Readers are furthermore encouraged to pick and choose those opportunities with which they may resonate most.31
The inspiration for this approach – as Hopkins makes clear in his dissertation32 – was Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.33 This is the work by a renowned advocate of ecological architecture, who looks at the built environment as comprising of patterns that are susceptible of application to similar contexts while – at the same time – retaining sufficient adaptability so that no two instances in which a pattern occurs will be exactly identical.34
Part of the process of aligning the life of Transition with a suitable style of re-presentation also involves a breaking down of the authorial voice. As Hopkins promises in the Introduction: ‘You will find not just my voice throughout this book, but the voices of many people who are actively trying out these ideas and sharing their experiences’.35 The Companion, in other words, has less of the structured, linearised approach of the Handbook, and offers what could perhaps be dubbed a more ‘Transition-like’ possibility for communicating Transition; an instance where resonance is produced between the expression of Transition’s moving in language, and the moving itself.
The change from the Handbook is, at times, striking. Far from a normative pre-setting of the goals that Transition is set to achieve as ‘resilience in the face of peak oil and climate change’, the Companion enumerates a number of different reasons why people are drawn into the moving of Transition. A number of these, such as ‘because it means they can do that project they have always dreamed of’,36 hold little sway as motivations that would be recognisable in some academic settings, where some agreed definition of a ‘problem’ to which a ‘solution’ is being suggested would be expected. But, I believe, this is precisely the point. To observe Transition as a moving, and to go deeper into it, involves precisely a splintering of all-too-neat discursive shells that may be the result of the application of this or that framework to explain an emerging phenomenon away. For this reason, the Companion represents a significant innovation in that it does away with the one good ‘official’ reason to enter Transition, and looks at a much broader array of motives. This, judging also from the interviews I conducted as part of my fieldwork in Totnes, is a more grounded re-presentation of Transition, as the manifold existence of a community in its making.
This approach echoes throughout the Companion. In ch. 6, for instance, Hopkins introduces Transition while avoiding any straightforward definition, but rather by proposing different ‘flavours’ that Transition may disclose to different people. So it is, for example, that Transition is presented as an ‘inner process’, as storytelling and leading by example, as well as a ‘cultural shift’.37
Finally, when presenting possible strategies of performing Transition, these are all offered up as ingredients in a recipe that can then be adjusted to context. Moreover, these strategies are always buttressed by the narration of examples and individual instances carried out in different Transition initiatives. There is, in sum, a much wider diversity of ‘ways into’ Transition and a richer expression of the qualities of its moving that find their way into the re-presentation crafted in the Companion, than there might have been in previous literature.
This approach also shines through in the last addition to Hopkins’s ‘Transition trilogy’ with Green Books: The Power of Just Doing Stuff.38 The book begins, however, by temporarily reverting to a more normative style of exposition. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff, in particular, Hopkins tries to account for the emergence of a number of initiatives around economic relocalisation, which have become thematically recognisable under the label of the REconomy project (see ch. 6). It is understandable, therefore, that this new title has an upfront focus on presenting Transition as an alternative economic model (in a manner reminiscent of the way in which Transition was presented as a community response to peak oil and climate change in the Handbook). The more sectorial focus on economics might equally be a consequence of the fact that the book was originally conceived – according to the publisher John Elford – as a guide to Transition for local authorities, which might therefore justify the inclusion of an immediately recognisable ‘policy’ framing. However, as the book moves beyond the first chapter, the strategy of presenting a number of stories to illustrate and articulate certain common themes in the moving of Transition brings The Power of Just Doing Stuff once again closer to the Companion. Hence, after introducing a new ‘Big Idea’ (that of local resilience as a model for economic development),39 this book eventually departs from a straightforward definitional process. Instead, it articulates that idea by feeling its contours as they emerge through different stories and initiatives.40
The adoption – in these later works by Hopkins – of a format leaning towards a collection of short stories is deeply interesting, as it resonates with a number of other works that fall into a somewhat loose and expanding family of books about Transition-like cultural experimentation. These are other attempts at making visible and calling forth a phenomenon that shines through situated instances of unrest and activism.
One of these works is called Tales of Our Times,41 and it is a collection of Transition-related stories gathered by Stephanie Bradley, a storyteller based in Totnes. A member of Transition in Totnes, Bradley undertook a pilgrimage on foot through a number of other Transition initiatives in the UK. In the process, stories were gathered that Bradley has subsequently retold in the form of fairy tales. The idea behind the project being that, imagining to look back at the present from the future, many of the experiments woven in the moving of Transition could be recast in retrospect as ‘folk’ tales of a time of change.
Bradley, however, goes beyond a mere recollection of projects undertaken under the institutional patronage of Transition. Instead, Transition finds expression here as an open-ended form of life, which makes it possible to recognise kinship across a broad spectrum of outwardly different experiments. For this purpose, she willingly departs from formal designations and institutional belonging. After presenting the stories of a number of Transition initiatives (such as the ‘failure’ and collapse of Transition Brighton42 and the ‘resurrection’ of Transition Lancaster after a similar disbanding,43 or the touching story of a LETS system in West Bridgford near Nottingham),44 she then moves beyond the virtues and vicissitudes of undertakings designated explicitly as ‘Transition’. Instead, she also relates, for example, the tale of care and conviviality shared by one of her hosts during her pilgrimage, whereby a group of elders in the town of Bridgwater would organise to meet local youths outside nightclubs, in order to provide them with ‘essential supplies’ necessitated after a night of partying (such as flip-flops for girls tired of heels).45 With this style of presentation, Bradley channels the experience of Transition through concrete instances. She does so by offering an insight into the continuity transpiring across the breadth of her encounters, at the same time as honouring their individual differences. The result is a sense of Transition as an incipient, still evolving, form of life that demonstrates tentativeness, dynamism and an openness to innovation and to the accommodation of yet more forms of concerted activity (even if these originate outside of the organisational setup of a Transition initiative).
Bradley’s work is echoed in another recent book that offers a similar approach to appreciating movement and change in the social field: that of scavenging for sensed Gestalts, i.e. emergent forms of life (into which action is directed),46 which become more discernible as a degree of fittingness is gradually achieved between the different stories and experiences that etch them into shape. The collection I am referring to is Stories of the Great Turning, edited by Peter Reason and Melanie Newman.47
The stories in that book reinforce the possibility to sense the incipient profile of a new social world in the mutual relatedness of situated instances. These come to be progressively understood as participants in the unfolding of a phenomenon that is given shape and sharpness when we dwell on those vignettes. In that text, the point of departure is not so much a journey through Transition initiatives. Rather, its focus is on unveiling before the readers’ eyes what the authors call ‘The Great Turning’. Much like Transition, this can be understood as an unfolding profile woven through instances that cling to each other responsively across time, as though part of an emerging, unfinished conversation. Ecological activist Joanna Macy first introduced the term ‘The Great Turning’. In her work, she instructs readers to ‘see’ it presenting itself through a number of undertakings, from communal gardens to co-housing. On the basis of this, Macy is adamant about The Great Turning embodying a change in cultural sensitivity that appears to be specifying itself in progressively finer detail, the greater the number of strands it gathers along the way. In the light of this, she is optimistic about the possibility of a sea change in our collective ethical posture towards the meaning of ‘dwelling’ on the planet.48 What is very interesting to notice is how a number of stories already related in Hopkins’ books also find their way into Stories of the Great Turning. It is no surprise, given the open-endedness of Transition already sensed in the Companion and in Tales of Our Times, to see it mix into the folds of other recognisable forms of life, such as The Great Turning. I also mentioned, in the Introduction, how – for example – Schumacher College and Transition were understood by many to be enfolded in the same movement of consciousness, albeit with slightly different orientations. In the same sense, the relative porosity of boundaries between The Great Turning and Transition is not a problem. If anything, it enhances the ability to navigate across a range of possibilities that extend beyond the realm of already recognisable ‘Transition’ things and doings, pointing to available ‘next steps’ that can be experimented with.49 So, it is the case that stories that quite clearly belong in the moving of Transition50 are juxtaposed, in this collection, to accounts of people abandoning dead-end jobs to experiment with lifestyles not dictated by the motives of a corporate career (which simultaneously raises the question of whether Transition could find ways to approach and ‘move into’ this disquiet, on which see later ch. 6),51 or alongside the description of a particular community garden in King’s Cross, London.52
All of these works that fall in the genre of the ‘collection of short stories’ embody a different attitude towards the re-presentation of Transition. They undertake a move away from attempts to outline Transition as a ‘solid object’ with a stated goal and purpose, a set of steps to achieve that and a formal organisation. Instead, from the Companion to Stories of the Great Turning, they undertake more fluid explorations that do not so much define and delimit, but proceed instead through a layering and weaving of situated instances, so as to unearth emergent similarities across an unfolding, unfinished milieu, and simultaneously drawing out differences that give depth and relief to the moving so described. The result is the ability to glimpse into a number of traits of the Transition phenomenon that are otherwise lost in more linearised accounts: its tentativeness, the porousness of its boundaries and its increasing diversification that together make attempts at a definition appear ultimately inadequate to re-present this ongoing motion.
What the literature I have discussed so far seems to show, therefore, is precisely that Transition – when approached on its own terms – for example by paying attention to the process by which situated instances conjure an emerging form of life, becomes something dynamic and alive. It becomes an unfolding appearance. It is from this initial impression that an invitation arises to intensify and deepen this experience of moving, as it already transpires from this brief run-through of a small section of the literature on Transition (from the late 2000s up to the time of writing). This is the invitation that I take up in the following chapters, where I try to dwell on some of the articulations of Transition that obtain an identity by virtue of belonging to ‘it’, and from which ‘it’ is simultaneously shaped. Before moving on, however, I am going to engage briefly with other studies that are devoted explicitly to Transition. My intention here is to show how some of the conventions of academic practice adopted in those works appear to stand in the way of offering an account of the moving of Transition that can capture the dynamism that has just been outlined. This critical gaze over previous scholarly work will also offer an opportunity for teasing out further distinctions and degrees of nuance to better underscore the identifying qualities of the book you are holding in your hands.
How this book differs from previous work
Transition has been extensively written about in academic circles. Beyond Hopkins’s own PhD, scholars such as Gill Seyfang, Noel Longhurst, Peter North, Giuseppe Feola and others have all authored important contributions. In this chapter, I find it convenient to qualify the type of talk about Transition that seems to transpire from their work as a ‘policy-oriented’ approach. My feeling, in other words, is that the audience those works seem to presuppose is one of other academics and/or professionals interested in Transition as a policy. Theirs appears to be an (still commendable) effort to translate Transition into a form of address that may be understood – and hopefully acted upon – by policy-makers. And the makers of policies, whether they are other academics, civil servants or other professionals involved in think tanks or consulting bodies, seem to look for a particular structure of presentation. To describe the backbone of this, it is perhaps convenient to attempt a correspondence with what Shotter calls ‘the quantitative way of seeing the world’,53 where ‘quantity’ can be understood as anything that ‘has parts external to one another’,54 so that – through that category – ‘the world becomes visible in a particular way [...] constituted [precisely] in the form of “parts external to one another”’.55
In this setting, Transition can be understood as a closed set of instructions to be rolled out onto the world, and subsequently evaluated – alongside other competing ‘policies’ – for its ability to elicit change from one state to another. The type of questions this asks of Transition, which I hope to make apparent in the coming paragraphs, are completely different to what I am asking of it here. Whereas the problem for ‘policy-oriented’ discourse is how Transition can allow to get from state A to state B, and therefore presupposes a normative orientation, the inquiry I carry out is one that does not take that orientation for granted. If anything, I try to get lost precisely in the maze of possibilities that simultaneously co-exist as available ‘next steps’ from within the unfolding time-shape of Transition. For me, Transition discloses a number of interesting problems and tensions related precisely to the process of finding an orientation amidst such a maze, so that the identity of Transition is fluid and its future manifold.56 Taking that orientation for granted changes the question to one of instrumentality, which removes the sort of controversies that interest me and, for this particular purpose, is a less fruitful approach.57
So it is the case, for instance, that Seyfang is concerned with formulating Transition primarily as a strategy to achieve a number of desirables, and particularly the shift to sustainable ‘sociotechnical systems of provision’.58 This shift can be articulated through objectives like improving the environmental performance of food supply chains, or the enlargement of sustainable consumption choices59; goals to the achievement of which Transition can contribute as an instance of ‘grassroots innovation’.60 In the light of this, ‘[t]he role of local Transition initiatives is to engage communities in a process of envisioning positive scenarios of a post-oil future, and then begin the work of building the infrastructure, habits and institutions to move towards that future’.61 In this sense, the overarching question appears to be how can Transition be ‘translated’ as a set of instrumental strategies through which a range of desirables are to be achieved.62
A similar understanding appears to surface in the work of North and Longhurst. In one paper, for instance, they examine Transition (again, understood as a set of strategies for the implementation of normatively-fixed goals) under the lens of replicability.63 What this means is that they are interested in clarifying what conditions can enable the expansion of Transition in urban, as opposed to rural, settings. Hence they undertake an inquiry focused on the comparative dimension: they try to understand the moving of Transition extensively, by abstracting a set of variables or indicators that can enable prediction and control/adjustment for Transition to reach out to ‘urban’ settings (some of the factors they single out are ‘alliances with local development agencies’, ‘urban cosmopolitanism’ and ‘grassroots activism’).64 This is again an analytical reduction of Transition, precisely because it singles out a number of traits for the purpose of facilitating the achievement of pre-specified goals.
Longhurst equally shares a similar focus in his PhD dissertation.65 That work is based – like this book – on a period of fieldwork in Totnes. Its main concern, however, is framed in analytical terms. What he does, in fact, is to begin by abstracting a number of ‘variables’: namely the presence of what he calls a ‘progressive’ milieu and the development of ‘alternative’ or ‘post-capitalist’ economic institutions. The scope of his study is then framed in terms of ascertaining whether or not there is a relation between these two discrete variables; it is to ‘test’ the hypothesis that these are correlated.66
The most recent, and to an extent the most exemplary, addition to this strand of literature is a working paper by Feola and Nunes.67 By relying on Seyfang’s work,68 they also begin with a definition of Transition as a strategy of ‘grassroots innovation’ to address the socio-economic challenges posed by climate change. It is in order to examine Transition as one such strategy that they go on to undertake a study of the relative success and failure of individual Transition initiatives. For this purpose, they identify a number of variables against which to then go on to measure the achievements of different initiatives. In their paper, the quantitative way of seeing that has been discussed earlier is made most explicit as a range of simplifications have to be undertaken in order to morph Transition into a manageable dataset. The paragraph below gives a flavour of the linearisation that is imposed upon it when working in a quantitative frame of mind:
[T]he success of TIs [Transition Initiatives] is defined along the lines of social connectivity and empowerment, and external impact or contribution to environmental performance. In this paper we have correlated the success of TIs to objective measures of activity and participation (i.e. members, duration, activities undertaken – steps to transition) [...] our results do suggest that, whilst there is no formula for more, or less success, TIs can be arranged into four typical configurations or clusters of variable success and failure.69
The standard of discourse that appears to shine through this strand of ‘policy-oriented’ literature is one that is centred on analytical precision and dissection, for the purpose of evaluation, assessment and measurement of any unit of analysis against a number of normatively established goals and in competition both with itself (between different Transition initiatives) and with alternative ‘strategies’. The ensuing picture of Transition is akin to an assemblage of parts and variables ‘that retain their character irrespective of whether they are part of the assemblage or not’.70 In this sense, when subjected to analytical divide-and-rule tactics, Transition as an assemblage becomes simple and manageable, whereas Transition as a living, growing whole lies dead.71
In sum, the logic underlying such studies is akin to what Bortoft calls the logic of ‘solid objects’ (and which I referred to earlier as the ‘quantitative way of seeing’)72; where the attempt is to establish extensive correlations between bounded objects of analysis. When it turns to Transition, this way of seeing forces one to have to stick to commonplace definitions of it that have not kept the pace of the transformative processes of diversification; as they transpire from our earlier engagement with various collections of Transition-flavoured stories.
So it is the case, for example, that one point where most of the literature agrees is in the definition of Transition as a ‘response to climate change and peak oil’. Interestingly, all of the works by these authors appear to resort to or adhere to the more normative presentation of Transition contained in the Handbook.73 Transition, in other words, is analytically simplified as a set of strategies to address the problem of peak oil, and – from that initial definition – it can then be set in relation to other terms of measurement or comparison.
My quibble with this approach is not in it somehow being ‘incorrect’ (if it makes a difference, which it does in the contexts in which such analyses are uttered, it is as real a presence as any to be reckoned with). It is, instead, with the different possibilities living within Transition for which it does not provide a suitable form of expression. In perusing the Companion, for instance, it is possible to witness a change in focus that embraces more than peak oil and climate change. In that work, the representation of Transition becomes more diversified, sampling a number of different motivations and aspirations that get people entangled in its moving. What is lacking, therefore, is an account that is able of creating a form of communication where even the more nuanced facets of Transition may find expression, so as to articulate a richer thicket of reasons and orientations through which people resonate and become involved with the movement of the social that is Transition. Transition, as I hope to illustrate in the following chapters, can be like the proverbial elephant touched in different parts by blind people, each of whom believes that the part he/she feels is the whole elephant when, really, a whole animal speaks to them through the particular aspect or quality of it with which they can connect. This is precisely the account that I aim to offer in this book. One that focuses on Transition by trying to follow its movement, the increasing diversification and multi-dimensionality that appears to transpire from even a superficial run-through of Transition literature. At the same time, it would be pushing this too far to take the account I offer here as superior to – or exclusive of – other approaches, like the ‘policy’ stance I have previously discussed. Transition is, of course, also about peak oil and climate change, and there is nothing inappropriate about relating to it as a form of ‘grassroots innovation’ to address these. It is, in fact, eminently possible that this is the best way through which to ‘translate’ or connect the moving of Transition to the world of meaning and the languages adopted in the culture of ‘policy-making’. However, Transition, and writing about Transition, need not end there, and this book attempts precisely to open a space to apprehend more dimensions of it beyond this more ‘canonical’ one. Transition, I suggest, speaks as a set of strategies about peak oil if the observational framework through which it is approached is one that looks for such policy strategies about peak oil.
My intention here, instead, is to inquire whether it is also possible to produce an account of Transition through an intensive, caring engagement with it, like an act of midwifery, tending to the progressive coming-in-the-world of a new being. In a way, therefore, my goal is to try and develop a language for talking about Transition that resonates with the dynamic quality of its moving. In technical terms, this is often called a ‘phenomenological’ approach (see box below), because it takes the appearance of any phenomenon that catches one’s interest as the primary focus of inquiry, seeking to appreciate ‘from within’ the modulations through which it constitutes itself an organised setting for its continued unfolding and self-differentiation, rather than dissecting it for the purpose of making it amenable to evaluation according to extrinsic criteria.
An invitation to the phenomenology of Transition
What academics call ‘methodology’ is simply the process of justifying and making accessible, to others who encounter it for the first time, the evaluative equipment through which one has tinkered one’s way to his/her account of a particular situation. However, a justification only has traction to the extent that it manages to mobilise resources that are, at least to some degree, shared with the persons to whom the discussion of methodology is addressed, i.e. so long as it offers them a practicable ‘way in’. Methodology, in other words, is an attempt to enable others to relate to a new textual product, by leveraging positions and ideas with which they may already be familiar, or that may otherwise be available to them. As such, it’s a negotiation and, like all negotiations, it is always risky. On this understanding of it, however, methodology – and the textual object to which it often inheres – recovers purpose (and honesty) as an invitation into a particular way of seeing. Methodology as justification and invitation requires more than trite listings of ‘data-gathering’ techniques, which – by means of an almost bureaucratic tone – seem to target their own disappearance from view, in order to reinforce a modernist commitment to ‘out there’ facts and their textual representation and ‘explanation’.74
To bring these general considerations to bear on the specific account of Transition I offer in this book, it is helpful to understand that it emerged in co-habitation with the ideas on science of J.W. Goethe, a German poet and scientist from the late eighteenth century. (Serendipitously, my first encounter with his work occurred during my stay at Schumacher College in the course of the period of fieldwork I spent there, precisely to study Transition.) What is especially distinctive about Goethe – and the reason I was drawn to his work – is the way he manages to speak of seemingly commonplace things, like colours and plants, in a way that enlivens them, disclosing their vitality. Rather than ‘explaining’ colours and plants from the position of an observer standing on the outside, Goethe attempts – in a way that may seem paradoxical to the modernist mind trained to only apprehend reality as a ‘thing in itself’, external and inaccessible to consciousness – to let the plant or the colours speak for themselves. His discussion of colour is particularly illustrative of this point, and warrants a brief detour.
The commonplace scientific explanation of colour, which originated with Newton, is that colour as a phenomenon is ‘caused’ by refracting light through a prism. The prism causes light’s wave motion to splinter into component waves because, since these have different frequencies, they are deflected at different angles as they cross the glass medium. Upon remarking that light disperses into a colour spectrum, and since the colour spectrum is explained in terms of differences in the angle of refraction of different wavelengths, it follows that each colour is in turn associated with a particular frequency. Goethe felt, however, that Newton’s account explained the appearance of colour in terms of a mechanism (the angle of refraction, or what Newton called ‘refrangibility’) that is external to the phenomenon of colour as it appears. In its stead, Goethe attempted to dwell in the appearance of colour without resorting to theories that pre-empted its self-disclosure by subsuming it under this or that causal explanation. After beholding the appearance of colours in the sky during the various phases of the day, Goethe was gradually capable of developing a keener imagination – an ‘eye’ – for colour, which prompted him to articulate its emergence from the interplay of light and darkness. Namely, he suggested that different colour spectra would emerge, depending on whether one was gazing into darkness through a lighter medium (e.g. when we look into outer space from the light-filled medium of the atmosphere, the shades of blue in the sky darken as the atmosphere becomes more rarefied),75 or into light through a darker medium (e.g. when the sun’s yellow turns orange and then red as the thickness of the atmosphere – a comparatively darker medium relative to the sun – increases).76 Colour, to put it otherwise, discloses itself as a transition appearing through the lightening of darkness, and the darkening of light. In a similar fashion, Goethe’s study of plants was an attempt to ensure that these, rather than being apprehended analytically through subsumption in a classification system external to the appearance of the plants themselves (like that introduced by Linnaeus),77 could instead be approached ‘on their own terms’. By which, Goethe meant to refer to an appreciation of the gestalt of the plant as a living being. In other words, instead of taking the plant as a finished and separate ‘thing’ to be manipulated from the outside, he was interested in intuiting its emergence: the process of internal metamorphosis through which the outward diversity of its organs (e.g. leaf, stamen, petals) could give way to an appreciation of their kinship relative to one another, as mutually constitutive variations emerging together in the process of the plant’s continuous self-differentiation.78
Goethe’s insights would later be formulated in more general terms by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who is recognised as the ‘canonical’ founder of the philosophical line of thinking called ‘phenomenology’. If we come to Husserl’s work through Goethe, it is easy to find correspondences. For one, Husserl shared Goethe’s concern for taking phenomena as they disclosed themselves to us. To this end, it was first of all necessary to detach oneself from any theories that purported to explain the phenomenon (away), for instance by reducing colour to waves, or plants to the separate features relevant for Linnaeus’ analytical classification system. Let us not busy ourselves – he suggested – with theories about the structure of experience, but rather let us direct our attention ‘to the “things themselves”’.79 This, after all, is something we are already accustomed to doing when evaluating mathematical propositions, whereby we don’t feel the need to establish whether mathematical entities, like the number two, exist ‘out there’, but can nonetheless appreciate their meaning when we encounter them. Indeed, Husserl believed that this was possible for anything that presents itself to us, not just mathematical propositions.80
Additionally, after bracketing our pre-judgments about the world of experience, he went on to suggest that, in order to really grasp ‘the essence’ of a phenomenon (i.e. to approach it on its own terms), it was necessary to undertake a further imaginative step in order to move beyond the specific contingency in which we had encountered it. Otherwise, there would be a risk of foregoing an understanding of the phenomenon’s dynamic internal self-differentiation and taking it as a finished, bounded ‘thing’. By attempting this additional imaginative step, instead, Husserl encouraged to visualise many possible variations of the phenomenon of interest, so as to develop an appreciation for the mobility in which any situated encounter is enfolded. A phenomenon – as reflected in the word’s Greek etymology – is a continuous appearing, and – through a step of ‘imaginative free variation’81 – we can train ourselves to appreciate every ‘thing’ as leaking towards its past, projecting itself into the future, and holding together alongside other entities that are (outwardly) different but related in their mutual delineation.
A phenomenon, in this sense, discloses a ‘lived world’ (or life-world) before our eyes. Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl, was particularly fascinated by this insight, and took this possibility of inquiry further by attempting to convey the dynamism of all life, to the point of using the term ‘being-there’ instead of ‘being’, in order to gesture towards the unfolding of life through temporal contours and in contact with other things.82
While the history of phenomenology does not stop here, I believe this is adequate to offer a sense of the trajectory I have tried to follow in this book. Specifically, I have endeavoured to approach Transition as a phenomenon, that is, as something that has a vitality to it. This has translated into an attempt to trace its coming-into-being, paying particular attention to the movement of self-differentiation through which it becomes possible to appreciate different ‘parts’ of Transition – currency experiments, urban gardening, Inner Transition, the REconomy project – as internally related, like stations along a path that not only binds them together, but constitutes them (like stations of the path) as organically expressive of Transition itself.
It is this orientation – to approach Transition as a dynamic medium in which to travel through – that has informed the way I have engaged in it and, ultimately, the type of account of it you’ll find in this book. To give an example of how this has informed my inquiry, it can help to focus briefly on the pattern followed in the interviews I undertook. Specifically, my initial question would typically inquire how the person I was interviewing had come to Transition. And while I would then ask follow-up questions based on where the conversation had gone, without a fixed ‘list’, in retrospect my interest has often gravitated towards how a particular interviewee negotiated his/her way inside Transition. Conversations have often focused on possible ‘next steps’ the interviewee envisaged to explore from their current involvement in Transition. Another frequent curiosity was how they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the other activities being pursued in that same milieu. This has led, for instance, to conversations on the REconomy project with Inner Transition participants, or about Inner Transition with others involved in the Totnes Pound, to name but a few examples. Supplementing this was also my own participation in Transition, affording me some degree of first-person navigational experience, nourished from the contrasts and continuities I encountered as I took up as many opportunities as I could manage to get involved in Transition. From the combination of these strategies, I slowly became more aware of how all the different streams of activity existing within Transition inevitably crept into each other. Hence, by dwelling as much as possible in the transitions of Transition, I have sought to educate myself to seeing their mutual relatedness, immanent in the dynamic self-differentiation of a shared form of life. This book, then, is my invitation to a phenomenology of Transition. Which is not to say, however, that phenomenology as a method is only appropriate for Transition, so that a more analytical method might befit other contexts. Inherent in the phenomenological approach, in fact, is an aspiration to disclose the vitality of any phenomenon that makes itself present to us. In this sense, the aspiration to offer an account ‘from within’ hinges more on the sort of attitude we are willing to embrace, as we relate to something that catches our interest. One way is to choose to analyse it and explain it according to a monologic order of connectedness. Another, of which I hope to have offered a fitting example in this book, is to look at it as an organic, living whole that discloses itself, like music, through the difference of its expressive movement.83
The perception that prompts my inquiry into Transition is not so much that it can be a set of strategies to address peak oil and climate change. Instead, it is that Transition – what Transition is – moves. And this movement is what this book tries to provide an account of. By getting inside the movement, dwelling in the process by which Transition – as a phenomenon – generates itself, lies the opportunity to produce an account that is closer in spirit to the Companion and The Power of Just Doing Stuff than to the Handbook. An account that makes Transition in its moving palpable and, in the end, endows readers with a different ‘eye’ for staying awake to the restless quality of the social around them.
In this sense, in the focus on how a movement actually ‘moves’, this book adds to an emerging alternative approach toward the study of Transition. One that is not entirely informed by a ‘policy’ stance, but that appears to have started manifesting an interest in the generative process whereby Transition comes to life.
An initial attempt in this direction is a paper by Hillier and Scott-Cato, who seek to find a way into Transition through the metaphors they adapt from Gilles Deleuze’s writings: most significantly, those of rhizome (to convey the drifting mobility of nomadism and, by extension, the erratic origination of emergent wholes) and the sense of continual production of difference.84 The authors find value in the way of seeing that Deleuze’s metaphors disclose because they do ‘not restrict social innovation to a limited number of possibilities, nor potentially “successful interventions” to already-prescribed outcomes or solutions. [They] offer [...] a more flexible approach and a more fluid and dynamic vision of the time–spaces of territorial and social innovation’.85 Notwithstanding this, the frame within which the authors conduct their albeit interesting examination is one where Transition is still treated as an instance of ‘grassroots innovation’, with a normative orientation to address peak oil and climate change. This leads to moments of ambiguity in their argument, where the Deleuzian framework is used to suggest features that facilitate ‘socially creative strategies to respond to social challenges’,86 almost as if to use it as a criterion for ranking different forms of social innovation based on their ability to spark difference (a difference subdued to the goal of addressing the ‘central’ concern around peak oil, acting as a fixed centre of gravity for Transition ‘innovation’). It is not surprising that Transition is then talked about as a ‘testing ground’87 for theories that, whilst more open to nonlinear trajectories, are not taken far enough to shed an enduring instrumentalist gaze.
Another recent contribution comes from Polk, whose inquiry focuses on the process by which Transition grows and transforms, and she dwells to this end on the ways in which communication is mediated within it.88 Where there are differences with the approach adopted here is perhaps in the fact that she appears somewhat puzzled at the sometimes hard-to-pin-down nature of Transition’s moving. So it is, for instance, that in noticing the move away from a twelve-step approach and towards one based on ingredients in the Companion, she displays a degree of puzzlement at the contradiction89 whereas – in the take I offer in this book – it is precisely this process of transformation that warrants an account. In Polk’s work, however, there is much greater sensitivity towards the ongoing, tentative quality of the moving of Transition. And yet, at the same time, that dynamism appears to be framed in terms of the outward expansion of a bounded entity, instead of an open-ended process of co-creation that constellates Transition across a gamut of different experiences. The reason Polk might seem to stumble into difficulties when accommodating some of the contradictions she encounters (such as the simultaneous existence of twelve steps and a looser set of principles or ingredients) might at root be connected with the choice to begin with a definition of Transition. Namely, she defines it as a process to enable community responses to climate change. This forces her into a search for coherence across a moving that, by virtue of being dynamic, is inherently generative of productive paradoxes and related differences, out of which emerge yet more distinctions and detail. Indeed, by pinning the goal of Transition on the development of resilience in the face of climate change – the initiating concern for Transition, albeit one that has transformed and diversified in the process – Polk eventually falls back into the instrumental mind-set of asking whether Transition ‘works’ or not.90 At times she compounds this by trying to understand the moving of Transition extensively, that is, through discrete indicators of ‘how big’ it might be, bringing into focus the rate or extension of its ‘spread’,91 rather than intensively, looking at the process of internal differentiation that is brought into focus in this book.
A similar oscillation between noticing the moving and talking about the ‘movement’ (as a completed process) occurs in Hardt’s work.92 In her dissertation, she both takes notice of the dynamic aspect of Transition, whereby common doings constellate in emergent fashion the organised setting for convening a collective, as well as undertaking the customary definitional step that allows to encircle it as a movement with defined goals.93 Hardt is very clear about the fact that analysing a particular phenomenon by picking it apart, labelling it and categorising – possibly in relation to one or another pre-stated goal – does not actually clarify much about the style through which its moving unfolds.94 At the same time, however, her presentation of Transition undertakes a ‘sampling’ of different initiatives, so that how Transition moves is abstracted from contrasting multiple instances (within Transition), or by comparison with movements different from Transition, as though linking up externally separate objects. If there is, in other words, a much more responsive understanding of the peculiar dynamism of Transition, the basic approach is still one that proceeds by analysis and synthesis, by separating and then distilling commonalities from different units. The departure is not complete from an extensive analysis of Transition’s moving, analogous to the handling of separate bodies and solid objects. This does not detract from the fact that Hardt’s work is immensely perceptive in its ability to tease out the dynamism that hints to a generative process that is only partly embraced by a definition in instrumental terms.95 The limits of that work transpire, instead, in the manner of presentation, in the choice (or need, given the constraints of the literary genre of the PhD thesis) to adopt an analytical method to describe a holistic movement. The result, in the end, is perhaps best described in the words of Bortoft as a ‘counterfeit whole’,96 like an aerial picture that abstracts and then unites through comparison of extensively different units (such as different Transition initiatives, or different movements to which Transition is juxtaposed). Hardt’s picture offers a series of discrete photograms in the place of the motion they re-present. They are fragments of the movement, not what generates the motion itself. As such, her account only scratches the surface of the possibilities for intensification, for delving deeper into the moving of Transition. And yet, it is primarily by heeding to these that one can access a dynamic description of the generative process through which the moving organically unfolds across many different realms of experience. Hardt’s telling is constructed from the outside, like a scaffolding that envelops a building: it rests on it, following its contours, while failing to offer a glimpse into the building-ness of the building, into the process by which a building becomes itself.97
Last, but not least, is the recent PhD contribution by Aiken, who offers a detailed exploration of the ambiguity connected to the use of the term ‘community’ in referring to Transition.98 ‘Community’, he suggests, is a wilfully indeterminate notion subject to constant specification as new occasions for common doings arise; community in Transition is therefore ‘flexiform, shapeshifting and never permanent. It is rooted locally, based on small-scale personal interactions, but has swings and ebbs and flows of people, ideas and energy throughout. In short, everything exists in a permanent state of transition’.99 In this sense, Aiken offers a first phenomenological glimpse into the piecemeal, contingent process by which new strands and trajectories are intersected and drawn into the moving of Transition, while it gathers diversity, depth and nuance along the way. He also offers the first clear articulation of the tension that I have outlined so far between policy/instrumental approaches to Transition (as a strategy to achieve normatively-fixed goals) and the endeavour to express the life of Transition’s moving on its own terms, with all the orientational dilemmas that can only be sensed from within (but not from without, in the position of a policy-maker that knows already where they want to go). Aiken finds this tension playing out in relation to the deployment of the term ‘community’ in order to speak of Transition, where he distinguishes between ‘governmentalised [understandings] of “community” used to discipline individuals into “correct” environmental actions and behaviours [on the one hand], and the “community” of experience and belonging [on the other]’.100 He positions himself in relation to this tension, by suggesting – in much the same way as I have done here – that ‘“community’s” meaning [...] is not an object to reflect on, be discussed and cognitively understood. Rather it is lived, embodied, and just is’.101 In this sense, the practice of community is ‘achieved only through work on a “demanding common task”. One does not simply walk into “community”’.102
The basic intuition underlying this alternative approach to engaging with Transition – and most clearly expressed by Aiken – is what this book tries to develop. Unlike scholarship of the ‘policy’ sort, a phenomenological narration of Transition actively tries to eschew a definition, the simplification of Transition from a policy perspective, mistaking one possible instantiation of this phenomenon – as a set of strategies to address peak oil – for the whole. I also try to avoid narrating the moving of Transition through a process of separation and re-combination, as do some of the writers in the incipiently ‘phenomenological’ strand I discuss above, like for instance Polk and Hardt. While noticing the moving, the latter fall short of providing an account that travels with the dynamic generative process of Transition. This is a process that discloses relatedness-in-difference across a range of practical pursuits, revealing the edge of a phenomenon that unfolds in increasingly complex, fractal form. This book aims to delve into this possibility, by experimenting with a description that is intensive rather than extensive. By going deeper into the phenomenon so as to let it speak, rather than beginning with a process of definition and categorisation that, like a scaffolding, sits on the outside but fails to grasp exactly how a phenomenon comes to life.
