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1. Introduction: Travelling Without Moving

It is in the doing that the ‘community’ is understood, in practice not definition.1

Legend has it that a visitor, upon coming to Totnes to ‘witness’ Transition, frowned in disappointment and observed the following: ‘I am dismayed to see that you still have cars on the streets. And not only do you have no living roofs in the town, but [...] there are also no goats grazing upon them’.2 Like that visitor, I confess, I too was after my own idea of purity; an idea formed studiously over a period of months spent toiling over articles and books, trying to make out from a distance what Transition was supposed to be. Those neat expectations, however, gave way to Kafkan disorientation when I entered the maze of a living and growing Transition initiative, like the one in Totnes. A bit like the main character Michele in Lo Cascio’s La città ideale3 I, too, went looking for ‘the ideal city’. I tried everything I could to fit that new place into my own ecological idealisations, only to realise – upon hitting on a live, moving thing like the horse Michele runs into with his car – that I was only seeing the inside of a blinker. Wind trapped in a box does not come out the same when the lid is lifted again. In the same way, confining Transition to boundaries that delimit what ‘it’ is meant to be can hardly preserve the pulsating intensity of its everyday unfolding. As Michele does by the end of Lo Cascio’s film, so did I, eventually, awaken to the possibility that ‘[t]he windy nature of events makes it impossible for life to drift [unchanged] in a frozen moment. All we can do is tell its tale’.4

This, I guess, is how I came to feel that too many works are written about Transition, which begin by offering a pre-formulated definition of what it is, like a box in which wind is enclosed. These accounts are often woven around a neat storyline that has a beginning, middle and an end. Transition, one learns from such works, is a social movement that begins – conceptually – from a vision of the world after peak oil5 and – geographically – in the town of Totnes, Devon. In the process of rolling out this vision, a list of steps and strategies is deployed; this results in projects ranging from communal gardens to local and complementary currencies, and in a geographical expansion spiralling outwards from Totnes, towards the rest of the UK and beyond. The end of this story is an assessment of these achievements, against the benchmark set by the initiating, seemingly fixed goal to tackle peak oil: how successful has Transition been at fulfilling it? It is from the end of the story, therefore, that the evaluative task of the scholar normally begins.6 This approach is one that sits uneasily with me. Chiefly because there is something deeply paradoxical about fencing Transition in a relatively closed and ordered narrative (what it is, what its goals are, what initiatives are necessary to bring about that vision and against which to appraise its ‘performance’) when its very name conveys the sense of movement. Of something perched in a precarious, unfinished position. A passage. A transition, precisely.

This book is my answer to that disquiet. Namely to the sense that understanding Transition also poses a fundamental challenge to the customary ways – within academic discourses – of explaining things away, and of adopting an external position from which to look at something as though it was a separate object. The detachment required when talking about Transition this way appears to me incapable of capturing the sense of participation, of journeying or of heeding a call to adventure that its very name bears: from the latin transire, to move across. For every crossing is also the stretching of a path open to yet further continuations, just like – in my experience of it – Transition manifests as the iterative uttering of an invitation to mix in the folds of something as yet unfinished; acting into it while – through one’s responses to that invitation – giving form to its ongoing specification.7

Another helpful metaphor to express this dissatisfaction came to me from an unlikely source: ‘Traveling Without Moving’ being the name of the third studio album by Jamiroquai.8 In an interview, Jay Kay, the frontman of the band, explained how this title aims to convey a sense of ‘going nowhere’. So, his words become the words through which I am able to begin extricating myself from all-too-common ways of talking about things, which lead to the paradoxical outcome of increasing – rather than reducing – distance from a phenomenon of interest. The irony of one Transitioner I spoke with in Totnes puts it most succinctly: ‘I’ve read academic stuff about Transition and I’ve been [wondering] “what, really?”’. As readers and writers (especially of the academic kind), we tend to want to get a definition of a phenomenon that has made itself present to our attention. ‘Definition’ in the original sense of the Latin word de-finire: to put boundaries around. The mental operation that is asked of a writer is then to distil, or abstract, some kind of purified essence of the phenomenon of interest. Building on that definition, the expectation is to go on and analyse this or that particular aspect of it.

The purpose of this book, instead, is properly to challenge this expectation and to offer an account that takes readers away from the sidelines, the boundaries of a definition, and into the phenomenon itself; this is a common way of exploring our noticings, and of developing the ability to distinguish something that catches our interest. If you asked me what football is, for example, it would probably be easiest for me to answer by playing it with you, by throwing you a ball, by getting you involved in a game of football and relating to you through it, rather than by presenting you with a formal definition, and then perhaps going on to focus on the rule of offside.9 Football, after all, is a lived experience. And so, as I argue in this book, is Transition.

The key to developing an understanding of something as mobile as Transition is to give up the expectation that we can travel without moving. That we can get an overview of a phenomenon that interests us, without first trying to experience the living moments through which it comes into being. And, by moving with it, letting ourselves be moved as well.

This is a slightly unusual approach to the study of (social) phenomena. One that embraces a more holistic perspective than is perhaps customary within the otherwise analytical focus of academic social science. Typically, in fact, one would begin by labelling Transition as a ‘movement’. After this initial step, one would be expected to provide a concise definition of the movement’s ‘central concern’ (what the movement is ‘about’). After that, the discussion of Transition should culminate with its partition into various analytical aspects, or with contrasting this movement with other movements. While this is a question I will return to below and in ch. 2, for now it is useful to say that this particular approach either dissects Transition into component parts, or bottles it in a definitional jar to put it in a cupboard along other jars. From the perspective I am trying to develop here, however, I tend to be uneasy with either of these operations. What they have in common is to treat a living process as something static, which can be manipulated as we would a set of billiard balls, as opposed to a live flame. What an approach of this sort does not do is provide a satisfactory account of precisely what kind of ‘moving’ one observes from within Transition. In fact, the deeper one goes into this moving, the more controversial it seems to encapsulate its unfolding into a definition; to enclose motion inside boundaries that contain it, exploring the world with the eyes of a border guard.

One might be tempted, at this point, to wonder whether the outcome of distancing oneself from the tendency towards analytic dissection ought simply to be a turn towards long-form description: a very detailed account of Transition carried out over ten chapters, and possibly one that risks losing the forest for the trees. What I aim for – in contrast to the customary practice of seeking ‘unity through unification’10 of separate components – is to let the unity of the phenomenon of Transition manifest itself through (and not in abstraction from) the richness of its detail. Transition, I argue, emerges precisely out of a process of self-differencing. By which I mean that it comes into being as it asserts itself in (and is in turn specified by) a range of practical pursuits and lines of inquiry. It coalesces into a form of life that becomes recognisable in a growing gamut of experiences, as that diversity simultaneously discloses continuity across the various strands enfolded within it. Ultimately, this prompts an appreciation that every difference marks itself out as a difference only in relation to something else. To say that the REconomy project (ch. 6) is different from Inner Transition (ch. 4), for example, is also to state that the two are related. This is because their specificity comes into its own against their being germane to each other, as differential emanations of a common generative movement they are both continuous with.

Once we begin to see these ‘related differences’ – i.e. the mutual relatedness of its internal variation – the sense of Transition, as a distinctive phenomenon shining through the details of its unfolding, can perhaps emerge in full. As the phenomenon of Transition appears through and into this dynamic diversity, it becomes harder to pin it down as a ‘movement’ that can be defined in an introductory chapter, and then analysed in later ones. In doing the sort of work I suggest here, one needs to revisit the priority of these mental operations. One needs to acknowledge that in the process of abstracting life into definitions, significant difference and detail can simply be lost. So that what we talk about, when we talk about Transition in the customary ways of analytic-speak, can often appear quite puzzling to someone that is actually implicated in its unfolding.

My time studying Transition has challenged me, as an academic, to try and develop ways of talking about the phenomenon of (social) life, that make my work recognisable by other fellow travellers in this medium – Transition – that I purport to describe. Anything less than that, I would risk saying, confines any such knowledge to irrelevance. I mean this literally, in the sense of absence of relief in a landscape that has been hollowed out for the sake of scholarly publication. Contrary to this, I hope the chapters that follow will be able to take you, the reader, into the wildness of Transition as a social landscape: on the elevations that are visible from afar (and which most academic accounts of Transition focus on), as well as the valleys that lie at their feet and bridge them together. For there, too, lives Transition.

The chapters that follow begin from where I begun: by reading about Transition in books that were published by people that were closely associated with its beginnings. Through those books, an incipient moving can be noticed. What Transition is ‘about’, in other words, shifts as you move from the first manual – The Transition Handbook11 – to the latest entry in the emerging activist literature on the topic, namely The Power of Just Doing Stuff.12 A purely textual account of what Transition is ‘about’ (ch. 2) already shows that this notion has been shifting over time. As we witness this shift, we start to notice ‘something’, a dynamism that perhaps wasn’t there if we came to this book with the idea that Transition is a social movement campaigning about something we can know a priori. Choosing to approach Transition analytically might be the equivalent of comparing static photograms; of breaking motion down into discrete phases. As we begin to notice that any definition of Transition is like one of these photograms, perhaps our interest can become attached to the phenomenon of moving that seems to shine through the comparison, the seeing-in-relation, of the photograms themselves.

It is to this dynamism that I turn in Part I of the book. There, ch. 3 begins from where Transition groups are often set in motion: gardens, and the craft of tending to growing spaces in permaculture as a source of practical-moral orientations for relating in the world. In ch. 4 I move on to consider the experience of Inner Transition (or Transition ‘Heart and Soul’) groups, and endeavour to go deep in the ‘related difference’ that these insinuate in the unfolding of Transition as a whole. In ch. 5 I introduce one of the most iconic projects that Transition owes its fame to, namely Transition currencies. Here as well I look at how the move into the development of local currencies spells out the significance of Transition in relation to a number of different domains: from consumer cultures to financial activism. In ch. 6 I then touch upon the latest expression of the Transition family (although one, many would argue, that had been there all along, without a dedicated label), namely the REconomy project. With REconomy comes also a new set of questions, as Transition begins to specify itself as a culture of social enterprising.

These sections, I hope, will further strengthen the sense that Transition is better understood as a phenomenon with no centre, which is articulated in increasing detail by the process of flourishing into (and through) a number of different – yet kindred – fields of experience, such as growing food, experimenting with new possibilities for relating to others (and nonhuman othernesses) in a mindful and attentive way, using a currency and starting an enterprise. It is on this insight that I then build on in Part II. Where I go deeper into an exploration of the dynamic process through which Transition unfolds as a form of life (as moving, rather than accomplished ‘movement’).

In the first chapter of Part II (ch. 7), I look at the practice of experimentation through tentative steps and projects. Experiments can become occasions where the whole of the phenomenon can be spotted in one individual part, disclosing its internal relatedness as well as its openness to further specification. In this sense, they are akin to those passages in a text that make one resonate with the style of the work as a whole, as it somehow seems to come alive in that particular paragraph. This quality, of aliveness and of enabling a glimpse into the whole, of modelling the whole through the parts, is what gives rise to what one interviewee referred to as ‘exemplars’.

In ch. 8, I then go on to focus on the dynamics whereby in-groups and out-groups sometimes emerge, when the cultural repertoire of Transition comes up against its limits in the face of unaccounted experiential encounters. The detail of how these divides – which typically come up as challenges – are processed in the moving of Transition is very interesting and it illustrates one more distinctive trait of this evolving phenomenon. Namely: the ongoing attempt to enable inclusivity, to keep the threshold low for enfolding in its moving further experiential possibilities.

In the last chapter of Part II (ch. 9), this aspect of inclusivity in the face of possible exclusions is explored further. Specifically, the last section is my most structured attempt at describing the moving of Transition as giving rise to a distinctive form of cultural politics, by allowing the unfolding of difference and the ensuing emergence of new forms of social relating, which give birth to a new landscape of moral and micro-political possibilities for personal and collective action.

My moving in Totnes

The chapters that follow are based on more than a purely textual study of Transition materials. From August to December 2013 I was, in fact, living in Totnes, which is where the first Transition initiative was ‘unleashed’. In many ways, therefore, this book is my attempt to make sense of that time, and of the unexpected realisations it has offered. Given that this particular experience marks the position from which I approached the writing of this book, it is important that I provide a few more details, so as to set any learning I will be sharing in context.

During my time in Totnes, I was based at Schumacher College, an educational establishment set on the Dartington estate. It might appear unusual that I ought to set the base for my explorations in the life of Transition in Totnes from an institution that is based several miles out of Totnes itself. There is, however, a special connection between Schumacher and Transition.

Schumacher College is part of a wider estate, Dartington, which was purchased in the early twentieth century by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. A wealthy couple, they subsequently went on to establish a number of institutions that were to have a significant impact on the cultural life of Totnes. One of these was the – now defunct – Dartington School of Arts. As it came up in several of the interviews I undertook, the presence of a school of arts has caused a slow but constant settlement of ‘cultural creatives’ since the early twentieth century,13 which – according to some – has played a crucial role in facilitating the development of Transition, by creating a background of activities, ranging from arts and crafts to bodywork to progressive spiritualities, that put Totnes on the map for individuals looking to live in greater alignment with ‘green’ values.14

In 1991, the Dartington Hall Trust that manages the estate went on to create an educational establishment under the name of Schumacher College. This came out of a suggestion advanced by prominent local environmentalist Satish Kumar,15 to create an experimental centre where a holistic approach to education could be adopted. This meant establishing a residential community, so that intellectual exchange could be balanced by practical activities: a model reminiscent of the Indian ashram tradition.16 The college, named after E.F. Schumacher – the author of Small is Beautiful17 – was meant to be a hub for the exploration of ‘new paradigm’ thinking.

This is shorthand for approaches that share a holistic, ecological and participatory outlook to the understanding and appreciation of life, typically in contrast to other ways of knowing that are characterised by oppositional categories, such as the Cartesian mind/body divide, and similar divisions between humanity and ‘nature’, between individual and society or between analysis and synthesis. The thinking that Schumacher College aimed to promote, and still promotes to this day, tries to address this rift. Of course, what ‘new paradigm’ thinking amounts to is an evolving notion, and any annotations have to be taken with a hint of caution. In my experience of it at the College, however, there seem to be a few pillars. These are the ecological ethics advocated by Arne Naess, which rely on the possibility of ‘deep experience’ as a source for the commitment to honour living ecosystems (thereby collapsing the descriptive/normative division in ethics).18 Deep Ecology also dovetails with ecopsychology, a form of inquiry that aims to broaden the concept of psyche to recognise its dwelling in the body, as well as in all the ecological systems through which the body is supported.19 There is also a philosophical prong centred on Goethean science, an approach to the observation of organic life that engages the world outside of an analytical mindset, in order to appreciate how life holds together in dynamic wholes, so that everything exists the way it is by a necessity stemming from the achievement of fittingness and harmony in the bodying forth of a whole.20 Other important contributions are complexity thinking, with its origins in the quantum physics revolution of the late twentieth century, and popularised through the writings of Fritjof Capra.21 Last, but not least, are ideas about human-scale economics. These are most clearly articulated in the work of E.F. Schumacher himself, and have been further developed in the life of the College through the writings (and the teaching) of Manfred Max-Neef22 and Vandana Shiva.23

Against this background, Schumacher College started offering a postgraduate course, known as the MSc in Holistic Science, in 1991, alongside other short courses on topics that fall broadly within the College’s purview.24 More recently, with the taking off of the Transition concept, the College has started offering an additional postgraduate degree, the MA in Economics for Transition. This is also the course I audited for a period of four months, during my stay there.

From previous contacts with the College I was aware that this course had been developed in co-operation with the Transition Network (the ‘outreach’ arm of the formal organisation of Transition). What this meant was that it would afford me the opportunity to get to know a number of individuals involved in various capacities with Transition, as well as to gain an overview of the main projects happening in Totnes through field visits.

Beyond the ‘formal’ connections between Schumacher and Transition, I was also able to take advantage of a number of informal channels. It is, for instance, not infrequent that alumni of the College remain in Totnes after their degree, and were able to direct me to contacts working on a number of Transition projects. Lecturers at the College also often doubled up as speaker invitees for a series of talks – with the name ‘Adventures in New Economics’ – that was organised by the REconomy Project, one of the projects initiated by the Transition Town Totnes. Last, but not least, Transition activists would cross paths at the College, either in the capacity of course participants or as occasional volunteers.

Therefore, Schumacher College does have a connection to Transition that allowed me to approach it from a position closer to that of an ‘insider’, making it easier for me to navigate. More generally, it has been brought up in interviews that Schumacher College and Transition are different expressions of a similar movement of ‘consciousness’, that is they articulate a common sentiment with slightly different bents: Schumacher being a centre of intellectual reflection, and Transition a site of solution-focused practical action, stemming from a common impulse to facilitate the development of a more holistic, embodied and sustainable mode of dwelling.

In my time at Schumacher College, I was what is often called a ‘participant observer’: a scholar in the position of taking part in activities, which are simultaneously being observed with a view to reporting about them to non-participants.25 However, I prefer to describe my research experience at the College as one of ‘accompaniment’.

This is a notion that is described in detail in the work of Andrej Grubačić and Staughton Lynd (an anthropologist of anarchist bent and a civil rights activist respectively).26 What accompaniment entails, in other words, is more than the ‘looking-in-order-to-report’ experience that is captured by the label of ‘participant observer’. In the process of accompaniment, instead, we make our own belonging to a supposedly external and neutral community of scholars open to challenge. In the process of experiencing Transition as a participant observer at Schumacher College, in fact, I have had to revisit not only the initial theoretical framing for my inquiry. The very purpose of that inquiry (gaining admission to the circle of professional academics – to a community that relies on certain practices of discourse and bodily orientations) has been tested through my belonging in Transition, and the sharing of other people’s lives and experiences. In fact, I grew aware of the tensions inherent even in the role of ‘participant observer’, sensing a risk lurking in the assumption that a reporter oriented to an audience who are gazing in from the outside can nonetheless fully attend to and participate in the occasions that present themselves to him or her. From the constant inability to fit life in a pre-formed theoretical frame, to the physical strain that my averagely sedentary academic body experienced in settings where bodily engagement was more explicitly valued and practiced: all of this provided an awareness of my own conditioning. Of the recurring temptation – which can be squared with a ‘participant observer’ frame of inquiry – to retreat back to a comfortable intellectual centre, giving one the illusion of travelling without having to move. What I experimented with, instead, was to try and become the ways of seeing and the embodied sense that I was being invited into. I had to lighten my bag so as to be able to follow more freely the loose ends and the wandering paths. This is a realm where the ‘participant observer’ has to wait behind, as the thrill of accompaniment takes one forward.27

Alongside my stay at Schumacher College, I also conducted a number of interviews with individuals involved in various capacities in Transition.28 The interviews were semi-structured. In layperson’s terms, this means that I tried not to steer interviews in any particular direction. My intention was for the phenomenon of Transition to shine through the individual experiences that participants would relate to me, and coming in with my own pre-set list of questions would risk derailing this process. For this purpose, interviews would often set off from a generic question as to how the interviewee had come to be involved in Transition,29 and subsequently build on what elements were then described as relevant.

Transition, Totnes and comparison

It follows from the above that Totnes forms the basin of my experience of Transition. Juxtaposing this observation to the knowledge that Transition initiatives exist in a number of different towns and cities in the UK, from Totnes and Forest Row to Bristol and Brixton in London, and abroad, the question arises to justify how it is possible to subtitle this book ‘Growing Transition Culture’, despite the single ‘case study’. This question, in fact, goes at the core of the approach I have adopted in thinking about this book.

A common academic methodology is to undertake comparative studies. In a comparative study, one is expected to single out a number of traits or ‘variables’ that purport to describe a particular phenomenon (in this case, Transition). The second step to a method of this sort is to then undertake a number of observations across different units (that would be different Transition initiatives in this case) and then extrapolate a number of conclusions from the comparison. This would be a viable method to examine, for instance, the impact of income distribution or ethnic composition on particular measures of ‘success’ of Transition initiatives (such as the amount of volunteers they engage, the number and type of projects they undertake, and so on). Studies of this sort, therefore, are appropriate to provide information about the distribution of a particular trait across a number of different units, and to enable inferences about how that particular trait might be more or less dependent on differences observed across the various units.30

What a methodology of this sort does not enable, however, is in-depth observation of the qualitative process by which a phenomenon comes into existence. So, were one to undertake a comparative study, it would be necessary to begin from some definition of Transition, in order to make sure that what we are trying to observe in different units is roughly the same ‘thing’. This essentialisation of Transition bypasses the whole question of how Transition comes to be, obliterating that process in a ready-made definition; it ‘hides from us (or at least makes it difficult to recognize) the reality of growth, the irreversibility of time, and the possibility of genuine creativity; we fail to realize the still incomplete nature of what it is we seek’.31 It is difficult, in a comparative study, to offer a detail-rich account that retains some of the complexity of the phenomenon under observation, without reducing it to a set of variables, which the scholar has pre-determined according to this or that theory that he or she wants to apply to explain the phenomenon.

In fact, I would say that my disagreement goes deeper than one of pure technical difference, and reaches as far down as the pretence that the task of a scholar should be to ‘explain’ a phenomenon. The search for explanation is often married to a quest for mastery over the phenomenon, for the ability to explain it away, diluting it into a theory that is able to elide its uniqueness.32

I tend to align myself in opposition to this approach, with a tradition of scholarship that tends to be more interested in observation than in explanation (see the box in ch. 2). A central task of my effort in this book is precisely to introduce the phenomenon of Transition not in the extensive manner (i.e. through comparing different ‘units’ external to one another), but in an intensive manner. What I try to do, in other words, is to go as deep as I can into the fine details of the phenomenon of Transition. In providing a rich empirical account,33 our knowledge of the qualities of the phenomenon becomes more intimate and less informed by a pre-existing theory we super-impose on the phenomenon itself.

This is why, when I chose the subtitle ‘Growing Transition Culture’ for this book, my attention was not on ‘Transition’, understood as an entity that exists and that can be examined extensively (which would leave me open to the criticism that I plan to do what would require a comparative study, without having actually undertaken a comparative study). Instead, my emphasis is on the ‘growing’. Where I judge the success of the enterprise of writing this book, in other words, is in being able to take the reader into the qualitative moving through which a distinctive culture of Transition develops, and I do so through the detailed observation of one initiative.

What this focus allows, despite its modest beginnings in one particular case, is to get a glimpse of the whole phenomenon; of Transition as an unfolding whole. By going deeper into its moving, my hope is to develop some facility with the process whereby a culture – which I understand as broadly as possible, as any set of discursive and material attachments34 that orient engagement in the world – comes to be, through a motion of relating difference and achieving fittingness in a dynamically unfolding whole. By turning to the process in its proceeding, it becomes possible to understand how the whole comes to be, how it ‘moves’. This, in the end, is something that requires a shifting of attention away from this or that ‘end-product’ of the unfolding of a social phenomenon, and into the making of those observed outcomes: these, after all, are only crystallisations of a fluid motion, not the motion itself.35