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
