‘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
