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
