the moving of Transition as a whole, and are often focal aspects of interventions initiated also outside of the purview of Inner Transition groups.
As is the case with gardening groups discussed in ch. 3, Transition Streets curates pre-formed, ‘furnished’ spaces, where people can experience conviviality and neighbourliness as a collateral aspect of tending to a particular practice or material attachment (such as working through the talking points outlined in a booklet). Moreover, by facilitating the experience of being in a group as part of a lightly assembled setting, this makes it possible that people will take on more of an inclination to engage in groups again in the future, building on the confidence earned from previous experiences: this is how ‘sociable’ subjectivities are nurtured. In addition, by creating individuals that take the risk to be together with others, the need can be felt for a ‘Transition’ culture of acting together, offering discursive and embodied practices to use and bring into that realm of experience. In other words, incipiently assembled spaces of interaction, where people are brought together in order to do something practical they can connect to in advance, can serve to entangle one in relationships that are there to be leveraged again when support may be needed in other respects as well. Further, the deeper the involvement in a community of shared concern(s), the greater the chance that an interest arises into the process of relating itself, and questions be asked of it (such as about the consistency of ends with means) that nudge one closer to the focus of Inner Transition.36
Conclusion
Inner Transition is perhaps best understood as yet a work in progress: one having to do with disclosing continuity across the difference between ‘inner work’ and ‘outer change’. This is a process that, like all experiments, unfolds by attempts. On the one hand, one finds endeavours to bring ‘inner work’ directly within Transition, such as by organising sessions and meetings where practices – such as the Work that Reconnects – can be cultivated explicitly. On the other hand, this is a pathway that has its limits, in that certain practices may resonate more with particular demographics, differentiated by age group, or by ‘spiritual’ (or secular) persuasion. This seems to carry ‘inner work’ only so far in the moving of Transition. Stumbling blocks, however, are part of the process and, in many of the conversations I held, there seems to be a very clear sense that the focus in Transition on ‘process’ and ‘inner work’ is one of the reasons that enthused several among those I interviewed. Even if they are not necessarily involved in the Inner Transition group, they may disclose various degrees of vicinity to ‘Inner Transition-type’ activities, and everyone seems to reiterate the importance of what Inner Transition ‘holds’ for the moving of Transition as a whole.
Moreover, alongside spaces for the explicit, conscious cultivation of alternative forms of embodiment and discursive self-understandings, Inner Transition is also about (implicit) openings where ‘inner work’ transpires in the process of focusing attention to the subtle negotiations and motions involved in the practice of relating to one another. This translates in a degree of reflexivity (for instance the reflection at the end of the Totnes Pound meeting described earlier) about the extent to which the functioning of Transition groups and initiatives expresses itself through forms of relating that honour a concern for the importance of ‘inner work’. The making explicit of this concern, I suggest, is a distinctive signpost of the space of Inner Transition. Another instance of Inner Transition practices surfacing in other activities not explicitly connected to an Inner Transition group is the case of Transition Streets. As part of that project, ‘holding’ spaces were developed, where the raising of awareness around common concerns could take place in the support of a peer group that can act as a catalyst for attempting lifestyle changes (such as in terms of transport or travel). In all these ‘implicit’ ways, Inner Transition manages to lower the threshold for gaining some awareness of the importance of being mindful to the nuances of relating to each other in the process of addressing shared concerns.
The relatedness of ‘inner work’ to the moving of Transition as a whole seems, to me, to have been best articulated by Sophy Banks who, in an interview, explained:
In Transition the two things absolutely go together. We come together and do stuff, and out of that we get a different experience of community and a new sense of ourselves in the context of our culture. And when we reflect on that, you know, we see the next thing that needs doing.
In my reading of it, this appears like a suggestion that the concern for cultivating new self-understandings, forms of embodiment and practices of relating emerges almost organically from the engagements that happen in the doing of ‘Transition things’. And as this concern becomes recognisable, so can various offerings and experiments, which are available to help tend to this emergent interest, begin to disclose a new fold – Inner Transition – continuous with the moving of Transition as a whole.
5. Transition Money
Currency projects are some of the most iconic initiatives to spring up as part of the moving of Transition: the Totnes Pound, the Lewes Pound, the Brixton and Bristol Pounds being the most significant currency offshoots of local Transition initiatives. These have also played a key role in popularising the practice of experimentation with currencies, at least in the UK, even though dabbling in complementary currencies and alternative trading schemes has a long history that pre-dates the inception of Transition.1
However, the same could equally be said of permaculture, which pre-existed Transition, and for the milieu of ‘inner work’ in which particular discursive and bodily orientations have been cultivated long before finding expression in the moving of Transition. As for these two previous examples, then, the question is not so much one of copyright. Instead, my interest is more in how Transition draws currency experimentation in the folds of its evolving profile, articulating currency schemes as a further ingress point into its moving. In the previous two chapters, therefore, I tried to illustrate how Transition lowers the threshold required to gain familiarity with permacultural ways of seeing, and with practices of relating that have been the object of experimentation in the milieu of ‘inner work’. In a similar spirit, this chapter looks at alternative money not just in its working as money – although some background on this will be necessary – but also at the role it fulfils in relation to the specification of Transition across a range of experiential possibilities. The question I want to try and elucidate, in other words, is how do currency experiments relate not just to a history of currency experimentation, but also to the process of intensification that breathes life into the unfolding of Transition, whereby differences multiply, while remaining continuous with the moving of Transition as a whole.
My interest is then to look at how experimentation with currencies makes its ingress within Transition, and of how particular forms of currency experimentation serve different purposes – depending on the possibilities for engagement they offer – and therefore negotiate different types of fit inside the process of self-specification through which Transition appears.
Now, experimentation with currency and trading systems within Transition has its most recent antecedent in the wave of currency activism that was started in Canada in the 1980s, through the promotion of the network of LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) schemes. At the same time, LETS are not just taken up ‘as is’ inside Transition, but they appear instead as a reference point that enables its ongoing differentiation and transformation.
In the Transition Handbook, for instance, Hopkins introduces the idea of a Transition currency precisely as a variation on the experience of the LETS, which becomes the term of reference for that experiment:
LETS schemes (Local Exchange Trading Systems) are not really up to the job of economic relocalisation. While they have an essential role to play, they tend to have a limited lifespan, and rarely make the step into being of much use to local businesses. Given the scale of the challenge presented by peak oil, and the degree of urgency in the rebuilding of local resilient infrastructure, likened by some to a ‘wartime mobilisation’, we felt Totnes needed more than LETS.2
Transition
