I think, to Occupy-style movements, Transition is described here as prefigurative and best understood as moving – a revolutionary notion of Transition described by Russi as ‘the dynamic process through which Transition unfolds as a form of life’. Due to the author’s wonderfully progressive methodological approach, we read, among other things, a penetrative and explorative account of the phenomenon of Transition as it comes into being. Russi is able to explore the richness of detail of the phenomenon itself, and lend to an understanding of Transition as that which cannot be absolutely defined or captured within ‘a relatively closed and ordered narrative’.
Without restraint, definite limits, restrictions, or authoritarian structure it may seem difficult to comprehend what actually informs Transition. Yet, one gets a sense throughout the following work that Transition is dialectical and almost exists in-between one of the many conflicts of modernity: structure vs. structurelessness. In view of this, the author undertakes an elegant exploration of what informs the developmental process from within the actual moving of Transition. Moreover, in Everything Gardens one gains a clear sense of Transition in its unfolding, wherein the phenomenon sings from the page as wonderfully fluid – almost as one might describe the flow of water. It becomes clear that, as with the dynamics of a river, Transition has ‘no centre’, instead being a ‘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’.
Inasmuch as Transition, moving and alive, resists absolute definition – perhaps expressive of its negative dialectical characteristics – upon reading this book one is nevertheless left with a deeper understanding of Transition as a fundamentally crucial social phenomenon in the modern struggle to move beyond capitalism as well as an entire history of dominant, violent and unjust social systems.
But if there was one thing that interested me most when reading Everything Gardens, it was the account of Transition as a politics of everyday experience. Struck again by the similarity between the author’s account of Transition and some of the underlying features of Occupy-style movements,12 the idea of a politics of lived experience is one that has deep roots in the existential-phenomenological tradition.13 Can it be that Transition has taken forward this revolutionary experiential notion?
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