I guess, is how I came to feel that too many works are written about Transition, which begin by offering a pre-formulated definition of what it is, like a box in which wind is enclosed. These accounts are often woven around a neat storyline that has a beginning, middle and an end. Transition, one learns from such works, is a social movement that begins – conceptually – from a vision of the world after peak oil5 and – geographically – in the town of Totnes, Devon. In the process of rolling out this vision, a list of steps and strategies is deployed; this results in projects ranging from communal gardens to local and complementary currencies, and in a geographical expansion spiralling outwards from Totnes, towards the rest of the UK and beyond. The end of this story is an assessment of these achievements, against the benchmark set by the initiating, seemingly fixed goal to tackle peak oil: how successful has Transition been at fulfilling it? It is from the end of the story, therefore, that the evaluative task of the scholar normally begins.6 This approach is one that sits uneasily with me. Chiefly because there is something deeply paradoxical about fencing Transition in a relatively closed and ordered narrative (what it is, what its goals are, what initiatives are necessary to bring about that vision and against which to appraise its ‘performance’) when its very name conveys the sense of movement. Of something perched in a precarious, unfinished position. A passage. A transition, precisely.
This book is my answer to that disquiet. Namely to the sense that understanding Transition also poses a fundamental challenge to the customary ways – within academic discourses – of explaining things away, and of adopting an external position from which to look at something as though it was a separate object. The detachment required when talking about Transition this way appears to me incapable of capturing the sense of participation, of journeying or of heeding a call to adventure that its very name bears: from the latin transire, to move across. For every crossing is also the stretching of a path open to yet further continuations, just like – in my experience of it – Transition manifests as the iterative uttering of an invitation to mix in the folds of something as yet unfinished; acting into it while – through one’s responses to that invitation – giving form to its ongoing specification.7
Another helpful metaphor to express this dissatisfaction came to me from an unlikely source: ‘Traveling Without Moving’ being the name of the third studio album by Jamiroquai.8 In an interview, Jay Kay, the frontman of the band, explained how this title aims to convey a sense of ‘going nowhere’. So, his words become the words through which I am able to begin extricating myself from all-too-common ways of talking about things, which lead to the paradoxical outcome of increasing – rather than reducing – distance from a phenomenon of interest. The irony of one Transitioner I spoke with in Totnes puts it most succinctly: ‘I’ve read academic stuff about Transition and I’ve been [wondering] “what, really?”’. As readers and writers (especially of the academic kind), we tend to want to get a definition of a phenomenon that has made itself present to our attention. ‘Definition’ in the original sense of the Latin word de-finire: to put boundaries around. The mental operation that is asked of a writer is then to distil, or abstract, some kind of purified essence of the phenomenon of interest. Building on that definition, the expectation is to go on and analyse this or that particular aspect of it.
The purpose of this book, instead, is properly to challenge this expectation and to offer an account that takes readers away from the sidelines, the boundaries of a definition, and into the phenomenon itself; this is a common way of exploring our noticings, and of developing the ability to distinguish something that catches our interest. If you asked me what football is, for example, it would probably be easiest for me to answer by playing it with you, by throwing you a ball, by getting you involved in a game of football and relating to you through it, rather than by presenting you with a formal definition, and then perhaps going on to focus on the rule of offside.9 Football, after all, is a lived experience. And so, as I argue in this book, is Transition.
The key to developing an understanding of something as mobile as Transition is to give up the expectation that we can travel without moving. That we can get an overview of a phenomenon that interests us, without first trying to experience the living moments through which it comes into being. And, by moving with it, letting ourselves be moved as well.
This is a slightly unusual approach to the study of (social) phenomena. One that embraces a more holistic perspective than is perhaps customary within the otherwise analytical focus of academic social science. Typically, in fact, one would begin by labelling Transition as a ‘movement’. After this initial step, one would be expected to provide a concise definition of the movement’s ‘central concern’ (what the movement is ‘about’). After that, the discussion of Transition should culminate with its partition into various analytical aspects, or with contrasting this movement with other movements. While this is a question I will return to below and in ch. 2, for now it is useful to say that this particular approach either dissects Transition into component parts, or bottles it in a definitional jar to put it in a cupboard along other jars. From the perspective I am trying to develop here, however, I tend to be uneasy with either of these operations. What they have in common is to treat a living process as something static, which can be manipulated as we would a set of billiard balls, as opposed to a live flame. What an approach of this sort does not do is provide a satisfactory account of precisely what kind of ‘moving’ one observes from within Transition. In fact, the deeper one goes into this moving, the more controversial it seems to encapsulate its unfolding into a definition; to enclose motion inside boundaries that contain it, exploring the world with the eyes of a border guard.
One might be tempted, at this point, to wonder whether the outcome of distancing oneself from the tendency towards analytic dissection ought simply to be a turn towards long-form description: a very detailed account of Transition carried out over ten chapters, and possibly one that risks losing the forest for the trees. What I aim for – in contrast to the customary practice of seeking ‘unity through unification’10 of separate components – is to let the unity of the phenomenon of Transition manifest itself through (and not in abstraction from) the richness of its detail. Transition, I argue, emerges precisely out of a process of self-differencing. By which I mean that it comes into being as it asserts itself in (and is in turn specified by) a range of practical pursuits and lines of inquiry. It coalesces into a form of life that becomes recognisable in a growing gamut of experiences, as that diversity simultaneously discloses continuity across the various strands enfolded within it. Ultimately, this prompts an appreciation that every difference marks itself out as a difference only in relation to something else. To say that the REconomy project (ch. 6) is different from Inner Transition (ch. 4), for example, is also to state that the two are related. This is because their specificity comes into its own against their being germane to each other, as differential emanations of a common generative movement they are both continuous with.
Once we begin to see these ‘related differences’ – i.e. the mutual relatedness of its internal variation – the sense of Transition, as a distinctive phenomenon shining through the details of its unfolding, can perhaps emerge in full. As the phenomenon of Transition appears through and into this dynamic diversity, it becomes harder to pin it down as a ‘movement’ that can be defined in an introductory chapter, and then analysed in later ones. In doing the sort of work I suggest here, one needs to revisit the priority of these mental operations. One needs to acknowledge that in the process of abstracting life into definitions, significant difference and detail can simply be lost. So that what we talk about, when we talk about Transition in the customary ways of analytic-speak, can often appear quite puzzling to someone that is actually implicated in its unfolding.
My time studying Transition has challenged me, as an academic, to try and develop ways of talking about the phenomenon of (social) life, that make my work recognisable by other fellow travellers in this medium – Transition – that I purport to describe. Anything less than that, I would risk saying, confines any such knowledge to irrelevance. I mean this literally, in the sense of absence of relief in a landscape that has been hollowed out for the sake of scholarly publication. Contrary to this, I hope the chapters that follow will be able to take you, the reader, into the wildness of Transition
