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 as a social landscape: on the elevations that are visible from afar (and which most academic accounts of Transition focus on), as well as the valleys that lie at their feet and bridge them together. For there, too, lives Transition.
The chapters that follow begin from where I begun: by reading about Transition in books that were published by people that were closely associated with its beginnings. Through those books, an incipient moving can be noticed. What Transition is ‘about’, in other words, shifts as you move from the first manual – The Transition Handbook11 – to the latest entry in the emerging activist literature on the topic, namely The Power of Just Doing Stuff.12 A purely textual account of what Transition is ‘about’ (ch. 2) already shows that this notion has been shifting over time. As we witness this shift, we start to notice ‘something’, a dynamism that perhaps wasn’t there if we came to this book with the idea that Transition is a social movement campaigning about something we can know a priori. Choosing to approach Transition analytically might be the equivalent of comparing static photograms; of breaking motion down into discrete phases. As we begin to notice that any definition of Transition is like one of these photograms, perhaps our interest can become attached to the phenomenon of moving that seems to shine through the comparison, the seeing-in-relation, of the photograms themselves.
It is to this dynamism that I turn in Part I of the book. There, ch. 3 begins from where Transition groups are often set in motion: gardens, and the craft of tending to growing spaces in permaculture as a source of practical-moral orientations for relating in the world. In ch. 4 I move on to consider the experience of Inner Transition (or Transition ‘Heart and Soul’) groups, and endeavour to go deep in the ‘related difference’ that these insinuate in the unfolding of Transition as a whole. In ch. 5 I introduce one of the most iconic projects that Transition owes its fame to, namely Transition currencies. Here as well I look at how the move into the development of local currencies spells out the significance of Transition in relation to a number of different domains: from consumer cultures to financial activism. In ch. 6 I then touch upon the latest expression of the Transition family (although one, many would argue, that had been there all along, without a dedicated label), namely the REconomy project. With REconomy comes also a new set of questions, as Transition begins to specify itself as a culture of social enterprising.
These sections, I hope, will further strengthen the sense that Transition is better understood as a phenomenon with no centre, which is articulated in increasing