So it is the case, for example, that one point where most of the literature agrees is in the definition of Transition as a ‘response to climate change and peak oil’. Interestingly, all of the works by these authors appear to resort to or adhere to the more normative presentation of Transition contained in the Handbook.73 Transition, in other words, is analytically simplified as a set of strategies to address the problem of peak oil, and – from that initial definition – it can then be set in relation to other terms of measurement or comparison.
My quibble with this approach is not in it somehow being ‘incorrect’ (if it makes a difference, which it does in the contexts in which such analyses are uttered, it is as real a presence as any to be reckoned with). It is, instead, with the different possibilities living within Transition for which it does not provide a suitable form of expression. In perusing the Companion, for instance, it is possible to witness a change in focus that embraces more than peak oil and climate change. In that work, the representation of Transition becomes more diversified, sampling a number of different motivations and aspirations that get people entangled in its moving. What is lacking, therefore, is an account that is able of creating a form of communication where even the more nuanced facets of Transition may find expression, so as to articulate a richer thicket of reasons and orientations through which people resonate and become involved with the movement of the social that is Transition. Transition, as I hope to illustrate in the following chapters, can be like the proverbial elephant touched in different parts by blind people, each of whom believes that the part he/she feels is the whole elephant when, really, a whole animal speaks to them through the particular aspect or quality of it with which they can connect. This is precisely the account that I aim to offer in this book. One that focuses on Transition by trying to follow its movement, the increasing diversification and multi-dimensionality that appears to transpire from even a superficial run-through of Transition literature. At the same time, it would be pushing this too far to take the account I offer here as superior to – or exclusive of – other approaches, like the ‘policy’ stance I have previously discussed. Transition is, of course, also about peak oil and climate change, and there is nothing inappropriate about relating to it as a form of ‘grassroots innovation’ to address these. It is, in fact, eminently possible that this is the best way through which to ‘translate’ or connect the moving of Transition to the world of meaning and the languages adopted in the culture of ‘policy-making’. However, Transition, and writing about Transition, need not end there, and this book attempts precisely to open a space to apprehend more dimensions of it beyond this more ‘canonical’ one. Transition, I suggest, speaks as a set of strategies about peak oil if the observational framework through which it is approached is one that looks for such policy strategies about peak oil.
My intention here, instead, is to inquire whether it is also possible to produce an account of Transition through an intensive, caring engagement with it, like an act of midwifery, tending to the progressive coming-in-the-world of a new being. In a way, therefore, my goal is to try and develop a language for talking about Transition that resonates with the dynamic quality of its moving. In technical terms, this is often called a ‘phenomenological’ approach (see box below), because it takes the appearance of any phenomenon that catches one’s interest as the primary focus of inquiry, seeking to appreciate ‘from within’ the modulations through which it constitutes itself an organised setting for its continued unfolding and self-differentiation, rather than dissecting it for the purpose of making it amenable to evaluation according to extrinsic criteria.
An invitation to the phenomenology of Transition
What academics call ‘methodology’ is simply the process of justifying and making accessible, to others who encounter it for the first time, the evaluative equipment through which one has tinkered one’s way to his/her account of a particular situation. However, a justification only has traction to the extent that it manages to mobilise resources that are, at least to some degree, shared with the persons to whom the discussion of methodology is addressed, i.e. so long as it offers them a practicable ‘way in’. Methodology, in other words, is an attempt to enable others to relate to a new textual product, by leveraging positions and ideas with which they may already be familiar, or that may otherwise be available to them. As such, it’s a negotiation and, like all negotiations, it is always risky. On this understanding of it, however, methodology – and the textual object to which it often inheres – recovers purpose (and honesty) as an invitation into a particular way of seeing. Methodology as justification and invitation requires more than trite listings of ‘data-gathering’ techniques, which – by means of an almost bureaucratic tone – seem to target their own disappearance from view, in order to reinforce a modernist commitment to ‘out there’ facts and their textual representation and ‘explanation’.74
To bring these general considerations to bear on the specific account of Transition I offer in this book, it is helpful to understand that it emerged in co-habitation with the ideas on science of J.W. Goethe, a German poet and scientist from the late eighteenth century. (Serendipitously, my first encounter with his work occurred during my stay at Schumacher College in the course of the period of fieldwork I spent there, precisely to study Transition.) What is especially distinctive about Goethe – and the reason I was drawn to his work – is the way he manages to speak of seemingly commonplace things, like colours and plants, in a way that enlivens them, disclosing their vitality. Rather than ‘explaining’ colours and plants from the position of an observer standing on the outside, Goethe attempts – in a way that may seem paradoxical to the modernist mind trained to only apprehend reality as a ‘thing in itself’, external and inaccessible to consciousness – to let the plant or the colours speak for themselves. His discussion of colour is particularly illustrative of this point, and warrants a brief detour.
The commonplace scientific explanation of colour, which originated with Newton, is that colour as a phenomenon is ‘caused’ by refracting light through a prism. The prism causes light’s wave motion to splinter into component waves because, since these have different frequencies, they are deflected at different angles as they cross the glass medium. Upon remarking that light disperses into a colour spectrum, and since the colour spectrum is explained in terms of differences in the angle of refraction of different wavelengths, it follows that each colour is in turn associated with a particular frequency. Goethe felt, however, that Newton’s account explained the appearance of colour in terms of a mechanism (the angle of refraction, or what Newton called ‘refrangibility’) that is external to the phenomenon of colour as it appears. In its stead, Goethe attempted to dwell in the appearance of colour without resorting to theories that pre-empted its self-disclosure by subsuming it under this or that causal explanation. After beholding the appearance of colours in the sky during the various phases of the day, Goethe was gradually capable of developing a keener imagination – an ‘eye’ – for colour, which prompted him to articulate its emergence from the interplay of light and darkness. Namely, he suggested that different colour spectra would emerge, depending on whether one was gazing into darkness through a lighter medium (e.g. when we look into outer space from the light-filled medium of the atmosphere, the shades of blue in the sky darken as the atmosphere becomes more rarefied),75 or into light through a darker medium (e.g. when the sun’s yellow turns orange and then red as the thickness of the atmosphere – a comparatively darker medium relative to the sun – increases).76 Colour, to put it otherwise, discloses itself as a transition appearing through the lightening of darkness, and the darkening of light. In a similar fashion, Goethe’s study of plants was an attempt to ensure that these, rather than being apprehended analytically through subsumption in a classification system external to the appearance of the plants themselves (like that introduced by Linnaeus),77 could instead be approached ‘on their own terms’. By which, Goethe meant to refer to an appreciation of the gestalt of the plant as a living being. In other words, instead of