Goethe’s insights would later be formulated in more general terms by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who is recognised as the ‘canonical’ founder of the philosophical line of thinking called ‘phenomenology’. If we come to Husserl’s work through Goethe, it is easy to find correspondences. For one, Husserl shared Goethe’s concern for taking phenomena as they disclosed themselves to us. To this end, it was first of all necessary to detach oneself from any theories that purported to explain the phenomenon (away), for instance by reducing colour to waves, or plants to the separate features relevant for Linnaeus’ analytical classification system. Let us not busy ourselves – he suggested – with theories about the structure of experience, but rather let us direct our attention ‘to the “things themselves”’.79 This, after all, is something we are already accustomed to doing when evaluating mathematical propositions, whereby we don’t feel the need to establish whether mathematical entities, like the number two, exist ‘out there’, but can nonetheless appreciate their meaning when we encounter them. Indeed, Husserl believed that this was possible for anything that presents itself to us, not just mathematical propositions.80
Additionally, after bracketing our pre-judgments about the world of experience, he went on to suggest that, in order to really grasp ‘the essence’ of a phenomenon (i.e. to approach it on its own terms), it was necessary to undertake a further imaginative step in order to move beyond the specific contingency in which we had encountered it. Otherwise, there would be a risk of foregoing an understanding of the phenomenon’s dynamic internal self-differentiation and taking it as a finished, bounded ‘thing’. By attempting this additional imaginative step, instead, Husserl encouraged to visualise many possible variations of the phenomenon of interest, so as to develop an appreciation for the mobility in which any situated encounter is enfolded. A phenomenon – as reflected in the word’s Greek etymology – is a continuous appearing, and – through a step of ‘imaginative free variation’81 – we can train ourselves to appreciate every ‘thing’ as leaking towards its past, projecting itself into the future, and holding together alongside other entities that are (outwardly) different but related in their mutual delineation.
A phenomenon, in this sense, discloses a ‘lived world’ (or life-world) before our eyes. Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl, was particularly fascinated by this insight, and took this possibility of inquiry further by attempting to convey the dynamism of all life, to the point of using the term ‘being-there’ instead of ‘being’, in order to gesture towards the unfolding of life through temporal contours and in contact with other things.82
While the history of phenomenology does not stop here, I believe this is adequate to offer a sense of the trajectory I have tried to follow in this book. Specifically, I have endeavoured to approach Transition as a phenomenon, that is, as something that has a vitality to it. This has translated into an attempt to trace its coming-into-being, paying particular attention to the movement of self-differentiation through which it becomes possible to appreciate different ‘parts’ of Transition – currency experiments, urban gardening, Inner Transition, the REconomy project – as internally related, like stations along a path that not only binds them together, but constitutes them (like stations of the path) as organically expressive of Transition itself.
It is this orientation – to approach Transition as a dynamic medium in which to travel through – that has informed the way I have engaged in it and, ultimately, the type of account of it you’ll find in this book. To give an example of how this has informed my inquiry, it can help to focus briefly on the pattern followed in the interviews I undertook. Specifically, my initial question would typically inquire how the person I was interviewing had come to Transition. And while I would then ask follow-up questions based on where the conversation had gone, without a fixed ‘list’, in retrospect my interest has often gravitated towards how a particular interviewee negotiated his/her way inside Transition. Conversations have often focused on possible ‘next steps’ the interviewee envisaged to explore from their current involvement in Transition. Another frequent curiosity was how they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the other activities being pursued in that same milieu. This has led, for instance, to conversations on the REconomy project with Inner Transition participants, or about Inner Transition with others involved in the Totnes Pound, to name but a few examples. Supplementing this was also my own participation in Transition, affording me some degree of first-person navigational experience, nourished from the contrasts and continuities I encountered as I took up as many opportunities as I could manage to get involved in Transition. From the combination of these strategies, I slowly became more aware of how all the different streams of activity existing within Transition inevitably crept into each other. Hence, by dwelling as much as possible in the transitions of Transition, I have sought to educate myself to seeing their mutual relatedness, immanent in the dynamic self-differentiation of a shared form of life. This book, then, is my invitation to a phenomenology of Transition. Which is not to say, however, that phenomenology as a method is only appropriate for Transition, so that a more analytical method might befit other contexts. Inherent in the phenomenological approach, in fact, is an aspiration to disclose the vitality of any phenomenon that makes itself present to us. In this sense, the aspiration to offer an account ‘from within’ hinges more on the sort of attitude we are willing to embrace, as we relate to something that catches our interest. One way is to choose to analyse it and explain it according to a monologic order of connectedness. Another, of which I hope to have offered a fitting example in this book, is to look at it as an organic, living whole that discloses itself, like music, through the difference of its expressive movement.83
The perception that prompts my inquiry into Transition is not so much that it can be a set of strategies to address peak oil and climate change. Instead, it is that Transition – what Transition is – moves. And this movement is what this book tries to provide an account of. By getting inside the movement, dwelling in the process by which Transition – as a phenomenon – generates itself, lies the opportunity to produce an account that is closer in spirit to the Companion and The Power of Just Doing Stuff than to the Handbook. An account that makes Transition in its moving palpable and, in the end, endows readers with a different ‘eye’ for staying awake to the restless quality of the social around them.
In this sense, in the focus on how a movement actually ‘moves’, this book adds to an emerging alternative approach toward the study of Transition. One that is not entirely informed by a ‘policy’ stance, but that appears to have started manifesting an interest in the generative process whereby Transition comes to life.
An initial attempt in this direction is a paper by Hillier and Scott-Cato, who seek to find a way into Transition through the metaphors they adapt from Gilles Deleuze’s writings: most significantly, those of rhizome (to convey the drifting mobility of nomadism and, by extension, the erratic origination of emergent wholes) and the sense of continual production of difference.84 The authors find value in the way of seeing that Deleuze’s metaphors disclose because they do ‘not restrict social innovation to a limited number of possibilities, nor potentially “successful interventions” to already-prescribed outcomes or solutions. [They] offer [...] a more flexible approach and a more fluid and dynamic vision of the time–spaces of territorial and social innovation’.85 Notwithstanding this, the frame within which the authors conduct their albeit interesting examination is one where Transition is still treated as an instance of ‘grassroots innovation’, with a normative orientation to address peak oil and climate change. This leads to moments of ambiguity in their argument, where the Deleuzian framework is used to suggest features that facilitate ‘socially creative strategies to respond to social challenges’,86 almost as if to use it as a criterion for ranking different forms of social innovation based on their ability to spark difference (a difference subdued to the goal of addressing the ‘central’ concern around peak oil, acting as a fixed centre of gravity for Transition ‘innovation’). It is not surprising that Transition is then talked about as a ‘testing ground’87 for theories that, whilst more open to nonlinear trajectories, are not taken far enough to shed an enduring instrumentalist gaze.
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