Everything Gardens and Other Stories. UNIV PLYMOUTH

and transforms, and she dwells to this end on the ways in which communication is mediated within it.88 Where there are differences with the approach adopted here is perhaps in the fact that she appears somewhat puzzled at the sometimes hard-to-pin-down nature of Transition’s moving. So it is, for instance, that in noticing the move away from a twelve-step approach and towards one based on ingredients in the Companion, she displays a degree of puzzlement at the contradiction89 whereas – in the take I offer in this book – it is precisely this process of transformation that warrants an account. In Polk’s work, however, there is much greater sensitivity towards the ongoing, tentative quality of the moving of Transition. And yet, at the same time, that dynamism appears to be framed in terms of the outward expansion of a bounded entity, instead of an open-ended process of co-creation that constellates Transition across a gamut of different experiences. The reason Polk might seem to stumble into difficulties when accommodating some of the contradictions she encounters (such as the simultaneous existence of twelve steps and a looser set of principles or ingredients) might at root be connected with the choice to begin with a definition of Transition. Namely, she defines it as a process to enable community responses to climate change. This forces her into a search for coherence across a moving that, by virtue of being dynamic, is inherently generative of productive paradoxes and related differences, out of which emerge yet more distinctions and detail. Indeed, by pinning the goal of Transition on the development of resilience in the face of climate change – the initiating concern for Transition, albeit one that has transformed and diversified in the process – Polk eventually falls back into the instrumental mind-set of asking whether Transition ‘works’ or not.90 At times she compounds this by trying to understand the moving of Transition extensively, that is, through discrete indicators of ‘how big’ it might be, bringing into focus the rate or extension of its ‘spread’,91 rather than intensively, looking at the process of internal differentiation that is brought into focus in this book.

      A similar oscillation between noticing the moving and talking about the ‘movement’ (as a completed process) occurs in Hardt’s work.92 In her dissertation, she both takes notice of the dynamic aspect of Transition, whereby common doings constellate in emergent fashion the organised setting for convening a collective, as well as undertaking the customary definitional step that allows to encircle it as a movement with defined goals.93 Hardt is very clear about the fact that analysing a particular phenomenon by picking it apart, labelling it and categorising – possibly in relation to one or another pre-stated goal – does not actually clarify much about the style through which its moving unfolds.94 At the same time, however, her presentation of Transition undertakes a ‘sampling’ of different initiatives, so that how Transition moves is abstracted from contrasting multiple instances (within Transition), or by comparison with movements different from Transition, as though linking up externally separate objects. If there is, in other words, a much more responsive understanding of the peculiar dynamism of Transition, the basic approach is still one that proceeds by analysis and synthesis, by separating and then distilling commonalities from different units. The departure is not complete from an extensive analysis of Transition’s moving, analogous to the handling of separate bodies and solid objects. This does not detract from the fact that Hardt’s work is immensely perceptive in its ability to tease out the dynamism that hints to a generative process that is only partly embraced by a definition in instrumental terms.95 The limits of that work transpire, instead, in the manner of presentation, in the choice (or need, given the constraints of the literary genre of the PhD thesis) to adopt an analytical method to describe a holistic movement. The result, in the end, is perhaps best described in the words of Bortoft as a ‘counterfeit whole’,96 like an aerial picture that abstracts and then unites through comparison of extensively different units (such as different Transition initiatives, or different movements to which Transition is juxtaposed). Hardt’s picture offers a series of discrete photograms in the place of the motion they re-present. They are fragments of the movement, not what generates the motion itself. As such, her account only scratches the surface of the possibilities for intensification, for delving deeper into the moving of Transition. And yet, it is primarily by heeding to these that one can access a dynamic description of the generative process through which the moving organically unfolds across many different realms of experience. Hardt’s telling is constructed from the outside, like a scaffolding that envelops a building: it rests on it, following its contours, while failing to offer a glimpse into the building-ness of the building, into the process by which a building becomes itself.97

      Last, but not least, is the recent PhD contribution by Aiken, who offers a detailed exploration of the ambiguity connected to the use of the term ‘community’ in referring to Transition.98 ‘Community’, he suggests, is a wilfully indeterminate notion subject to constant specification as new occasions for common doings arise; community in Transition is therefore ‘flexiform, shapeshifting and never permanent. It is rooted locally, based on small-scale personal interactions, but has swings and ebbs and flows of people, ideas and energy throughout. In short, everything exists in a permanent state of transition’.99 In this sense, Aiken offers a first phenomenological glimpse into the piecemeal, contingent process by which new strands and trajectories are intersected and drawn into the moving of Transition, while it gathers diversity, depth and nuance along the way. He also offers the first clear articulation of the tension that I have outlined so far between policy/instrumental approaches to Transition (as a strategy to achieve normatively-fixed goals) and the endeavour to express the life of Transition’s moving on its own terms, with all the orientational dilemmas that can only be sensed from within (but not from without, in the position of a policy-maker that knows already where they want to go). Aiken finds this tension playing out in relation to the deployment of the term ‘community’ in order to speak of Transition, where he distinguishes between ‘governmentalised [understandings] of “community” used to discipline individuals into “correct” environmental actions and behaviours [on the one hand], and the “community” of experience and belonging [on the other]’.100 He positions himself in relation to this tension, by suggesting – in much the same way as I have done here – that ‘“community’s” meaning [...] is not an object to reflect on, be discussed and cognitively understood. Rather it is lived, embodied, and just is’.101 In this sense, the practice of community is ‘achieved only through work on a “demanding common task”. One does not simply walk into “community”’.102

      The basic intuition underlying this alternative approach to engaging with Transition – and most clearly expressed by Aiken – is what this book tries to develop. Unlike scholarship of the ‘policy’ sort, a phenomenological narration of Transition actively tries to eschew a definition, the simplification of Transition from a policy perspective, mistaking one possible instantiation of this phenomenon – as a set of strategies to address peak oil – for the whole. I also try to avoid narrating the moving of Transition through a process of separation and re-combination, as do some of the writers in the incipiently ‘phenomenological’ strand I discuss above, like for instance Polk and Hardt. While noticing the moving, the latter fall short of providing an account that travels with the dynamic generative process of Transition. This is a process that discloses relatedness-in-difference across a range of practical pursuits, revealing the edge of a phenomenon that unfolds in increasingly complex, fractal form. This book aims to delve into this possibility, by experimenting with a description that is intensive rather than extensive. By going deeper into the phenomenon so as to let it speak, rather than beginning with a process of definition and categorisation that, like a scaffolding, sits on the outside but fails to grasp exactly how a phenomenon comes to life.

      Part 1: The Moving Transition

      3. ‘Everything Gardens’, Gardens Everywhere

      It appears common practice for researchers interested in Transition to start from a definition of what the movement is ‘about’. In our case, this definition posits both a defined endpoint to Transition’s activism (such as responding to climate change and peak oil), as well as describing Transition in a fundamentally summative manner (because of the analytical dissection that is presupposed in the ‘quantitative’ way of seeing). By this, I mean that Transition is portrayed as the sum total of a number of components that feed into