Similar, I think, to Occupy-style movements, Transition is described here as prefigurative and best understood as moving – a revolutionary notion of Transition described by Russi as ‘the dynamic process through which Transition unfolds as a form of life’. Due to the author’s wonderfully progressive methodological approach, we read, among other things, a penetrative and explorative account of the phenomenon of Transition as it comes into being. Russi is able to explore the richness of detail of the phenomenon itself, and lend to an understanding of Transition as that which cannot be absolutely defined or captured within ‘a relatively closed and ordered narrative’.
Without restraint, definite limits, restrictions, or authoritarian structure it may seem difficult to comprehend what actually informs Transition. Yet, one gets a sense throughout the following work that Transition is dialectical and almost exists in-between one of the many conflicts of modernity: structure vs. structurelessness. In view of this, the author undertakes an elegant exploration of what informs the developmental process from within the actual moving of Transition. Moreover, in Everything Gardens one gains a clear sense of Transition in its unfolding, wherein the phenomenon sings from the page as wonderfully fluid – almost as one might describe the flow of water. It becomes clear that, as with the dynamics of a river, Transition has ‘no centre’, instead being a ‘process of flourishing into (and through) a number of different – yet kindred – fields of experience, such as growing food, experimenting with new possibilities for relating to others (and nonhuman othernesses) in a mindful and attentive way, using a currency and starting an enterprise’.
Inasmuch as Transition, moving and alive, resists absolute definition – perhaps expressive of its negative dialectical characteristics – upon reading this book one is nevertheless left with a deeper understanding of Transition as a fundamentally crucial social phenomenon in the modern struggle to move beyond capitalism as well as an entire history of dominant, violent and unjust social systems.
But if there was one thing that interested me most when reading Everything Gardens, it was the account of Transition as a politics of everyday experience. Struck again by the similarity between the author’s account of Transition and some of the underlying features of Occupy-style movements,12 the idea of a politics of lived experience is one that has deep roots in the existential-phenomenological tradition.13 Can it be that Transition has taken forward this revolutionary experiential notion?
Without attempting to define the basis of political relations according to some sort of totally encapsulating analytic schema, it seems that what we witness in Transition is the politics of unfolding experience as ‘contingent, tentative movement’. This movement – contingent and tentative – appears to accompany, as Russi describes, all engagements through a sort of multifaceted dialectical interplay between general orientations and particularity of emerging challenges: i.e. constraint and enablement, innovation and drift, as well as individual and the social. If Transition is moving, constantly at work and reworking itself as it comes into inquiry – therefore progressively refining itself – it would seem that, philosophically speaking, this politics is actually immanent to a dynamic intersubjective process where individual and social arise together.
If this descriptive account is true, then perhaps it is not too wild to suggest the existence of a sort of phenomenological (‘lived’) ethics. Consider, for instance, the question of justice, which is seen as a ‘constant negotiation that is part of the ongoing moving of Transition’. Illustrative of a politics of unfolding experience, which is responsive and engaging, normatively re-evaluating phenomena, ‘justice’ here becomes not only understood through the process of shared concern but also as something moving in itself as a ‘micro-politics [...] that is directed at “local forms of transformation”’.
Ultimately, then, we read in the following work a gripping account of Transition wherein a radical notion of ethics emerges. Within this ethics, which has experiential roots in terms of mindful attentiveness to phenomena, an equally radical concept of change emerges, one which is less rigid and abstract than what we read in much of academic literature. That is to say that rather than an institutional or identitarian notion of change, Transition seems to have more to do with an anti-identitarian one, wherein together we might feel our way into the unknown, hands out and feeling through questions and uncertainty, armed only with a consciousness against suffering and injustice and the belief that another world is possible. Each injustice, each problem or dilemma forces us, in this politics of experience, to feel in and through each other, inspiring new waves of theory, constant deliberation and the challenge of an ethics rooted in the lived. It is a notion of change without end, which appears close to a revolutionary notion of recognition, if we consider mutual recognition as a many-sided transformation process without an instrumental point of conclusion: ‘the moving of Transition’ thus ‘is constantly exceeding its own form, as a cultural whole (a unity) that is carried and transformed in the specific instances (unmerged particularities) in which Transition practices are under way’.
Within this process a tension arises that, as Russi describes, is deeply political. Additionally, it seems that the ensuing dilemmas are exemplifications of a process that is inherently critical – or that employs, within a certain communicative context, a sort of normative critique. This inherent criticalness of Transition – its normative mode of critique – potentially leaves us with an account of a fluid and working process of transformation, ethical and critical in practice, and yet moving with the spirit of emancipation as self-educating or, better yet, in and through participatory ‘pedagogical subjects’.14
Perhaps, then, if this account is accurate, Transition might be seen as self-transformative precisely insofar as it can be ‘a permanent process of self-education’.15 The subject – the individual – and the community arise from ongoing mediation. And within this politics of lived experience, the problem of praxis fades or, in the very least, is constantly confronted, particularly as theory and experience become interlaced. Entwined together, reinforcing one another in ways which are self-transformative and self-educating on an experiential level, theory and practice become emanations of the internal deliberating presupposed by the normative critique immanent to the very process of Transition.
If ever there was a book that was so penetrative and that raises so many fascinating questions about the phenomenon of Transition, it is Everything Gardens. As a study of the utmost integrity, one can only hail this work by Russi as a significant and important achievement in the field of social science.
Norwich, January 2015
Acknowledgments
Every book worth writing feels, to whomever penned it, like a small act of revolution. This is because, just like a revolution, writing a book can lead one into unexpected openings in the fabric of the usual and the normal, to disclose hitherto unimagined possibilities for life. In the relatively understated universe of academia, the time I spent in Transition gave me the courage to seek alternatives beyond the increasingly unrecognisable world of REF-compliant research agendas, securitised student fees, teaching fellowships of uncertain duration and customer satisfaction ratings. And before this, it gave me the courage to call myself a sociologist, after a time spent feeling a bit crazy and a bit stupid for arguing that there ought to be a space to experiment with a new grammar to put Transition into words. No revolution, of course, is possible without revolutionaries, and I have been lucky to meet a string of them, all at once: a rare privilege.
It is not surprising, in retrospect, that many of my companions along this journey I met in Devon, a county known since the seventeenth century for being a haven to pirates. One of its biggest ports – Plymouth – is where I found a team bold enough to sign up and produce this book at the University of Plymouth Press: Paul Honeywill, Miranda Spicer, Peter Jones and the editorial assistants