2078/1978. Anticipation and the contemporary

In 2018 we were asked to anticipate 2078 for a piece that provided some form of foresight into that world-to-come (Brassett and O’Reilly, 2018b). We, fairly obviously to us but maybe a little perversely, chose to look first to 1978, to a moment of our teenage/proto-teenage years and punk/new wave. This was not so much a choice driven by some theoretical framework or other, but one that was stylistic: a trope that allowed us into the world of 2078. The 78 as a node joining different narratives, trends and affects. These 78s (and all the others) will always be connected, we thought, even if different flows spill through the tracks. As we are familiar with the work of philosopherpsychoanalyst couple Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we found a similar energetics informing their joint writings: especially the second volume of their ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ series, A Thousand Plateaus (1988); and, in that text, particularly their opening ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ (pp. 3–25). Here, Deleuze and Guattari are resolutely more than individuals collaborating. Their opening words are: ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 3). They crowd and spread through their text – though, to say ‘their text’ undermines their desire to create an open-ended, multiplicity of a book – rambling through works, disciplines and loves, creating philosophical concepts as they go. Most importantly for us, now, is their choice to attach dates to each of the chapters (apart from their introduction and conclusion). So, for example, Chapter seven is ‘Year Zero: Faciality’ and Chapter eleven is ‘1837: Of the Refrain’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 167–191, 310–350). For them, the date gives a specific moment at which the concepts they put into play intensify strongly and are able to communicate as pure a sense of themselves as possible. Their dates are barbed, sticky, seed-like forms that serve to attach concepts to those of us passing by. Similarly, then, do we offer 2078 and 1978 to locate our sense of contemporary in relation to anticipation, in a way that is also Jamie Brassett and John O’Reilly