The number nine is the last numeral of the decimal system, and its associations with death and fatality are primarily based on this purely numerical (modular) function of termination. There are nine rivers of the underworld, and the mortuary aspect of the cat is indicated by her nine lives. Charles Manson’s adoption of the Beatles’ Revolution-9 (or Revelation IX) as an apocalyptic ‘family anthem’ was fully in keeping with this aspect of the number.
Alternatively, nine is acknowledged as the highest numeral, and associated with celestial inspiration (the nine muses) and bliss (Cloud-9). Nine solar planets are recognized by modern astronomy (as also by the ancient Lemurian Planetwork).
The duplicate reiteration of nine is remarkable for its theo-mystical resonances. Islam (= 99) lists ninety-nine ‘incomparable attributes’ of Allah. The Anglossic value of YHVH = 99. According to the cryptic Black Atlantean cargo-cult Hyper-C, the number ninety-nine — as dramatized by the Y2K panic — designates the cyclic completion of time.
In a few days’ time, on Tuesday 13th January 2026, it will have been nine years since we lost Mark Fisher. It is hard to believe.
As I tend to do every New Year, I was revisiting some of Mark’s blogposts over the first week of January. In particular, I was reading his May 2015 post, “Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)”.
“Abandon Hope” was one of the last substantial posts Mark put on his k-punk blog. He’d stop posting two months later, roughly 15 months before his death.
There are two likely reasons why Mark stopped blogging; both may be true at once:
- Mark was spending more time organising politically in meatspace, having already recognised that the internet he once called home was a sinking ship;
- Mark was increasingly struggling with his depression.
Given his eventual death on 13th January 2017, Mark was evidently depressed towards the end of 2016, but between 2014 to 2016, he also appeared to be doing more to publicly fight back against his depression than he’d ever done before.
This fightback was felt most powerfully in Mark’s writing when depression had every reason to overwhelm him and us. The context for the May 2015 post, of course, was that month’s general election in the UK. The Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, had just lost to David Cameron’s Conservatives, who had somehow converted their disastrously austere coalition government with the Liberal Democrats into a (very narrow) Conservative majority.
It is an election I remember well (and I may have recollected it on this blog before).
I was working at Ffotogallery in Cardiff at the time — my first job after graduating from university. On showing up to work at Chapter Arts Centre on 8th May, where our offices were located, the morning mood was thick with misery. Everyone knew what was coming. Funding cuts at the community arts centre were presumed inevitable and did eventually come to pass. In January 2016, I felt them personally when I was let go from my job.
Citing precarious future funding, I remember my boss took a moment to soften the blow by reminding me that I’d already expressed plans to leave later in the year. I had been accepted onto a Master’s degree at Goldsmiths, and so, at the end of the summer of 2016, I was going to move to London to start my studies, which I hoped would be under the tutelage of Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun.
I was sad to leave the gallery and I was very worried about money — nothing much has changed there — but my future overall was looking bright. I was chasing a dream. Whether I’d read Mark’s latest post at the time or not, I can’t remember, but I do remember the hope I was clinging onto then, with no way of knowing what further pains were to come.
Ten years on from that concentrated sequence of political disappointments and real grief, hope once again feels like a fragile affect of late. But in the midst of a particularly blue January, when my mental health has once again felt fragile, I am trying my best to convert hope into confidence, in order to assuage the anxiety of another personal limbo.
Although the anniversary of Mark’s death is always a painful moment of reflection for me, I am also long overdue a return to his work. It may look like I write about little else, but it has actually been a while… And I have not been disappointed. Especially right now, what we might call Mark’s late ‘confident’ writings offer a powerful vision of the future, enmeshed in the real potentialities of what was then the present. These writings are no less pertinent, even if the world feels very different, because Mark’s struggle is timeless. What he was wrestling with was an attempt to overcome various “passive affects”, which might be felt even more sharply now than back then.
These affects are named across Mark’s last two months of k-punk posts. Alongside the confidence of “Abandon Hope”, which we’ll return to shortly, we find him trying to express more ambivalent feelings through a couple of mixes on his blog.
The first, “Look What Fear Has Done To My Body”, takes its title from the lyrics to Magazine’s “Because You’re Frightened”. The mix was shared as a tribute to Mark’s students on his ‘Popular Modernism’ module, which he taught as part of the BA(hons) Fine Art & History of Art degree at Goldsmiths (if I’m not mistaken).
Two months later, “No More Miserable Monday Mornings” was shared as a less explicit tribute, but a worthy one nonetheless. “You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism” is here an adage turned inside out. In private, Mark had expressed how he came to treasure Mondays as one of his postgraduate teaching days, and so he turned this personal joy into a new mantra of post-capitalist desire.
Both mixes are sonic excursions that place the feelings to be counteracted — fear and misery — at the forefront, like two curated séances for exposing and then exorcising sad affects. But what is most sobering about these exorcisms is how clearly Mark was attempting to reaffirm some sort of emotional-engineering project for himself, in order to forestall a familiar depression.
The electoral defeat of the Labour Party in 2015 — although who can say what amount of good they would have actually done, had they won — could have devastated Mark. Maybe it did. When his essay “Good for Nothing” was published a year earlier in 2014, he was clearly gearing himself up for overdue change and an end to a politics of austerity that had followed the financial crash in 2008.
There, Mark begins by diagnosing the depression that had long stalked him. Returning to the materialist psychiatry of David Smail — who was a major influence on his 2009 book, Capitalism Realism — Mark wrote about the source of his feeling that he is “good for nothing”, and his attempts to silence the “sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together”; the voice that “isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all”, but “the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.”
Mark wanted to re-emphasise this connection, not to wallow in it, but in order to more forcefully cut the knot; depression is political, but Mark did not want to advance a depressive politics. He concludes:
We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK’s population to austerity as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. This isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can ‘snap themselves out of it’ by ‘pulling their socks up’. The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions – but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?
What eventually came to pass in 2015 was a disappointment for all of us, even if the improvements dangled before the electorate now seem minimal in hindsight, when compared to the drastic change we so desperately need today. But it is further heartening that Mark did not (publicly) give into the sort of depression he was prone to. The negativity of his intellect intensified, but so too did his capacity for confident action.
Ever the Deleuzo-Guattarian, this intellect/action dialectic was ever-present on Mark’s k-punk blog, continuing to intensify over time, as he persistently attempted to short-circuit the alienation felt between self and society. As in “Good for Nothing”, he persistently described and critiqued the manner in which the privatisation of mental-health issues is a consequence of neoliberalism’s penchant for privatisation in general. It is certainly misleading to transform the personal effects of social conditions into nebulous folk-pathologies that let governments off the hook for the misery they cause, but the tension within Mark’s work as a whole is that thinking about the human condition in terms of health and illness is not, in itself, a bad thing to do. Neoliberalism has only perverted such an outlook, which might otherwise be agreeable to us, for its own ends. Indeed, to think more emphatically in terms of socialised health and illness is a key site of (re)new(ed) possibility in privatised times.
If there is a sharp contradiction present in this argument, it is a contradiction acutely British in nature, since our National Health Service is held up as both a bastion of socialised medicine at the same time as it is a political football and gravity well of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Since Mark was Britain’s most perceptive guide for navigating the contradictions of British culture, he had first wandered into the fray of this contradiction a decade or two earlier than most. For example, in a 2004 post about Spinoza titled “Emotional Engineering”, he writes:
In place of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ a vulgarized Kantianism and vestigial Christianity has inculcated into us, Spinoza urges us to think in terms of health and illness. There are no “categorical” duties applying to all organisms, since what counts as “good” or “evil” is relative to the interests of each entity. In tune with popular wisdom, Spinoza is clear that what brings wellbeing to one entity will poison to another. The first and most overriding drive of any entity, Spinoza says, is its will to persist in its own being. When an entity starts to act against its own best interests, to destroy itself – as, sadly, Spinoza observes, humans are wont to do – it has been taken over by external forces. To be free and happy entails exorcising these invaders and acting in accordance with reason.
One looming problem at the heart of the capitalist-human condition is that we are so riddled with invaders, we have never been more assured of our various sicknesses and ailments. We know this because we seek to name them constantly, albeit too often without investigating their root cause. Without the more granular work necessary to meaningfully diagnose our contemporary condition, all we end up doing is neoliberalism’s work for it. We do this by buying into every new social-media symptomatology presented to us like a monthly horoscope — the sort found in the back of glossy magazines that enlarge our insecurities only to sell us new snake oils to treat them.
Intervening more thoughtfully within this perverted economy of affects, we can uncover grounds for newly honed critiques. But an awareness of what fear is doing to our bodies can just as easily devastate us, trapping us in reflexivity. It is a situation that can result in the most pernicious condition of capitalist realism, which Mark termed “reflexive impotence” — “yes, [we] know things are bad, but more than that, [we] know [we] can’t do anything about it.”
Mark never took this depression for granted, even whilst he too was affected by it. Clearly he felt it too, but he refused to languish in it, all the while acknowledging just how difficult it can be to overcome. This is important, because it made Mark’s optimism hard won; it was never a whimsical flight into fantasy or delusion. He stayed with the trouble precisely because he so often felt in trouble. This is how he was able to intervene in these very British paradoxes so astutely, albeit with difficulty.
Initially, when writing Capitalist Realism, Mark tried to ‘denaturalise’ this depression with public theory. As he argued in 2010:
There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life – it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity).
But Mark’s forceful negativity was never the be-all-end-all. He insisted that we must also reaffirm our capacity to act alongside every armchair critique of what stands in our way. As such, Mark updated Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”; his version was subtly but powerfully different, and can perhaps be formulated as “negativity of the intellect, confidence of the act“.
This formula was most often put to work in Mark’s challenges to a toothless twenty-first-century ‘poptimism’. He always insisted that optimism counts for nothing on its own and must always include a negativity that is honest about the material conditions that seek to deflate us. Refusing to be deflated is not enough, because we do in fact have every reason to be so! Therefore, without an intellectual negativity, our observations all too easily align themselves with a “spontaneous unreflective … compulsory positivity” that helps no-one.
I have made this point many times before: Mark’s critics typically only see his negativity and nothing else. But contrary to this, Mark’s coupling of a “negativity of the intellect” and an “confidence of the act” is forthright and persistent. Together, they generate friction, yes, but that is better than the two poles cancelling each other out.
By way of an example, in a post from 2006 entitled “Optimism of the Act”, Mark explicates an early version of the above formula with a clarity often ignored by his more uncharitable readers. Here, Mark critiques the very mode of cultural critique he remains associated with, and also challenges the utility of theory in addressing the “cultural depression” his critics also diagnose him with:
In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognized that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless. But ‘going through the motions’ of the act is an essential pre-requisite to the growth of belief ‘in the heart’. Much as Pascal famously argued in his Wager, belief follows from behaviour rather than the reverse. Similarly, the only way out of cultural depression like now is to act as if things can be different.
This was an inversion of capitalism realism: not the reflexive impotence of ‘there is no alternative’, but an active insistence that there are alternatives right here, right now, and we can live (in) them. It is a new realism; a communist realism:
We need a new, communist, realism, which says that businesses are only viable if they can pay workers a living wage. This communist realism would reverse the capitalist realist demonisation of those on benefits, and target the real parasites: “entrepreneurs” whose enterprises depend on hyper-precarious labour; landlords living it large off housing benefit; bankers getting bonuses effectively or actually out of public money, etc.
But the concept of communist realism also suggests a particular kind of orientation. This isn’t an eventalism, which will wager all its hopes on a sudden and final transformation. It isn’t a utopianism, which concedes anything “realistic” to the enemy. It is about soberly and pragmatically assessing the resources that are available to us here and now, and thinking about how we can best use and increase those resources. It is about moving – perhaps slowly, but certainly purposively – from where we are now to somewhere very different.
So far, so Fisher. But all of this comes together with a new profundity in mid-May 2015 for Mark. His post on abandoning hope, published a few days after his argument for a “communist realism”, feels like the culmination of the k-punk dialectic, at a time when its essentiality was more obvious than ever (and it is surely even more so now). Indeed, Mark’s prior wager in 2006 that “belief follows from behaviour” returns here as a powerful new motor for political organising, which he ponders on but refuses to restrict to a rapidly waning blogosphere.
Where Mark’s legacy suffers — although it seems clear that the depths of his k-punk blog remain uncharted territory for many — is that he did not document this move into meatspace as diligently as he might have done a decade earlier. He seemed to see little value in a paper trail beyond the material interventions and improvements he now wanted to make in the lives of others.
This is what I found most moving, when I stumbled unexpectedly into Mark’s orbit at the time of his death. Having forsaken the internet on which he made his name, most seemed to think he disappeared. But to speak to those who knew him IRL, Mark may have had even more of an impact than ever before, although this was initially restricted to his family, friends and students, as well as the people he met whilst out organising.
It is what made Mark’s death so shocking. We knew he was depressed — the last time I saw him, in the admin office of the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths in December 2016 — he looked a hollow man. But in the classroom or his office or at political events, Mark’s confidence in a world that could be — that will be — free was more palpable than it had ever been.
Whenever I think about this rarified Mark, I think about “Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)”. This is the passage I think about most:
“There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons,” Deleuze writes in ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’. He was no doubt thinking of Spinoza’s account of hope and fear in the Ethics. “There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope,” Spinoza claimed. He defines hope and fear as follows:
Hope is a joy not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.
Fear is a sorrow not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.
Hope and fear are essentially interchangeable; they are passive affects, which arise from our incapacity to actually act. Like all superstitions, hope is something we call upon when we have nothing else. This is why Obama’s “politics of hope” ended up so deflating – not only because, inevitably, the Obama administration quickly became mired in capitalist realism, but also because the condition of hope is passivity. The Obama administration didn’t want to activate the population (except at election time).
We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act. “Confidence,” Spinoza argues, “is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed.” Yet it is very difficult, even at the best of times, for subordinated groups to have confidence, because for them / us there are few if any “future objects from which cause for doubting is removed.”
To achieve this kind of confidence, we must dedicate ourselves to new forms of action that are wholly contrary to communicative capitalism’s dilution of the social realm. Mark went in search of these things offline, and later brought back a salvagepunk blueprint of what could be built from the wreckage of the present.
He ends “Abandon Hope” with a list of ten forms of action that are essential for changing the world, beyond his own negative interpretations of it. I won’t reproduce them all here, but I do want to pause on number seven, which struck me with a new significance:
7. Engage in forms of activism aimed at logistical disruption
Capital has to be seriously inconvenienced and to fear before it yields any territory or resources. It can just wait out most protests, but it will take notice when its logistical operations are threatened. We must be prepared for them cutting up very rough once we start doing this – using anti-terrorist legislation to justify practically any form of repression. They won’t play fair, but it’s not a game of cricket – they know it’s class war, and we should never forget it either.
As I already mentioned in my last post, my partner Hana is currently in prison for engaging precisely in this form of activism. Just as Mark predicted, they are been targeted with (a misuse of) counter-terrorism legislation, in order to justify a deeply cruel and lengthy remand. A direct-action movement that has aimed for logistical disruption (during an ongoing genocide no less) has led to new repressions heaped on the sorts of activism that this country has otherwise championed historically. It is an incredibly painful and fearsome thing to experience up close, because no one is playing fair. But this has never been a game of cricket.
What is to be done? It has admittedly been a while since I’ve had this thought, but I really wish Mark was here writing about ‘the now’, doing something about it, inspiring and gathering others as he did so effortlessly.
‘Now’ encroaches on us. I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything here for a while that doesn’t mention what were going through. In truth, it feels difficult to write anything about what we’re doing. Suffice it to say that we’re doing all that we feasibly can, but it is a situation that continues to cause me a great deal of heartache, over four months in.
Without Mark, we are our own guides to the future, and we’re making the best we can of these new roles. It’s not easy. But just as I felt my knees begin to buckle under the weight of things at the very start of this year, in going back over Mark’s writings from a decade ago, I am grateful to be reminded of the negativity of his intellect and the confidence of his actions. It is what made me fall in love with his writing, with my partner, and it is what has led us to now.
With my partner’s confident act undertaken, resulting in an extended period of enforced passivity, negativity of the intellect dominates violently. To wit, some days it feels like wild oscillations between fear and hope are all that we are left with. But there are many more confident acts at our disposal in the here and now, even if they are dwarfed by the act that has led us to this situation. Regardless, they are not “good for nothing”. On the contrary, doing what we can to preserve our confident belief in a better world, in a better life on the horizon, is essential. We hold that confidence before us right now, actively, in the light of a future that will arrive, because we will have made it.
What remains devastating about the loss of Mark Fisher is that he succumbed to his own oscillations between hope and fear. These hopes and fears, as Tariq Goddard has always insisted, were far more personal than they were political. I feel that pressure myself some days. What frightens me the most is that the relationship I cherish and hold so dear to my heart is strained by the prison system’s anti-social impositions. This is a personal battle that feels distinct from the more political fight on our hands. Yes, the personal remains political, but in terms of the affects produced, it is painful to feel that the personal is at the mercy of the political nonetheless.
How to acknowledge the political source of this fear without espousing a fearful politics? As the locomotive of 2026 pulls sluggishly out of its station, my anxiety has at times gotten the better of me. Hope is transformed into fear at the slightest provocation — is that not a good definition of anxiety, or perhaps just neurosis? The question is how to borrow a confidence from the political that can buoy the personal in turn.
Thankfully, on January 7th — the day before I started writing this post — my partner and I achieved this on the phone, and not for the first time. The cultivation of confidence is a process that requires diligent upkeep. We found it again when we spent over an hour daydreaming about what our life together might look like when this is over. We talked mostly about caring for animals, keeping bees, and growing our own food in some countryside idyll far from the pressures of city life — all joys that Hana is extracting from their prison job and hopes to continue with new purpose on the outside. Hana credits this new passion to their more eco-conscious co-defendant, Frank, who has taught them a great deal, as well as the broader community of people who work alongside them in the prison gardens, with whom they share so much camaraderie. We also talked about doing more to organise in our communities, because nothing makes you more desperate for new integrations than prison does.
In making these connections between the present and the future, an anxiety that had weighed heavy for a few days was gently lifted. Confidence was reaffirmed as we plotted all the ways that we will live more intentionally, now and then, utilising all that we have learned and will learn from this experience to found a new form of life by each other’s side.
I recall a short poem, written on the back of a drawing I received in the post from Hana on 16th October 2025:
In future memory
the prison untouches us like shadows
and we are flesh before it.
Our best phone calls make that future already present, allowing us to feel like any long-distance couple talking into the night. The confidence I am determined to cultivate in 2026 is one fuelled by the knowledge that this future memory is not a fantasy, but one that will materialise…
“… and when it does, who knows what is possible?”