Be pragmatic, they say. Just be pragmatic. How simple does it need to be before you understand this? Before you stand up and do something?
The rhythm is familiar: this pervasive, stentorian refrain of pragmatism that blares its lyrics across the land, especially now, dyed as we are in the thick of many sorrows.
As I write this, a palimpsest of missile trails inks paper-thin skies into a cosmic script of lamentation. Israel attacks Iran. Iran responds in kind. Iron Domes and orange dictators dance with delight. Gaza burns. Putin is unrelenting. Masked agents of the fabled land of the free become silent volunteers for the long-awaited rapture as bodies disappear into the thin. The ‘Turd Coming of the Reich’, an angry placard from the “No Kings” protest mocks. An autistic activist activates an armada against apartheid. In her devil-may-care wake, everyone asks: what can we do? A LinkedIn post offers reassurance: “Greta is great, but you don’t have to be Greta. We can all do something now.” The post stops short of offering recommendations, but those aren’t in short supply:
“Call your senator!”
“Stand up!”
“Protest!”
“Worst sequel ever!”
“To sit while the world burns is to be complicit in its disappearing.”
“If you are not doing something now, you are part of the problem.”
“Just do something.”
“Be pragmatic.”
We tend to think that the thing to do in response to trouble, in the face of an incoming tsunami, at the edges of ruin, in the laboratory of our frantic solutions, in response to the fires on the mountain, is to try as much as possible to "be pragmatic." And yes, there is a certain quality of virtue in the man or woman who seemingly eschews the fluff of ideology, rolls up their sleeves, and just gets right down to it. Such is the appeal of the pragmatist - that in times of wars and strife and existential suffering, he can cut right through to the bone of contention, cutting away the offending interruptions to the simple task of accountable engagement.
But pragmatism is orthogonal. It is the right-angled appropriation of the liminal; the marauder's Procrustean bed offered to the weary pilgrim; the violence of the measure that slices off limbs and smoothens cracks so that everything fits; a taxonomy of action. It is the bending of the ache into music our ears have been trained to hear.
This is my meandering way of suggesting that pragmatism is political. Of course. It may feel like what remains when the philosophical, the conceptual, and the ideological have left the room. Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. But pragmatism is not neutral, not value-free. It is a political project. Not in the sense of partisan manoeuvring or bureaucratic expediency, but in its ontological commitments. It is a means of coding what counts as real, urgent, and admissible. Its appeal lies in its seeming sobriety, its purported distance from the mess of "ideology." But in truth, pragmatism is an ideology, albeit one that smooths over trouble, flattens contradiction, and disciplines possibility.
We tend to think that the thing to do in response to trouble, in the face of an incoming tsunami, at the edges of ruin, in the laboratory of our frantic solutions, in response to the fires on the mountain, is to try as much as possible to "be pragmatic."
It is a measure that amputates what doesn’t fit. It is not simplicity; it is suppression. It is not clarity; it is claustrophobia. It is not the “deed”; it is a dynamic that disciplines what gets noticed as such. The insistence on "being pragmatic" in the face of calamity is itself a kind of violence. It anesthetizes. It converts the wild ache of the moment into manageable problems with efficient solutions. It permits only certain responses, those that can be tallied, measured, justified in the language of utility. It polices the perimeter of the thinkable. It swarms to the sites where cracks land – immigrants from across oceans of milk – and offers them uniforms, the sheen of the entrepreneurial, the promise of usefulness. It is the bureaucratization of the sibilant sacred.
***
The pragmatist is by necessity alone. His cosmology demands this isolation, for he alone must bear the weight of the thing to be done. The crushing burden of action unwaveringly rests on his soul with a moral urgency, which is itself taken as incontrovertible evidence for the thing to be done. Others might waver in speculation, but he? He acts. He carries the cross of "what must be done," without indulging the luxury of dreaming.
But what if this isn’t sobriety? What if this is solitude?
What if the rush to act, the quickness to do, is not the antidote to despair but its symptom? What if the insistence on clarity is a refusal to sit with the ache, to stay with the trouble, to let the ambiguity speak?
It would seem to be the case that the pragmatist, well-intentioned and earnest, draws the righteousness of the deed from the mereness of moral compulsion, while overlooking the fact that morality is itself a metastable dynamic of subjectivization, a holding pattern, a congealing of ethical tensions into clear algorithms, clear lines of action, clear visions of the actor. Nothing wrong with that. The tensions however start to flare up when the world herself turns away from the call-and-response of clarity, when she drifts off-script and refuses to render herself solvable. When the cracks do not ask to be mended, but to be noticed. When the grief is not a prelude to repair, but a depth in its own right.
Then what?
Then the pragmatist’s tools fall silent. The hammer quivers. The blueprint curls at the edges. The metrics grow unreadable. And the soul that once bore the weight of action, proudly, stoically, begins to feel its own exile.
What if the rush to act, the quickness to do, is not the antidote to despair but its symptom? What if the insistence on clarity is a refusal to sit with the ache, to stay with the trouble, to let the ambiguity speak?
What happens when the thing to do, the call to action, becomes a part of a moral field of doings, of comings and goings, an exhausted carousel of threadbare luggage that steadies the architectural frame of despair? What does “being practical” risk? What does it leave out, obscure, or flatten? Given that ‘being practical’ is not a neutral, self-evident, ahistorical occurrence of agency, but a conditioning of the terms of accommodation within which action becomes legible, a performance of subjectivity, is it not possible that even the most gut-wrenchingly honest acts of practical resistance might feed a modality of being, nourish a certain kind of “weather of the body”, and reproduce the very logics we fight against?
When is it permissible to say, without shame, that ‘solutions’ may not be the tools of resolution we think them to be, and are instead moral technologies that relocate the tension to some other part of the field – and that sometimes these moral machines lose torque and elasticity, becoming less capable of postponing the eruption? What might a geo-fugitive world, a world that is not stable, press us to consider about our constructs of the practical, born as they are within the matrix of settlement?
This is not a denouncement of action. It is not a celebration of inertia. It is not an apology for complacency. It is a reckoning with the speed of certainty. A murmur in the script. A minor gesture that says: perhaps the task that presses itself upon our flesh with the hieroglyphics of an unknown god is to notice how we are being moved to act, by whom, and toward what. Perhaps being useful in times of fire is exactly what the fire needs to keep on burning. Like dry leaves rushing headlong with the courage of martyrs to put out a bonfire with their bodies.
But against utility, syncopating winds drift across bodied worlds – disrupting the purity of the practical. Maybe there is no such thing as a pragmatist. Maybe the pragmatist is not a ‘person’ or ‘self’, but a weather pattern, an arachnean field, a sticky system of acting that enlists bodies into taxonomical regimes of action to the effacement of cracks. To the elision of the para-pragmatic. Maybe “we” are always in conversation with the para-pragmatic, with cracks, with liminality – and maybe the machines of governability, strong and persistent, habitually reinforce their boundary-making prowess by teaching us to be good subjects. Maybe these psycho-geo-somatic monstrosities I call “cracks” are too scandalous for the practical because they do not lend themselves to the docility of the archive, and so we learn alongside our systems of accommodation to apologize for being impractical, to see ‘problems’ only through the lenses of their potential ‘solutions’, and to police each other into “just doing something”.
The isolated pragmatist, he who acts because he must, because he alone can, is thus revealed not as a self-evident moral figure at risk of hell and the sulphuric guilt of indifference if action is not taken, but as a theological holdover, an echo of a humanist ethos that extricates the actor from the diffuse fields of acting, investing the self with a singularity that it never ‘had’. It is this machine that keeps us trained, entranced, with the prospects of a world that mirrors our moral territories and gestures.
The world does not care. And I do not say this is in the blind evolutionary, nihilistic way some might think. I mean that the world exceeds the moral ecosystems that hold us. The world is not morality. It is ethically alive but not necessarily contained within the legibility of moral space, where our articulations of practicality become our tendons and flesh.
It is what surfaces when we notice that “doing something” often does something else entirely. That the fire might grow on the oxygen of our most earnest gestures. That usefulness is not innocent. That the compulsion to act may itself be the residue of a theology desperate to place humans at the centre of consequence.
This is how what I call the para-pragmatic comes to be. The para-pragmatic, the disentrepreneurial, the liminal, is the distress call of a moral order to the chaos that begat it. It is the poetics of uselessness, the agonistic churn of a world in-different, a world never fully made, a world that makes morality up like sandcastles and will often notice that those sandcastles need to return to the depths.
The para-pragmatic is not a critique of action or the practical, but a choreography of its unmaking. It is not the opposite of pragmatism, but its haunting – its echo in an ungovernable register. The para-pragmatic lingers where no deliverables arrive, where there isn’t return on investment, no victory at last, no applause is promised, where the world’s in-difference resists conversion into meaning. It is the rippling aftermath of the deed undone, the storm after clarity.
It is what surfaces when we notice that “doing something” often does something else entirely. That the fire might grow on the oxygen of our most earnest gestures. That usefulness is not innocent. That the compulsion to act may itself be the residue of a theology desperate to place humans at the centre of consequence.
The para-pragmatic is the humility of drift. It is the minor gesture that does not scale. It is fidelity to the crack. It is the refusal to plug holes in the levee of the real without first listening to the water. It does not contest that action is possible, only that its meaning is ever stable, ever known. It asks: what is obscured in this call to “be pragmatic”? What fugitive solidarities, what impossible desires, what trembling thresholds of the not-yet are rendered impractical, inadmissible, unintelligible?
The para-pragmatic is the excess between, the syncopating cracks that disrupt utility and whisper about a world not fully furnished or finished, a world still moving – often in ways that leave our care empires in tectonic ruins. A world always becoming otherwise.
To dwell here, to abide in the para-pragmatic, is not to wait passively, but to become available. Available to the unformed, the fugitive, the monstrous, the excessive. The disabling blast of uselessness that steals into the watertight settlements of moral clarity. It is to be present to the world’s refusal to mirror our intentions.
And in that availability, something else begins to stir. Something churns that is not the deed, but the dance. Something moves that is not the fix, but the fissure. Something weeps that is not the solution, but the trembling. Something sibilant sighs stern songs softly. The lyrics of the song are that the world is already otherwise, ironically maintained and incarcerated by the practical.
To live in the wake, to listen for the minor key, to trace the residue of refusal is to know otherwise. It is to know that the world is not only what is, but what aches to become. It is to know that the fires on the mountain are not only crises to be managed, but portals to be entered. It is to know that what is called “impractical” may be the most needed song of all.
Let us not be merely pragmatic. Let us be excessive. Let us be untranslatable. Let us be ungovernable in our care. Let us stay with the ache, not bend it into melody.
***
I end with a story about two monks strolling down the river and by and by, they hear someone drowning, screaming for help. One of the monks jumps into the waters and drags the person out, resuscitates the person and they are on their way.
But then it happens again, and someone else is in the water calling for help. The same process repeats itself. Then it happens again, and again, and again until the monk that is now enlisted in this troubling cyclicity of saving someone else decides to run up the river instead of jumping into the waters. His companion calls out and says, "Where are you going? You know I can't swim; you're supposed to save this person." The running monk responds, "I'm going to stop them from where they're dropping in."
I sense that the right thing to do is no longer how we are being asked to be available. I sense that the practical obscures too much. Not that it should be dismissed or discarded. We can do many things together. Of course. But the very same forces of subjectivization and legibility, complicit in the maintenance of war, are also implied in the articulation of what the pragmatist names as the deed, the thing to be done, boundaried by accusations of inertia and indifference. This theological riddle is undone by the slithering approach of the serpent in Eden, who contests the moral arrangements that keep us bound to a practicality that effaces.
As bombs drop, as children wail and die, as families disappear, a stench grips the surface. Most of us will wrinkle our noses. We will decide to get rid of the stench. We will focus on getting rid of orange dictators and their claims to thrones. We will seek to save the day. We will clench our fists with an ironclad conviction that it is left to us to move the world. We will perhaps ‘save’ some, maybe even ‘many’. Perhaps that senator or that drop of a coin to support a call to action might be the difference between a life destroyed and a life saved.
But even in the gestures of saving, there is something that remains unsaved.
There is the unspoken terrain, the fugitive trembling of a world that no longer orbits human intention. The para-pragmatic reminds us not that saving is “wrong”, but that salvation is not a stable category. That what we name as the “right thing” may be forged in the same fire as what we condemn. That the stench we seek to eradicate may carry sacred spores. That in the rush to disinfect, we may destroy the seeds of something strange and vital, something not yet known.
This is not to advocate for apathy. It is to listen for a rhythm beneath action. A dissonant breath that says: slow down. Undo the rush. Question the prescription. Let the ache linger. Let the ambiguity speak. Let the silence hum its impossible tunes.
To be available now is not to be ready for deployment. It is to be ready to be undone.
To be available now is to open to the crack, not as a place of failure, but of fecundity.
To be available now is to risk uselessness, to stretch into the unmeasurable, to become illegible to the architectures of control that summon us to just do something.
And in that availability, the world, in all its in-difference, in all its excess, may just begin to whisper back, not with answers, but with atmospheres. Strange, drumming, pustular, fungal atmospheres that bleed through the geometries of clarity, and infect experience with a glimpse of something that coloniality cannot name.
And that may be enough.
