OK, another quote from Žižek but it’s a very good one, I promise:
Even in much of today’s progressive politics, the danger is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active and to participate.
How many people do you know who bustle about uselessly, making a lot of noise and generating an illusion of doing something of value? I know quite a few.
People intervene all the time, attempting to “do something”; academics participate in meaningless debates. The truly difficult thing is to step back and withdraw from it.
Take that useless debate about MOOCs. I received dozens of chain emails where people debated all of the ways we should transform our teaching to prevent MOOCs from outshining us and making real teaching redundant. Or that inane debate about flipped classrooms. Or the equally inane “budget-cutting exercise aimed at awakening our creativity“. Maybe the best thing we could have done was to ignore these idiocies altogether because when we allow ourselves to be sucked into a dialogue about them, we grant them legitimacy.
Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence – just to engage us in a dialogue, to make sure that our ominous passivity is broken. Against such an interpassive mode in which we are active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate.
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