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.
Clarissa's Blog 
When in trouble or in doubt
Run in circles, scream and shout
Don’t just do something – stand there!
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To withdraw into passivity with the expectation that this will have an automagic impact is a kind of idiocy, too. You’re not part of a great pantheistic universe which will notice your absence of engagement. People refuse to vote and then think the universe will register their absence and get all upset and repent. Zizek may be aiming for a rather more subtle and complex stance which can be found in shamanism in terms of don Juan’s “not doing” or Bataille’s notion that the superficial transcendence of the Nazis invading France can be defeated with “our immanence”. But that is not passivity. That is biding your time and in a way stepping out of the linear sequence of time, so as to gather one’s energies to be used tactically when the exact right time approaches. Immanence is like a bear hybernating. It’s underestimated, because one does not know there is a bear there at all, so those with a superficial transcendence discount it in their calculations. Then one day, the bear appears, baring its teeth. She has stepped out of time for a while and is not back in the play, but the enemy has already miscalculated.
And can you see? That is a very different thing from passivity?
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Typo,should be “noW back in the play”.
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I love the debate about flipped classrooms. I start by asking what makes them think the kids will actually watch the videos every night, because when they don’t, we’re right back where we started.
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