To sum the Zizek excerpt up in two sentences: How can we discredit science and conspiracy theories at the same time, since our denial of the validity of objective inquiry means that we can't then disprove conspiracy theories by appeal to facts? Answer: no problem, appeal to authorities who deny the validity of scientific inquiry and who, at the same time, deny that conspiracies exist.
Of course, there is the inconvenient fact that conspiracies do exist. We might look to the recent ADM lysine price fixing convictions as an example. As Carl Oglesby said in _The Yankee and Cowboy War_: "Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal business by normal means." But I'm sure that with sufficient obfuscation, we can circumvent this minor stumbling block.
>>The theory of risk society and its global reflexivization is right in
>>its emphasis one how, today, we are at the opposite end if the
>>classical Enlightenment universalist ideology which presupposed that,
>>in the long run, the fundamental questions can be resolved by way of
>>the reference to the "objective knowledge" of the experts: when we are
>>confronted with the conflicting opinions about the environmental
>>consequences of a certain new product (say, of genetically modified
>>vegetables), we search in vain for the ultimate expert opinion. And the
>>point is not simply that the real issues are blurred because science is
>>corrupted through financial dependence on large corporations and state
>>agencies - even in themselves, sciences cannot provide the answer.
>>Ecologists predicted 15 years ago the death of our forrests - the
>>problem is now a too large increasee of wood... Where this theory of
>>risk society is too short is in emphasizing the irrational predicament
>>into which this puts us, common subjects: we are again and again
>>compelled to decide, although we are well aware that we are in no
>>position to decide, that our decision will be arbitrary. Ulrich Beck
>>and his followers refer here to the democratic discussion of all
>>options and consensus-building; however, this does not resolve the
>>immobilizing dilemma: why should the democratic discussion in which the
>>majority participates lead to better result, when, cognitively, the
>>ignorance of the majority remains. The political frustration of the
>>majority is thus understandable: they are called to decide, while, at
>>the same time, receiving the message that they are in no position
>>effectively to decide, i.e. to objectively weigh the pros and cons. The
>>recourse to "conspiracy theories" is a desperate way out of this
>>deadlock, an attempt to regain a minimum of what Fred Jameson calls
>>"cognitive mapping."
>>
>>Jodi Dean(3) drew attention to a curious phenomenon clearly observable
>>in the "dialogue of the mutes" between the official ("serious,"
>>academically institutionalized) science and the vast domain of
>>so-called pseudo-sciences, from ufology to those who want to decipher
>>the secrets of the pyramids: one cannot but be struck by how it is the
>>oficial scientists who proceed in a dogmatic dismissive way, while the
>>pseudo-scientists refer to facts and argumentation deprived of the
>>common prejudices. Of course, the answer will be here that established
>>scientists speak with the authority of the big Other of the scientific
>>Institution; but the problem is that, precisely, this scientific big
>>Other is again and again revealed as a consensual symbolic fiction. So
>>when we are confronted with conspiracy theories, we should proceed in a
>>strict homology to the proper reading of Henry James' The Turn of the
>>Screw: we should neither accept the existence of ghosts as part of the
>>(narrative) reality nor reduce them, in a pseudo-Freudian way, to the
>>"projection" of the heroine's hysterical sexual frustrations.
>>Conspiracy theories, of course, are not to be accepted as "fact" -
>>however, one should also not reduce them to the phenomenon of modern
>>mass hysteria. Such a notion still relies on the "big Other," on the
>>model of "normal" perception of shared social reality, and thus does
>>not take into account how it is precisely this notion of reality that
>>is undermined today. The problem is not that ufologists and conspiracy
>>theorists regress to a paranoiac attitude unable to accept (social)
>>reality; the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac.
>>Contemporary experience again and again confronts us with situations in
>>which we are compelled to take note of how our sense of reality and
>>normal attitude towards it is grounded in a symbolic fiction, i.e. how
>>the "big Other" that determines what counts as normal and accepted
>>truth, what is the horizon of meaning in a given society, is in no way
>>directly grounded in "facts" as rendered by the scientific "knowledge
>>in the real." Let us take a traditional society in which modern science
>>is not yet elevated into the Master-discourse: if, in its symbolic
>>space, an individual advocates propositions of modern science, he will
>>be dismissed as "madman" - and the key point is that it is not enough
>>to say that he is not "really mad," that it is merely the narrow
>>ignorant society which puts him in this position - in a certain way,
>>being treated as a madman, being excluded from the social big Other,
>>effectively EQUALS being mad. "Madness" is not the designation which
>>can be grounded in a direct reference to "facts" (in the sense that a
>>madman is unable to perceive things the way they really are, since he
>>is caught in his hallucinatory projections), but only with regard to
>>the way an individual relates to the "big Other." Lacan usually
>>emphasizes the opposite aspect of this paradox: "the madman is not only
>>a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a
>>king," i.e. madness designates the collapse of the distance between the
>>Symbolic and the Real, an immediate identification with the symbolic
>>mandate; or, to take his other exemplary statement, when a husband is
>>pathologically jealous, obsessed by the idea that his wife sleeps with
>>other men, his obsession remains a pathological feature even if it is
>>proven that he is right and that his wife effectively sleeps with other
>>men. The lesson of such paradoxes is clear: pathological jealously is
>>not a matters of getting the facts false, but of the way these facts
>>are integrated into the subject's libidinal economy. However, what one
>>should assert here is that the same paradox should also be performed as
>>it were in the opposite direction: the society (its socio-symbolic
>>field, the big Other) is "sane" and "normal" even when it is proven
>>factually wrong. (Maybe, it was in this sense that the late Lacan
>>designated himself as "psychotic": he effectively was psychotic insofar
>>as it was not possible to integrate his discourse into the field of the
>>big Other.)
>>
>>One is tempted to claim, in the Kantian mode, that the mistake of the
>>conspiracy theory is somehow homologous to the "paralogism of the pure
>>reason," to the confusion between the two levels: the suspicion (of the
>>received scientific, social, etc. common sense) as the formal
>>methodological stance, and the positivation of this suspicion in
>>another all-explaining global para-theory.
>
-- bill
³The clear-minded Open Conspirator who has got his modern ideology, his lucidly arranged account of the universe in order, is obliged to believe that only by giving his life to the great processes of social reconstruction, and shaping his conduct with references to that, can he do well with his life. But that merely launches him into the most subtle and unending of struggles, the struggle against the incessant gravitation of our interests to ourselves.² H.G. Wells