I couldn't care less what this fellow Zizek thinks. With someone who expresses himself in such a cryptic way, it is in any event impossible to fathom what he thinks and presumably not worth the effort.
What do YOU think?
[WS:] I agree, however, obscurantism has always been instrumental in manufacturing or maintaining social status, so decrying it is an uphill battle, indeed.
As to this whole ideology debate - its seems that it conflates or confuses two issues - the necessarily selective nature of all human perceptions and knowledge, and a value judgment about those perceptions or knowledges that one finds disagreeable.
All perceptions and knowledge systems are selective in that they emphasize certain facts and deemphasize or altogether ignore other facts. This is known as framing in cognitive science, and there is nothing unusual or deplorable about it.
The ubiquitous existence of framing implies that the notion of "truth" is not the matter of simple "concordance" between thought and reality, but it is rather an interpretative process involving *sets* of ideas in which the truth value of individual proposition is established not just by its in relation to reality, but also to other propositions within that set. As a result, there is always a certain level of inconsistency between ideas and facts, or among ideas within the same set that is tolerated or explained away.
This process exists not only within popular discourse, but in science as well (cf. Imre Lakatos' concept of scientific research programme) and is unavoidable. Therefore, any critique of a thought system (be it a set of opinions or a scientific theory) on the grounds that some of its propositions are inconsistent with facts is really misguided, because every thought system is subject to some inconsistency. It is not humanly possible to create a system that is not. This line of criticism is valid only if a set of ideas is held regardless of the *overwhelming* evidence to the contrary, which happens relatively rare. Most people are pragmatic and modify their belief systems if maintaining them becomes increasingly problematic.
The second element of this confusion of the concept of ideology is a value judgment about sets of ideas one finds disagreeable. In this situation, the notion of ideology comes handy as a rhetorical device that discredits such a disagreeable set of ideas while maintaining an illusion of objectivity and abstaining from direct ad hominems. In other words, it is a polite way of calling a set of ideas a bunch of lies without calling their holders a bunch of liars.
Oftentimes, this rhetorical charges of being an ideology are bolstered by calling attention to the inevitable discrepancies with reality that *any* system of thought inevitably has. As I already mentioned, this is not a valid criticism, since the critics, or anyone else, cannot escape that inconsistency either. It is an integral part of human cognition.
Wojtek