This is where the conflict over the truth of September n comes up against the hard rock of the Real. And not surprisingly, this doesn't provide us with a way out, with a way through the radicaly incommensurable perspectives on 9 In. The gap between the oficial and unoficial accounts of events can't be filled in with a �et of facts. It's more fundamental, an indication of the larger , decline of symbolic eficiency, diminution of conditions of credibility, and change in the status of knowing and knowledge. As an event that can be signified, it's "never fuly verified precisely because . . . there is no external limit to it:'41 The oficial and unoficial accounts thus perpetually circle around a void that cannot be filed, deriving their enjoyment from the circuit of drive.
Psychotic Media?
What is the role of alternative or progressive media in this environment? My discussion of 9 / 11 truth shows that new media can be vitally and virally efective. They help build movements and communities. They provide alternative sources of knowledge and information. The counterknowledge they produce enables the emergence, and the flourishing, of epistemologically diferentiated spaces. Networked communications-particularly in their continued entanglements with the mainstream media-format the terrain of battle between competing conceptions of the Real.
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