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The madness of Oedipus has become Western reason.
“Oedipus” is used in more ways than we can count; he (or it) is uncountable, as well as un-accountability productive. Oedipus, and it is quite unclear what this word refers to, is a multiply divided and repetitive enigma that prompts an incessant murmuring through as many voices as can be called upon to utter the name, a name that surely did not come from the mother or the father, but, perhaps, from outside the fold or from the other family. Oedipus is living and dead—and neither living nor dead—existing only along that boundary line at which language positions us, subjecting us to the constrained freedom of speaking subjects. Oedipus is the subject of his own, which means our own, discourse about our place in the world. And he is also subject to the discourse of many others, including his own forgotten history. As are we all.
Oedipus, to repeat, is uncountable. Technology, on the other hand, is what really counts for us. It makes things, including human things, count, by counting. It makes sure we are tagged and numbered by placing us in the data-base. It creates value by counting at ever faster rates of speed, by digitizing, accumulating, archiving. By buying and selling that about us that can fit on a disk and travel the wires, echo and ricochet from satellites orbiting our point of arrival and departure.
Already and a very long time ago, Oedipus sets the scene for technological surveillance. He accomplishes this, in part, by installing a self-surveillance and self-guidance system called rationality within both his own interior and, by becoming the police, within that of the polis. Oedipus moves, without at first recognizing it, from inside to outside the polis, back inside and then outside once again, cast into exile by his own word. Fleeing from the oracular voice of Apollo, who spoke enigmatically long before Oedipus saw the light of day, the man of ideas passes through the riddle of the half-