I think constantly about how society reproduces itself. For me, this begins with Marx’s insight into how the working person is able to reproduce herself—how she arrives at her job each day in the same functional condition as the day before. This reproduction isn’t just biological; it’s existential. It requires food, shelter, movement, intimacy, and meaning. Society, too, reproduces itself—through values embedded in education, institutions, monuments, holidays. But its biopower—the living force of its people—is, in this moment, still primarily reproduced by the family.
So much of my thinking on reproduction is fixated on the family: not the sentimental image of it, but the family as a technical apparatus for reproducing society’s workforce, desires, and belief systems. The family is the hard drive of biopower.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about theology—specifically political theology. The idea that every political system, no matter how secular its mask, rests on a form of faith. Take the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence: we are “endowed by our Creator.” Even moral secularism, when stripped down, relies on axioms that must be believed. Political theology is what persists when belief sneaks in through the back door of reason.
My friend EJ reminded me of the strange origin of the word “fact.” We often distinguish belief from knowledge—what we take on faith from what we can prove. But the word “fact” derives from the Latin facere, “to make.” Originally, in the 15th century, it was a legal term—a thing done, an act. The idea of fact as a scientific truth, observable and replicable, didn’t emerge until the 17th century. But even then, “fact” is never neutral. It belongs to a context, a world. Newton’s F = ma is true—but only in the classical world, not in the quantum one. Law is always law within a world.
Laws are engines of reproduction. They shape possible outcomes by narrowing infinite possibility into bounded results: 25-to-life, 5 miles per hour. Laws create realities. They make worlds reproducible.
While writing about the film AI for Emu Butch, I kept returning to reproduction—and its failures. AI, Spielberg and Kubrick’s cybernetic Pinocchio story, ends in a future where humanity has vanished. Humans fail to reproduce themselves, biologically or socially. But what remains is the idea of humanity—reproduced, preserved, even sanctified in the minds of the mecha, the sentient robotic successors. The mecha seek David, the robot boy, not to save him, but to understand us, their forgotten creators.
There’s a pivotal scene: David finds the lab where he was made and sees rows upon rows of himself. Identical units. His scream—”I’m the real David!”—is met by Dr. Hobby, his maker, who tells him: “You are not unique. You are the first.” Not the only, not the last—the first in a sequence. Not a subject, but a template.
This distinction—between the unique and the first—haunts me. It opens onto the logic of computation itself: the discovery that meaning, identity, and function can be formalized, sequenced, and iterated. It echoes in the foundations of category theory, which, like abstract art or quantum physics, marks a break from classical metaphysics. Category theory doesn’t start with elements—it starts with relations.
At the core of “the first and the unique” is theological reproduction. The patriarchal family, like a program, reproduces its code: father to son, family to family, body to body. This logic appears in genealogies—from the Book of Chronicles to the lineages of kings. But every lineage bears its own glitch: what happens when the sequence breaks, when there is no heir, no continuation? When the function doesn’t return a value?
Ontotheology attempts to install God as the first term in this sequence—a Being from whom all being flows. But this is precisely Heidegger’s critique: that Western metaphysics has reduced ontology to ontotheology, turning existence into computation—everything reducible to a base case, a generating function. Our entire technocratic civilization may be the fallout of this metaphysical error. Perhaps computation is not the child of mathematics, but the bastard of theology.
And what if computation, as Turing showed, requires a base case? What if we can’t compute in medias res—what if we can’t bootstrap from nowhere? Then the system must begin with a miracle, a fiat, a god-term. But Turing also gave us the oracle—a machine that exceeds machines. A source of answers not derived from calculation, but from something else. The oracle is not reproducible. It breaks the sequence.
Maybe Dr. Hobby is not an ontotheological god to David. Maybe their relationship is something else—a rupture rather than a lineage. The mecha, who seek to understand humanity, resurrect David’s mother from a strand of hair. She lives for one day. When she vanishes, David dreams. That is, he becomes real—not because he was computed, but because he did something outside computation: he dreamed. Robots don’t dream. Boys do.
This is the limit of computation. It cannot reproduce spirit. And our institutions—those scaffoldings of belief—are ultimately not built from code, but from faith. The family can be reproduced. Spirit cannot. And when we try to reproduce belief, we risk losing its fidelity. Is it like an analog tape, recorded over until the signal fades? Or a digital copy—perfect in form but already compressed, already lossy?
This question of spirit, of irreproducibility, isn’t abstract—it’s embodied. What does this have to do with lived experience? Spirit is non-material, yes, but like the internal arts of Chinese martial practice, it reveals itself on the surface. The structure of the invisible manifests. I’m drawn to Deleuze and Guattari here: the surface is not secondary—it’s the field where internal systems emerge and become real.
I’ll continue this later. I’ve exhausted the sequence for now.