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is already taken into account by the protective measures".27 But with the material original,
the simulacrum "analogue or digital" loses its foundation in physical reality, and
therefore its authority. "I would not recommend this to anybody who has an archive."
Framework and Original (Martin Heidegger)
The first draft of Walter Benjamin's work Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit dates from the autumn of 1935. The near literal analogies to Heidegger's
work Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, which was written at almost the same time, are
striking when Benjamin mentions the example of antique sculptures. The essentially distant
is - entirely in the spirit of Heidegger, the unapproachable:
The original way of integrating a work of art into the traditional context found its
expression in the cult [...]. It is crucial that this auratic existence of the work of art is never
completely divorced from its ritual function. 28
The English translation of Martin Heidegger's work Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks
into [The] Origin [of Art] demonstrates: arche, archive and the concept of the original are
onomastically connected. "All these terms - singularity, authenticity, uniqueness, originality,
original - depend on the moment of origin." 29 By contrast, "the modern framework
[...] appears, from a logical point of view, as something multiple: a system of reproductions
without an original."
Is the Gestell (framework) - of the museum or of technology - the dispositive of
the concept of the original?
In ordinary use, Gestell refers to some kind of framework or apparatus. [...] According
to Heidegger, Gestell is deeply connected to the modern concept of representation
(Vorstellen) [...]. Heidegger comments that the essence of technology, Enframing, is 'in a
lofty sense ambiguous', [...] we are always already 'in the picture'. [...] Thus the issue is
not [...] whether what is on view is authentic or a reproduction. Nor is the issue whether
the work is actually framed, as is Van Gogh's painting of the peasant shoes, or free-standing,
as is the temple at Paestum. Finally the issue is not whether the work of art is or
is not on its 'own site'. For the temple at Paestum is just as much displaced as the temple
of Pergamon. 30
However, Heidegger did not see with his own eyes the Bassae temple scenery that
he describes (his visit to Greece took place only after the Second World War). What we
see here is a rhetoric of dissimulation, because Heidegger's insights into the nature of
the antique Greek temple were based on photographic evidence, and thus on discrete
units of media in-formation whose technological reproduction dislocates them permanently.
31 Heidegger may well have been using Walter Hege's photographs of antique temples.
Hege insisted that photographs of works of art must not replace the "real encounter
with the original", "and that is the way it should be, there has to remain a distance
between original and reproduction", an irreducible difference. 32
On the other hand, it is the reproduction - entirely in the spirit of Derrida's Grammatology
- that imbues the archetype with the aura of the original 33 ; seen in conjunction
with the original, the duplicate practically generates "the pure uniqueness of the pri-
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