Dot, 2/4

Walter Benjamin proclaimed that "the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity", and although I can see where he was headed with this statement, I do not fully agree with it. In our day and age, how can one know what is truly authentic and what is a copy? With such difficulty actually discerning what is "real" is it almost impossible to know how much of an impact the original has on the reproduction. 

Take the movie All The King's Men for instance. The original version of this film was produced in the late 1940's, and a remake was made in 2006. When the newer film version came out, my high school english class just happened to be reading the book version by Robert Penn Warren. As a class, we traveled to the theater to see a showing of the newer film. Having already read the book, we were able to compare it to the film and to recognize several differences between the two. At the time, many of us did not know there had a been a previous version of the film made and therefore were not comparing the new film to the original one, because in our minds the 2006 version was the original film. 

My class knew that the book was the original and that the movie was an adaptation of the authentic, but never considered that it was a reproduction of a previously made movie. We had no knowledge that a previous version existed and therefore believed the 2006 film to be the original film. Instances such as these happen in everyday life and it is because of this that I have a hard time fully agreeing with Benjamin. If someone sees something for the first time, say a Gucci bag, how do they know it is not the original? How can we actually know if something is a reproduction or not if we have never seen nor heard about the authentic? Sure we can assume that the bag was probably not the first one made, but without an infinite knowledge it is hard to ever really know. 

Sure the original must be around to make a reproduction, but how can we distinguish what is actually the reproduction?