MASS PRODUCTION AND AUTHENTICITY

From the fact that the manufacturing process produces a vast number of identical lamps Anders draws the conclusion that it is nonsense to attach any value to a separate, individual lamp. The reasoning is curious, for in order to understand what a mass-produced artifact means in human life one needs to analyze, not backwards to how it originated or what its conditions of possibility were, but forward to what it actually does. The artifact itself must be looked at, rather than reduced to its origin.

From Verbeek, “What Things Do”