The concept of culture as the values of a heritage was for Benjamin ‘fetishistic’: “Culture appears reified.” Only an understanding of “the crucial importance of reception… enables us to correct the process of reification which takes place in a work of art” (SW 3, 267; 269). For Benjamin, however, reception—or what he called the ‘afterlife’ [Nachleben] of the work—was not merely something that happened to the work, externally; it was as constitutive of the work itself as its ‘fore-life’ [Vorleben], or conditions of production—which are themselves rendered invisible by the idea of culture as value, and are themselves “involved in a constant process of change” as the work itself changes. A materialist cultural history would restore to the experience of works a sense of both of these changing sets of conditions (before and after), and the conflicts between them, in an engagement “originary for every present”, since “[i]t is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and after-history”  (SW 3, 261–2; AP, [N7a, 8], 471). It is here, in an ontological rethinking of reception, that the philosophical significance of Benjamin’s interest in technologies of reproduction lies. With these concepts of fore- and afterlife, Benjamin founded a new problematic for cultural study. 