ABSTRACT
From his theory of readability and his definition of dialectical images as read, it is clear that Benjamin regarded images in terms of their property as writing (Schrift) rather than as representations. As such, Benjamin’s concept of images has nothing to do with the history of material images, nor with a ‘mental image’ that is distinguished from the material image in its characterization as derivative or secondary, not proper (uneigentlich). Rather, his thinking goes back to a tradition of the image which precedes that of the function of pictorial representation and which ‘sees the literal sense of the word image as a resolutely non-or even antipictorial notion’ (Mitchell 1984:521). Benjamin himself describes the image as a constellation of resemblances (Ähnlichkeitskonstellation) which is figured in a third (ein Drittes), beyond a form-content relation. It is at any rate in order to establish this distinction that he recounts his story of the stocking, a story taken up again in ‘Berlin Childhood Around 1900’:
Each pair had the appearance of a small bag. Nothing gave me such pleasure as to plunge my hand as deep as possible into its inside. I did not do this on account of the warmth. What drew me into its depths was ‘what had been brought me’ [das Mitgebrachte] which I always held in my hand in the rolled up inside. When I had clasped it in my fist and assured myself as best I could of the possession of the soft, woollen mass, the second part of the game began which brought the unveiling. For then I applied myself to unwrapping ‘what had been brought me’ out of its woollen bag. I drew it ever closer to myself until the perplexing thing happened: I had taken ‘what had been brought me’ out, but ‘the bag’ in which it had lain was no longer there. I could not put this process to the test often enough. It taught me that form and content, the wrapping and what is wrapped in it are the same thing. From this lesson I learned to
draw the truth out of poetic writing [Dichtung] as carefully as the child’s hand took the stocking out of ‘the bag’.
