grow up something like a universal currency of these banknotes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature.» [49] The ‹banknotes› are those photographically divorced forms of the objects kept in the ‹great Bank of Nature,› the universal archive. The characteristic comparison of photography with the one and only circulative medium of capitalism, money, shows that the circulation (of the market) is always already taken into account in the archive opened by photography: «Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable…. Already a workman has been travelling about the country with stereographic views of furniture, showing his employer's patterns in this way, and taking orders for them.» [50] But the ‹workman› still has to carry the stereographic images around with him; the image information is not yet completely divorced and cannot travel about by itself, something that first becomes possible with the introduction of image telegraphy. This now really divorces form from matter and allows it to travel even without the workman who transports the image carriers. Regarded in this way, the

digitalization of the photographic image is by no means an event that first occurs in the 1990s. [51]

However, the truly new thing about the use of digitalized photographs by computers is the following: Until the image is printed, it is an «array of values» [52] in which the individual values describe the pixels—which enables subjecting the image to mathematical operations. This calculability of the image is the central prerequisite for image processing, those processes at the beginning of the use of digitalized images by the military and in astronomy in order to, for instance, remove noise, errors, etc. from images. [53] However, the mathematical form is above all constitutive for the postphotographic archive.

Data compression/Original and copy

Only data compression allows—if at all—the transferal of the image archive into nonlocal networks, because as two- or three-dimensional matrices, images require a large amount of resources for their archiving and transmission. There is lossless and lossy compression; thus if need be, information may have to be dispensed with. A given original cannot be