1 “Archive and Erasure” Sven Spieker There cannot be any discussion of archives without taking into consideration their outside, the hors d’archive. The reason is that archives are “distributed” entities whose mode of operation is that of the network or the cluster (office-registry-archive). An archive assumes custody of documents from another place - which is why whatever is present in an archive reflects its provenance from that place, and it is that place in the last resort, its specific operations and ways of production, that the archive stores (“archives store other archives”). This means that archives must be understood first and foremost in their dimension as mechanisms that reflect a certain way of producing and combining signs - rather than as storehouses of meaning. To speak of the archive – of knowledge - as an archeology, as Foucault does, is also to acknowledge the archive’s fundamental discontinuity, a discontinuity that mirrors that of signification itself. Archival storage is distinct from the activity of collecting precisely in that a collection, with its close relationship to the collecting subject whom it mirrors and represents, strives for temporal and spatial continuity in a way that the archive does not.