The Archive is usually taken to be the total set of collected texts from a given period (or for history altogether). Foucault describes the archive in terms of the conditions of the possibility of its construction, thus changing it from a static collection of texts to a set of relations and institutions that enable statements to continue to exist (i.e., to become part of an archive). Thus, for Foucault the archive is not a set of things or even a set of statements, but rather a set of relations: it is ‘the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.’
