In Search of an Archive: Methodological Issues in the Genealogical Analysis of the Popular Music Industry in Quebec

This research note is related to my ongoing research on Francophone mainstream popular music in Quebec, more precisely, to a project devoted to the development of the local music industry since the 1960s. I undertook this project with a view to challenging an abundant yet highly standardized literature in which the history of quebecois popular music is generally presented as a linear and internally directed phenomenon centred almost exclusively on artists, genres, and repertoires, that appear to be independent from any industrial mediations. The objective of the project was twofold. First, to better understand the conjunctural conditions which made the development of an indigenous music-related apparatus possible. Second, to account for the ways in which the latter has shaped the production of popular music as a cultural form which, more than any other, is deemed to conjure up the whole socio-political dynamic, particularly the nationalist movement, underlying the emergence of Quebec into modernity. In order to do so, my initial plan was to conduct “archival research” as a means to document and study the insiders’ discourse, namely that of the individual and corporate agencies involved in the development of the French-language music industry in Quebec. What I ended up doing was, however, a pretty different thing as I conducted the analysis of what, following Foucault (1994a, 1994b), I call the chanson dispositif, that is, the historically contingent linkages of discourses and institutions which support and are supported by particular systems of musical action and knowledge, and which act to orient, guide, or affect the conduct of self and others—an ongoing analysis on which I have been working for the last several years. The following comments focus not on the results of this analysis, but on the methodological and theoretical issues which arose in the course of the research