Marking a sense of self and politics in interviews on political engagement :Interpretive logics and the metapragmatics of identity

This paper explores the relationship between notions of self and politics in discourse on political engagement. By means of a heuristic inspired by the poststructuralist notion of logic and the pragmatic concept of metapragmatic awareness, the author argues that metapragmatic markers play an important role in communicating interpretive processes that inform preferred and disavowed modes of subjectivity. He relies on an interview conducted with an activist involved in Flemish minority politics in order to show how activists distinguish between preferred and disavowed modes of politics. In dealing with the multiplicity of identities and issues that constitute political debates, activists need to establish and communicate some degree of coherence. Metapragmatic awareness allows interlocutors to establish patterns of coherence that can be described in terms of interpretive logics. The author presents a strong case for taking the reflexive awareness of language users into account when studying society-wide debates.