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This article examines one informant's approach to the relationship between ideological concepts and political power. I argue that ideological representation must be understood on its own terms, rather than within a larger theory of discourse. I point toward three key qualities of every encounter with ideological representation: subjectivity, discontinuity, and commitment. The fieldwork on which this article is based occurred in Berlin, Germany, during the fall 2014. During this period, my research focused on activists committed to overturning the sanctioning policy (Sanktionspolitik), which allows case managers to dock the unemployment benefits of their clients. [ideology, subjectivity, welfare state, Germany] RESUMEN Este artículo examina la aproximación de un informante a la relación entre conceptos ideológicos y poder político. Argumento que la representación ideológica debe ser entendida en sus propios términos, más que dentro de una teoría más amplia del discurso. Llamo la atención hacia tres cualidades claves de cada encuentro con una representación ideológica: subjetividad, discontinuidad y compromiso. El trabajo de campo en el cual se basa este artículo ocurrió en Berlín, Alemania, durante el otoño de 2014. Durante este período, mi investigación se enfocó en los activistas comprometidos con anular la política de sanciones (Sanktionspolitik), la cual permite a los gestores de casos recortar los subsidios de desempleo de sus clientes. [ideología, subjetividad, estado de bienestar, Alemania]

This article consists of an initial theoretical attempt to describe “interests” as widespread social phenomena which emerge specifically from discursive interaction. I focus on the way in which the indexical signaling of discourse participation roles and public/private standings provide key conditions of possibility for the emergence of interests in interactional real time. The case at hand involves the German welfare state, a social institution which is constituted both on the local level of my fieldsite (a working‐class suburb of the former East Berlin) and on the national level (through the popular media and through the circulation of laws, policy documents and the like). [Germany, welfare state, interests, indexical orders, institutionality]

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Use‐value and exchange‐value are pragmatic features of commodity exchange which are apparent from the careful study of specific interactions, as well as from the viewpoint of economic processes at large. While Marx's well‐known attempt to describe this pair of concepts in Capital (2001) takes the latter tack, I attempt here to take the former—i.e., to approach the composition of the commodity from the point of view of the pragmatics of interaction. In doing so, I offer a semiotic model of the valuation of commodities which differs from accounts given by Kockelman (2006) and Agha (2011). The ethnographic object at stake in this essay is StreetWise, a Chicago street newspaper said to have “empowering” effects on its vendors.