ABSTRACT
To stay with Foucault's analytics, it seems reasonable to think of qualitative research interviewing as a central technology of the self in a postmodern consumerist culture, where nothing is or must remain hidden, and where selves are commodified conversational products. In a philosophical sense, all human research must be understood as conversational, since we are linguistic creatures and language is best understood in terms of the figure of conversation. The relationships between social science, in casu qualitative inquiry, and the social and cultural worlds in which inquiry is practiced, are multifaceted. Human reality is a conversational reality human-kind is an enacted conversation, as are particular selves. A life, as Paul Ricoeur has said, "Is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not been interpreted". Different conversational practices, including research interviews, produce and activate different forms of subjectivity and social life. Thus, ethico-political issues are always internal to practices of interviewing.
