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Duck, Steve. Rethinking Relationships. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2011. Pp. 232. ISBN 978-1-4129-5876-9 (paper) $60.00.
Steve Duck begins his book, Rethinking Relationships with this sentence: "If this book 'works,' then by the time you reach the end of it, you will think about relationships in an entirely new way" (p. 1). His use of the word "think" is the key to this promise. Duck describes relationships as the "synapses between self and society" (p. 24). He wants us to move away from thinking of relationships as choices based on our emotions. Having taught interpersonal communication over many years, at different levels, and with different texts, I am intrigued by the implications.
To build this new vista, Duck combines interpersonal communication with Kenneth Burke's contributions to the field of rhetoric. Specifically, this rethinking requires that we understand five concepts: episteme, personal order, social order, communication as presentational, and rhetorical vision. We begin with relationships as ways of knowing, or epistemic. We must understand our own episteme, others' epistemes, and how epistemes can change. Also, we need to understand personal order and social order (Chapter 2). A personal order is made of the values and priorities of each person that index his or her personality. A social order is public opinion. Duck's view of communication is presentational, seeing communication as performance and spin, as opposed to representational because "communication is always spin; always persuasive; always rhetorical, argumentative, and position oriented" (p. 18). Since he sees all interaction as performance, rhetoric is central, and specifically rhetorical vision, or the way we depict our "values, preferences, and opinions" (p. 18) in our talking and acting in the world. With these five concepts explained, or in his words, "favored," our ability to rethink relationships is...