A Place for the Premodern: A Review of Modern and Postmodern Intimate Interpersonal Communication Frames

Abstract

In interpersonal communication studies, questions of human agency in discourse are central. Currently, the interpersonal communication literature is largely situated in modern social scientific assumptions of what it means to be a human being and to be in relationship with one another. These modern frameworks designate issues of control, reciprocity, response, and identification within communicative conditions as central to human discourse. The theoretical presuppositions guiding these frameworks have been reassessed by postmodern critical scholars. Postmodern reassessments of human discourse and identity frame the interpersonal communication literature through an understanding of human being as emergent from discursive meetings. With a review of both modern social scientific and postmodern reassessments of the literature in intimate interpersonal communication, the essay concludes with an heuristic exploration of the place in which a premodern approach to intimate interpersonal communication may hold within the field. A premodern approach offers a unique understanding of human agency as both subject to a created and discursive order as well as a participant within said order. The essay will conclude with implications which a premodern approach holds for intimate interpersonal communication in the everyday.