Rethinking Human Nature and Human Needs: Raymond Williams and Mass Communications

Abstract

Ideas of human nature and human need are currently out of favour. According to contemporary strands within cultural theory, only the most untutored undergraduate who had not yet sampled the delights of post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism could fall victim to such ideas. The human subject, it seems, is being constantly interrupted and rewritten through the wider processes of culture and society, implying that our understandings of ‘human nature’ are purely social constructs of the historical time frames we happen to be living in. This in turn marks any notion of human need and nature both politically conservative and intellectually regressive.¹ Here, primarily through attention to the work of Raymond Williams, I want to argue that notions of human need and nature could have profound implications for our thinking about the means by which global societies communicate with themselves. My argumentative strategy will press the case against the received wisdom of the present and suggest that globalization processes have given fresh impetus to such questions. This will seem an odd claim in an age where the media of mass communication have chopped up space and scrambled temporal dimensions in such a way as to promote a culture of the ‘perpetual present’. Surely, it might be argued, any attempt to retain such definitions has been outstripped by the global flow of information that penetrates the permeable borders of the nation-state. To talk of communications, nature and needs in the same breath amounts to little more than an exercise in cultural nostalgia. Yet I think that such prescriptions are misleading and would disconnect cultural concerns from wider questions of democracy, identity and responsibility.