We all know that PR is Public Relations and HR is Human Resources. But why is it never the other way around? Consider:
1) Why don’t we have truly “Public Resources”?
2) Why don’t we have truly “Human Relations”?
Let’s answer these questions one by one.

Why not “Public Resources”?

This is easy to answer: We don’t have them, because whatever “Public Resource” we have is either immediately pocketed by private corporations (which means “private persons” in practice) or it is first appropriated by secret government (or meta-government) councils by some imaginary/ideological excuse and then pocketed by private corporations (actually persons). This is just the well-known imperialist dynamics of capitalist monopolization pointed out by Lenin more than a century ago [1].

As the classical communist thinkers stated, since the capitalist production gets more and more socialized, the capitalist society is haunted by great spectres of “Public Resources” but these potentials are never actualized. These resources can never be truly publicized as long as they are owned by private persons in the final instance. The last example of this phenomenon of virtual publicity is the social media platforms [2]. Previously it was the television.

What we did have for the last few centuries was The Press to simulate information as the sole “Public Resource” even when the news they serve has become more and more depressing, like the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Remember how much Political Newspaper mattered to Marxist-Leninist parties as the sole guarantee of the ultimate possibility of the truly “Public Resources” imagined for Communism [3].

Why not “Human Relations”?

This is a little bit harder to fathom: Why can’t human beings establish humane relations? Why do almost all relations among humans finally or eventually rely on motives for domination and/or profit? The answer to this question comes from psychoanalysis: When any “Human” imagines himself/herself to be a self-contained whole (“in God’s likeness/image”) this is just an imaginary construction that psychoanalysis calls the Ego [4].

Whenever any “Human” relies on his/her Ego for identification, what inevitably follows is the mounting of the Superego as the ferocious agency over the Ego, a dominating/profiting position that is up for grabs, and most certainly to be appropriated by an exploiter who can answer the “natural” calling of “Humans” to make-themselves-used by an authoritative Other [5]. This simply means that there is a lack in the Other, that sexual relation (the ultimate fantasy of “Human Relations”) is impossible. This lack in the Other S(Ⱥ) is the famous “crack” (Leonard Cohen) or “wound” (Rumi) where the light gets in.

Now let’s use Lacanian mathemes to express the situation:
1) Human Resources stand for the Master-Signifier S1 that decides people’s fate by hiring and firing employees.
2) Public Relations stand for the knowledge S2 that is fabricated to support the legitimacy of the hegemonic decision-makers.
3) The inexistence of “Public Resources” stands for the object-cause of desire, objet petit a, which orients the mediatic attention economy.
4) The impossibility of “Human Relations” stands for the barred subject of the signifier $ as the unfreedom disguised as freedom.
When these four terms are collected in a table, Lacan’s diagram for capitalist discourse emerges:

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Vladimir Lenin (1917) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

[2] “Facebook” renamed as “Meta” refers to the fact of meta non-language: “There is a meta non-language”

[3] Vladimir Lenin (1902) What is to Be Done?

[4] Ego is sustained by echocide: “Ego is Echocide before Ecocide”

[5] See “The Perverse Core of Labor-Power: Making Oneself Used”