Eugene, I have come across an essay recently that addresses the politico-economic aporias you mention, maybe that'll be of use. German as well as a somewhat bumpy English version available via eurozine (see below), best, sz
Broeckling, Ulrich. "Human economics, human capital - a critique of biopolitical economics." Mittelweg 36 11.1 (2003). <http://www.eurozine.com/article/2003-03-04-broeckling-en.html> "While biopolitics has become a catchword in present debates on applied life-sciences, the Foucauldian origin of the concept is almost forgotten. Foucault, and in his pathways Giorgio Agamben, analysed the efforts towards a political regulation of the population as a biological entity, but did not focus on the specific economic rationality of biopolitics. The contribution highlights this dimension by studying two different approaches to an economic theory of human life: first the concept of "Menschenökonomie", as formulated by the austrian social philosopher and sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid in the years before World War I; second the theory of human capital, whose most famous exponents are the US-economists Theodore W. Schultz and Gary S. Becker." # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]