'the head which governs us is no more than an ideal stomach'

it's all very well fantasising about this work lark as being morally improving but let's face it most of it is donkey work.

horsemouth is back from a sojourn dahn sahf - up early (ring ring 8 am less than magnificent), seaside towns tramway, jubillee line, overground, zone 2 hugging (avoiding the center), out at denmark hill (past the wicker wolf and geese), a walk up the road. arriving early horsemouth hid out in camberwell with a cafe breakfast until it was time to work and then discovered he wasn't needed for the morning. evading security (frankly unenthusiastic about having a non-registered donkey on the premises) he sauntered nonchalently into the library and hid himself in the philosophy stacks - pulling out the cambridge companion to foucault and jacques ranciere's chronicles of consensual times (a collection of articles from a brazillian newspaper from 10-20 years ago, so as up to date as it needs to be) from whence the title to this piece - there was the 'head' of society and there were the 'belly' of the poor - now that everything is ruled by economics the head is in fact a belly (p.3).

curiously both georges canguilhem and foucault (in les mots et les choses) and jacques ranciere (in a piece describing the partitioning of bosnia along 'racial' grounds including the 'race' of moslems) use the same part of a story from borges - the one about the different categorisation of animals in ancient china - animals that flock together, animals belonging to the emperor, animals that have just spilled something etc. in showing us what seems to be an arbitrary means of division we are made to think about the divisions we think of as natural.

for ranciere the regime of consensus under which we operate is portrayed as one where 'we have come at last to live in times of peace' on condition that we accept 'there is no more than what there is' (kind of a restatement of the TINA - 'there is no alternative' preached by margaret thatcher and critiqued by istvan meszaros - the kind of whining bullshit politicians always come out with until they see votes in saying the opposite) - anywhere the people don't accept this they are by definition backward because they are not oriented towards a future that is distinctly lower-case politically (the future is TINA, history ended, the markets won and they don't work very well) but strangely upper case 'The Future' technologically .

'enlightened classes, enlighten yourselves' says flaubert - but horsemouth no longer can because the books remain safely locked up in the library.

on his way home, after nearly succumbing to a chugger, he charity bookshopped it, returning with an uncorrected proof copy of david graebar's the democracy project - an account of the occupy movement where he neatly points out that all this democracy and freedom of speech stuff wasn't in the original american constitution but in the amendments to the constitution because the founding fathers did not want them to be there. apparently there's democracy day tuesday next week - 750 years since the first english 'parliament'.

at denmark hill railway station a touching parting scene was happening - horsemouth remembered having that much emotion in his life but then he flinched and turned away.