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Dr Kakatoscopy
There
has
been
reckless
talk
about
a
decline
in
Australian
academic
standards.
Nothing
could
be
further
from
the
truth.
Everywhere
university
teachers
with
bold
imaginations
are
adventurously
at
work—and
there
can
be
none
bolder
or
more
daring
than
Dr
Kakatoscopy
of
the
University
of
Queensland.
Her
May
5th
seminar
The
Anal
Imagination:
Psychoanalysis,
Capitalism,
and
Excretion
pushed
the
frontier
of
social
analysis
into
areas
previously
unexplored.
Speaking
at
the
Centre
for
the
History
of
European
Discourses,
and
taking
her
cue
from
Freud,
she
showed
how
superficial
it
is
to
mistake
chocolate
for
food
when
analysing
the
digestive
disorders
of
late
capitalism.
And
also
how
naive
it
is
to
regard
excretory
taboos
as
a
mark
of
civilization—in
fact
they
denote
a
whole
sad
complex
of
a
posteriori
neuroses
about
money
and
lavatorial
wastes.
But
it
would
be
presumptuous
to
try
and
summarise
her
own
inimitable
words:
The
central
claim
presented
is
that
while
the
bawdy
gags
of
Rabelais
or
of
the
Fabliaux
may
have
excited
guffaws
and
hooting
in
the
early
modern
era,
the
acrobatic
farting
routine
of
Joseph
Pujol
at
the
Moulin
Rouge
in
the
1890s
provoked
nervous
laughter
of
a
kind
altogether
unique
to
late
modern
capitalism,
new
to
bourgeois
Europeans
of
the
fin-de-siècle
metropolis,
and
indicative
of
a
colonising
subjectivity.
This
is
acute.
Those
of
us
still
given
to
nervous
laughter
in
the
presence
of
carelessly
untoward
emissions
are
exposed
as
woefully
blind.
Now
all
is
clear:
at
bottom,
this
embarrassing
reaction
reveals
the
same
old
grubby
obsession
with
profit
and
loss.
Dr
Kakatoscopy,
a
scholar
as
devoted
to
classical
music
as
she
is
to
cloacal
anatomy,
notes
shrewdly
that
In
the
time
span
from
the
music
of
Mozart
played
in
the
courts
of
Europe
to
the
melodious
virtuosity
of
Pujol,
something
had
changed
in
what
the
anus
was
understood
to
symbolise…
Evidently
hoping
to
change
our
understanding
still
further,
her
paper
is
a
chapter
from
a
book
she
is
writing:
Informed
by
Marxism,
by
the
work
of
Mary
Douglas,
Kristeva,
Bataille
and
Baudrillard,
The
Anal
Imagination
proposes
that
the
bANALity
with
which
the
subjects
of
excrement
and
chocolate
history
are
often
approached
is
itself
indicative
of
a
nervous
avoidance
that
is
testimony
to
the
psychoANALytic
metaphors
presented
in
this
book.
Orthographically
playful,
intellectually
feisty,
robustly
committed
to
kicking
ass
in
her
preferred
target
zone,
Dr
Kakatoscopy
writes
in
a
biographical
note
that
“her
ongoing
project
is
about
the
history
of
excretory
taboos
in
Europe
from
the
mid
nineteenth-century
and
their
relationship
to
visions
of
progress,
class
and
colonial
identification.
In
this
vein
she
had
published
‘Kakao
and
Kaka:
Chocolate
and
the
Excretory
Imagination
in
Nineteenth-Century
Europe’,
in
Carden-Coyne
and
Forth
(eds),
Cultures
of
the
Abdomen:
Diet,
Digestion
and
Fat
in
the
Modern
World,
New
York:
Palgrave,
2004.”
* * *
So
don’t
believe
what
you
hear!
Our
universities
are
in
good
shape.
Led
by
thinkers
like
Dr
Kakatoscopy,
Australian
academic
life
is
not
only
in
safe
hands,
it
is
audacious,
innovative,
and
in
some
places—the
University
of
Queensland
for
example—it
is
setting
new
and
courageous
standards
for
the
world.
June
2005
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