Dr Kakatoscopy.(Universities)(The Anal Imagination: Psychoanalysis, Capitalism, and Excretion, seminar)(Dr Alison Moore)

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 5 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 civilisation--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-siecle 
   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 ...