The Theory Factory

J. Bradley Minnick is a writer, public radio host and producer, and a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His books, The Bankrupt Circus & Other Misadventures and The Book of Why are both published through Silent Clamor Press.

The Abstraction:

Patty’s paper on “Post-Modernism and the Role of Identity” got her into The Theory Factory. 

She found, however, whenever she wrote about identity, given or made, she lost her own.

Each week in The Higher Education Chronicle there were articles of academic despair, written in a maudlin third person by the angry ones, who would never find academic jobs or get tenure.

Should she start her essay she tentatively called “The Theory Factory” for the Chronicle with the bus incident or the rental car incident?

The whole “affair”—no that was not the word—the whole “post-production”—was bleak—“post-production” were not the words either. 

So many ideas were running through Patty’s mind that she just couldn’t seem to pin any of them down. She wrote—“ideas dissolved into metaphors and then signifiers.”

“Dissolved”? Okay, better perhaps: “faded into the theory of non-transparency”—well, maybe not “faded,” maybe “caused” as in cause and effect—“my crisis in identity.”

Her essay would begin with the rental car incident in which she found her self-reflexive-self sitting next to Marginalia—a beautiful graduate student from Venezuela. 

The Rental Car Incident: 

Marginalia was purportedly the daughter of a shipping magnate, the product of a divorce and divorced herself—a post-modernist who dabbled in the pedagogy of Freire and who played around with Identity Theory. 

Marginalia considered herself a feminist, and didn’t shave her armpits.

Patty had heard that if you wanted to have a meaningful conversation, it was best to set up situations where you sat side-by-side—that was if you wanted to have a meaningful conversation—with men, or post-modern feminists. 

Maybe she should start her essay with the bus incident after all and save the rental-car incident for second.

The Bus Incident: 

Patty cried on the bus after her failed overview in which she unsuccessfully defended the first three chapters of her dissertation: “Paraplexis and the Inhuman Agency of Language.” 

Its thesis described the corporal world’s inability to allow safe space for the presence of language. 

During the overview, grumpy Dr. Soup wore a necklace of cat claws; Patty’s advisor, Dr. Gunnings, who had mistakenly driven to school in his pjs, teleconferenced from his Toyota in the parking lot; and, the third member of her committee (Dr. Beemon) known for his cheerful grasshopper ties munched on pita and cheese crumbles. Who knew bringing snacks to the overview would lead, in part, to her doom.  

In the smack-middle of her overview presentation, Dr. Soup stopped her and said, “That’s fine well and good, Patty, but what the fuck do you mean by inhuman?”  Dr. Beemon kept eating.

Later, Patty sat alone in that crazy mass of piled papers that Dr. Gunnings (Professor PJs), her mentor, called his office, while he sifted and then sorted and then fiddled with each pile. Professor PJs, now wearing a borrowed yellow raincoat, cracked a window in his office. A smoker, Gunnings liked to flaunt his disregard for the rules by smoking inside the hallowed halls of Building Y every chance he got. 

Dr. Gunnings, the only member of her committee who had voted in her favor, voiced his concerns: “I thought I had the votes, Patty. I really did, but I couldn’t read the room from the car. I’m convinced that the cheese crumbles had been sitting out too long and the cat claws suddenly personified.” 

With no response, Dr. Gunnings said, “These are just theories, Patty. I think you should try reading something else for a while. Let me talk with the committee again. I need a drink.” 

Sitting on in the back of the bus with tears rolling down her face on the way home to her tiny one-bedroom walk-up with Rowdy, the hamster, and Tawdry, the Siamese fighting fish, Patty sank deeper into herself and knew she would never feel at home at home.  

When she got back to her apartment, she worked on her string art project, she called “Agency,” stretching its many different colored yarns around nails she called identity points. 

Each identity point had a name: perseverance, placation, permission, and persistence, which was different from perseverance although a synonym. 

Later in the week, she offered-up “Agency” to Dr. Beemon (Mr. Chips) as a peace offering, but during the handoff, Beemon fumbled, dropped it, and while trying to pick it up accidentally put his foot right through it.

Now without agency, Patty talked to Dr. Beemon about giving up on The Theory Factory, who quickly replied while knocking the bits of yarn from his boots: “Not an option, Patty. We have too much invested in you.”

Soon afterward, she desperately attempted to reconstruct the broken string art project and put the identity points back into their holes.

The next day, Patty found professor Gunnings in his office smoking a stinky cigar. Gunnings pronounced it “CEEGAR” and poured two fingers of bourbon in a glass with Scooby Doo on it and handed it to Patty.

“Excuse the glass,” Gunnings said. “My granddaughter uses it because it’s easy to hold.”

Patty watched the cigar smoke waft out the open window. She watched the sun set on trucks that worked their way up Transition Mountain heading for California—they looked like they were flying.

Gunnings said, “Did I tell you about the time the Chair forgot to pick me up for my planned interview when I visited here during my job search? I stood in the rain for over an hour waiting for him—Old Testament rain. I stood there waiting—afraid I would miss him. The man finally did arrive and made some excuse. I got the job. Do you know why I told you that story, Patty?”

The Rental Car Incident Continued: 

En route to the annual Identity Issues Conference in Montreal to present Patty’s string art project “Agency,” Marginalia, who was presenting a paper on Freud’s citations as cited by Karl Abraham,  blurted out: “I secured Mr. Oedipus’s autograph.” (Mr. Oedipus was a pseudonym for the hottest identity theory critic on the planet.) “I plan to insert Mr. Oedipus’s autograph into a reference letter I wrote for myself.”  

Patty did not relish sharing this ride in the rent-a-car with Marginalia—not for a second—and especially not for the two hours that this angst-ridden trip would take.

“What kind of sick frenzied vortex of masochists would hold a conference in the dead of winter in Montreal?” Patty tried to change the subject.  

“You’re a technocrat and a double-downer,” Marginalia said.

“Just because I don’t agree with you, Marge,” Patty said, “that doesn’t mean I’m a technocrat or a downer?”

“You’re right. IT means you’re an asshole,” Marginalia laughed and then confided that although she was supposed to be writing her thesis all winter, she had been watching episodes of Judge Judy. She said that she had decided to become a social worker after she found a box of unsubmitted yet completed handwritten research from a graduate student with the pseudonym KIDDO at a garage sale and seriously considered typing it up and passing it off as her own. “I was able to steal the one volume of the research I needed and put it under my skirt and suddenly realized the unsanitary nature of it all.”

Marginalia added it was then she decided to give up on the Theory Factory. She told Patty that she had already put out 200 resumes with cover letters and transcripts. “Actually, to be truthful within the confines of this rental car, we can be truthful, right? The research journals were from an ex-graduate student I dated who was bitten on the leg by a wolf spider. Her doctor gave her ten days of Doxycycline and told her to stay out of the sun, but she quit the program and said I could use all her notes.”

Patty sat in the front seat of their floating movable world. In the spirit of post-modernism, she made a literary compromise and remained silent.

“Why can’t you be happy for me?” Marginalia said. “Why can’t anyone be happy for me? Why can’t I be happy for myself?”

Patty played with the seatbelt buckle, not sure whether to prepare for a silent emotional roller coaster ride or to take off a shoe, breakout the side window, and squirm through—until she fell onto the pavement and scampered across the road leaving a trail of dust as she disappeared in a puff. 

Instead of allowing the stoic silence of an expected profile, Patty said, “Why are you so unhappy?”

“You really know how to hit where it hurts, Patty. You really do!”       

Patty started to draw the outlines of the telephone poles on the side window with her fingers, her fingernails slicing the wires in wet streaks.

“And after your overview, you don’t know what you’re going to do come September?” Marginalia broke the silence.

“I’m filled up to my teeth with theory,” Patty said.

“And, you’re so damn mad about your indirection that you’re taking all of it out on me. Our good moments have replaced what our bad moments used to be.”

“We’ve never had any good moments, Marge.”  

“You never ask me how I’m doing. You never say, ‘Hey, what are you working on?’ I theorize that’s because you’re not working.”

“Just because I’m not working doesn’t mean that I’m not working,” Patty said. “And, you’re right, I’m suffering from Heideggerian anxiety. I don’t know the difference between being and there, now and then, this and that, and can’t distance myself from myself.”

“You’ve always been afraid of nothingness, Patty.”    

Patty unbuckled her seatbelt. The click passed between them like a word. She closed one eye and tried to fit another telephone pole into her drawing.

“You have absolutely no idea what it’s like—my pores are filled to bursting with theory and by the way thinking is action, Marge,” Patty said. 

“Don’t fret. Soup is mean,” Marginalia said. “She was late to my wedding—and everyone told me just to go ahead—to walk down the aisle, but I wouldn’t have it. It was hot as Hades in the church, and still I waited, sweltering in that dress—my hair wilting. And when Soup finally got there, she just sat in the front pew in a black dress—on my wedding day for Heaven’s sake—scowling and fanning herself. Didn’t come to the reception even though she rsvp’d for two and neglected to buy me a gift. Didn’t buy me a gift! And later that day, I lost my student ID. A trucker sent it back— it arrived two months later all beaten up. There is dishonestly and honesty in the world, Patty.”

Conclusion: 

Patty looked out the window and found suddenly their rental car was driving through a poppy field—a great red patch that one could only see from the sky. Nobody had known the poppies were there, she thought, nobody, until the brush fire cleared the forest. I dream only in theory and idea, Patty thought. Theory, idea and nothing.

Later in the conference hotel room that night, Patty took a picture of “Agency” and its identity points, included it with her essay, which she retitled “Circle of Citation” and hit send.