This document discusses qualitative research methods through three lenses: 1) Socrates' use of questioning to walk towards ideas, showing the iterative nature of finding answers. 2) The "Jar Assemblage" concept from poet Wallace Stevens' work, showing how qualitative research questions can lead to complex and unexpected places. 3) How military technology evolved explosive "jars", demonstrating how qualitative methods examine multifaceted topics from varied perspectives.

1. “Answers”, Assemblages, and
Qualitative Research
What do these three men have in common?

2. Socrates and the Peripatetic
answer
Socratic Ideal: What is desired?
Answers approach but never
reach finality.
Successive questions “walk” us towards ideati
“[W]hat we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest
kind of thought” –Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

3. It is so much more complex and messy when you
get down to it.

4. The Jar Assemblage:
What was the question again?
Anecdote of the Jar. Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of birds or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

5. “Let each man answer the question as he sees fit: his answer will
demonstrate his understanding of „culture‟, as long as he attempts
to answer the question at all and has not been struck dumb with
astonishment.” –Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Portrait of Artist, with his morning jar.

6. “It took dominion everywhere…like
nothing else in Tennessee.”

7. The jar goes to war: assemblages and
militarized thinking.
Another use for a “jar”
Grenades as explosive jars
The mother of all jars, truly the last
argument of kings.
Clay pots for Greek fire
As technology has developed, so has our ability to find more devastating
purposes for the jar assemblage.

8. “Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a
children’s playground.” –Charles
Bukowski, Dinosauria, We