“Answers”, Assemblages, and Qualitative Research

What do these three men have in common?

Socrates and the Peripatetic answer

Answers approach but neverreach finality.

Socratic Ideal: What is desired?

Successive questions “walk” us towards ideation

“[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

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

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 wildernessSurround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it,And sprawled around, no longer wild.The jar was round upon the groundAnd 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.

“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.

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

The jar goes to war: assemblages and militarized thinking.

Another use for a “jar”

Clay pots for Greek fire

Grenades as explosive jars

The mother of all jars, truly the last argument of kings.

As technology has developed, so has our ability to find more devastating purposes for the jar assemblage.

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

Dinosauria, We