<p><strong>Scott W. Schwartz</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>Coherenscopic Mensuration</em></strong></p>
<p>Where does one thing end and another begin? A puzzling question for some millennia, made all the more intractable by particle accelerators, microbiomes, and deep field telescopes. Are there discrete entities, or is it all just a slimy spectrum? Zooming in, scaling out. Doesn't help. Perhaps the inquiry has been misguided? Perhaps rather than attempting to delineate this that, it may be more useful to question how well objects, ideas, or moments are held. How strongly do the constituents of an experience adhere? Is this object (be it a bucket of dirt, a table, a sentence, or a solar system) coherent or incoherent? How could such a measurement be attempted? What would the answer reveal? This piece simulates such a coherency detector, filtering out the incoherencies of composite assemblages to reveal ostensibly more substantiative conglomerates. Upon entering the device, a whole becomes segregated from its noise. Is this evisceration of the whole a useful way of seeing the world? A useful way of discerning Otherness? What is the object without its surrounding decay? Without its contextual interference? Without the crumbliness in which it is enclosed? Bits of dried flesh crumble off our bodies daily. We are all crumbly things. And sometimes we need to be held.</p>
<p>Scott W. Schwartz is an archaeologist whose research investigates measurement and its use in the production of knowledge, specifically measurements used to facilitate the belief in and practice of perpetually accelerating asvmmetncal growth of wealth.</p>