The Glass Essay
Kelly Krumrie's "No Measure"
No Measure by Kelly Krumrie, Calamari Archive, forthcoming October 2024
Exiting this record I feel as if abandoned to the elements—dumped in the wind-scratched tundra, worn to the consistency of sand—the location of this record is dislocation—a desert outpost, a scientific station occupied by the narrator and an other—together they examine the framed landscape—they enter and exit the control room—they enact the process of measurement—“We try to uncover what to look for, discover a property that is already there,” the narrator states—as we drift into the methodology of impossibility—measurement here rests in the immeasurable, in Aquinas’s “negative knowing”—the thing exists because we cannot prove it does not—the thing the relationship that develops between the two present parties—that is placed within a system of observation, documentation, quantification—what do we see, what do we see through—the dissolve of the impenetrable—an impossible heap—Krumrie seems, in this study of measurement that cannot be measured, to be aiming toward a consideration of significant otherness—both in the relational sense, but also as Donna Haraway identifies the term in her work “The Companion Species Manifesto”—significant otherness as “vulnerable, on-the-ground work that cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways of living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures”—in the reckoning of internal with external—body with environment—how does the self find context within the other—where do physicality and unbodiedness converge—how do we trust the process—while resisting the urge to measure for worth—