![Head](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6352107814ac391e33a480b47c30269116c1e5cb0ec17697d57dbb6b898799b6/louse-hair-redo.jpg)
Louse turns into its smallness, and adjusts irreparably. Its attempted articulation has been spoilt by minor change; it has, in some form, found a way out. Louse is deft, a skillful maneuverer, but it’s the ant that troubles Robert Hooke in his attempt to render it:
“I could not, for a good while, think of a way to make it suffer its body to ly quiet in a natural posture; but whil’st it was alive, if its feet were setter’d in Wax or Glew, it would so twist and wind its body, that I could not any wayes get a good view of it; and if I killed it, its body was so little, that I did often spoile the shape of it, before I could thoroughly view it: for this is the nature of these minute Bodies, that as soon, almost, as ever their life is destroy’d, their parts immediately shrivel, and lose their beauty”11 – Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Royal Society, 1666), p.203
Ant has a borrowed score of 0.12, indicating very little evidence for borrowing. Source: https://wold.clld.org/meaning/3-817#2/24.3/-4.8
The ant, partially contained, twists and winds in an attempt to escape physically - which, though we know this to be a hopeless pursuit, enables it an escape in virtuality. It avoids a stifling, representational form. The fragility of the ant and its other minute accomplices even prepares for an escape post-life, a smudged protest against a pinning down. Louse leans in, and welcomes the worst.
Robert Hooke’s tussle with the depiction of the ant points to a far larger issue: that of the diagram. The diagrams in Micrographia of the minute bodies are anatomical; they aim to disclose a body-functioning in the microscopic realm, and do so mechanically, rigidly. So it is with louse, whose diagram, or drawing, as the holder & homepage of these texts displays it belly-up, legs in the air, its middle section unmoving and inanimate. The diagram gives a sense of one condition of louse but falls short of a true expression of it - it is not the multiple twistings and windings of the body that are captured, but one moment of this moving spectrum. Louse-drawing is an indicator of singular positioning, not of overlaid function. Even if it did manage to achieve a wider expression, such as in the ‘exploded-view drawing’, which is “meant to clarify some complex physical system for the benefit of a human constructor, operator, or designer” - a diagram that dissects even further into parts in order to indicate the effects of their comings-together - it would simultaneously offer up “as much intrigue as it does value”, enabling the uninformed reader “to fathom a small aspect of its murky otherworldliness”.22 – All quotes Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What it's Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p.52 There is a double scurrying away: louse escapes in its manifold movements and undisclosed functions, and there is the lapse of the louse-viewer, who is inevitably drawn into otherworldliness of the microscopal realm rather than comprehending supposed instructional elements. This form of the diagram does not capture wholly.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/45c2aef3ff00577b86eee6f68b3c8df0c45ee4491e1abe6a8ae83b443664ae14/Hooke-microscope.jpg)
fig.1 Robert Hooke's microscope in Micrographia, 1665
This brings a complex relationship between this abstract, generative, diagram and the image. As the diagram is non-representational, and due to its elusive nature, “it needs to be embodied in some kind of image so that it can be grasped”.66 – Ibid, p.23. A resistance to grasping can be found in leg 4 Two of the embodying ways that Jakub Zdebik discusses are architectural and cartographic representations, which help give some form of approximate image: “These two spatial markers are important because they are an attempt to capture the fluid and unstable dimension of the diagram”.77 – Ibid, pp.7-8 Yet the attempt always falls short - abstraction, as expected, is not fully capturable; something leaks. The drawing stalls somewhere between the lines - it is not wholly representational, as it cannot capture the abstract in full and, for practical reasons, it needs to be kept comprehensible to a viewer; it is not completely abstract, so that it can communicate some actual information.
Louse as depicted - louse-drawing - functions at an inbetween. The twisting and winding is an embodiment of a resisting abstract function - louse-diagram - the complex machinery of microscopic function on minute bodies, the power relation of observation, the parasitic habits and motions. Louse-drawing, as in Micrographia, exists as momentary cartographic attempt. Yet louse-drawing as homepage, holder to these writings, indicates a change in function, a display of an altogether different diagram. This is the diagram of ongoingness; an expansive, generative diagram, of which the collection of writings altogether are perhaps only a cartographic, or at moments architectural, rendering. Ongoingness-diagram is the abstract function/s that encompass and pertain to ongoing, those that these essays seek to express. That which louse-drawing, in all its dissections, only points to, anxious of a shrivelling up, a loss of beauty.
*louse*