II.7 "an Animal in Quires"

Understanding Hooke's engravings as maps rather than tracings underscores their constructedness; for, more than double vision, seventeenth-century microscopes operated through radical perspectival shifts within a network of observational agents, including the viewer's eye, the lens, the flickering of his artifical light source, even the positioning and liveliness of the flies which Hooke would decapitate, gluing dismembered body parts to glass to keep them still. To produce the printed images, Hooke did not simply switch from one eye to another but, as Cohen later points out, had mentally to erase the color distortions produced by his lens, as well the dark blotches from the lack of light emitted by small objects, then reassemble body parts into an animate machine, each mechanism neatly labeled. Rather than tracing the image from slide, to microscope, to eyepiece, to observer, to the page, Hooke maps the image in the eyepiece back onto the slide through the page. Thus the engravings become a form of Latourian immutable mobiles, translating and disseminating a constructed vision of the inaccessible.