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Epilogue
partially monopolized the function of referring to the technology itself and its physical objects, by removing them from the immediate wealth of relations that they call into play18 and then regularly adding new possibilities for expression.19 Taking into account the language used to mediate involves relocating the social groups, the reasons and interests at stake in their action, the beings they mobilized to provisionally define it (and notably standardization institutions), the final definition and interpretation procedures, and the new practices that are emerging. Technical drawing, like other languages or objects, corresponds to the naturalization and projection on paper of collective practices, which the very properties attached to the object on its own have made invisible. Although it is important to reconstruct the heat of the action in order to understand the objects, the action can be really grasped only by understanding the inextricable overlappping of the various mediators and the lack of fixation of various bodies, objects, or texts. When the action is part and parcel of a multitude of persons, objects, and texts, technical performance seems only natural. Human control of technology is also contingent on a string of little things. On the other hand, the object suddenly seems to be powerless when deprived of its producers, maintainers, and users. Technology is, intrinsically, as powerless as human beings who are naked and weak without their reference points, objects, and texts. Elements able to impose themselves without any help are few and far between. Autonomous technical objects, like free human subjects, are divested of their force when they lose the relations that maintain them and which they maintain. Objects and gestures are mixed up. Action programs on matter are action programs on society, and vice versa. As we have seen with design activities, even thought operations and sequences of ideas are spread through situations, objects, and groups. Cognition and imagination belong to sets of things and people; they are not imprisoned in the brain, neither are they confined to a transcendent symbolic system. Now, all relations to things suppose some kind of organizational structure, translation, and hybridization. Relations to objects are no more immediate than those between humans. They must be built and consolidated. They must be objectivized, by intermingling the constraints and forces of numerous mediators, and re-configured in the process. When beings come into contact with one another, their properties are modified and redistributed. The new mix or the next distribution constitutes a model that forbids, authorizes, or obliges certain associations. It is then no longer possible to do whatever one pleases, since the cards have been