Law's 1997 essay defines "heterogeneous engineering" as the ruthless re-engineering of every component toward a single controlling center

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Ten years after coining the term (see claim-law-1997-footnote-credits-himself-with-1987-heterogeneous-engineering-coinage), John Law's essay "Heterogeneities" (1997) still uses "heterogeneous engineering" as live analytical vocabulary, and glosses it explicitly: a process that is "goal oriented, functionalist, and ruthlessly centering," which "re-engineers all its components... holding none of them sacred, until the centre holds, for a moment, in a manner which is more or less durable." Law summarizes: "Such, then is heterogeneous engineering. It is the making of distributions, a mirror or an embodiment of the control project of the Enlightenment or modernity."

This gloss emphasizes centering and control — subordinating heterogeneous social, natural, and technical elements to a single dominating project — a harder-edged reading than the more neutral "durable technology requires managing heterogeneous elements together" framing already in claim-john-law-coined-heterogeneous-engineering-1987-not-mackenzie. The two are compatible (the earlier note's framing describes the task; this one describes Law's own diagnosis of its character), but this note's emphasis on forcible, non-consensual centering is closer to Law's stated critical purpose: naming heterogeneous engineering as one instrument of Enlightenment-style control, not a neutral engineering method.