Doing things with things: the european accident statement (EAS)

This article examines how automobility reproduces and governs itself through textual practices. Focusing on the European Accident Statement (EAS) – a standardized form used across Europe to document vehicle collisions – it explores how a seemingly mundane document participates in the apparatus of automobility by transforming embodied violence into administratively legible events. Drawing on ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and science and technology studies, the paper develops the concept of text acts to analyze how documents not only record but actively constitute the social and epistemic order of mobility. The EAS functions as a mediating device that eventifies the continuous violence-field of automobility, converting the kinetic and affective disruption of collisions into a spatiotemporal ‘accident event’ that can be processed, effaced, and normalized. In doing so, it restores the flow of circulation, making automobility’s systemic violence appear episodic and manageable. The analysis reveals that automobility depends not only on cars, roads, and fuel, but also on paper, pen, and the textual coordination of conduct through which the apparatus sustains its promise of uninterrupted movement.