F: you started a new line by asking if the game of croquet could be made into a real muddle only by having all the things in it alive. ... There is something funny about that point.
D: What?
F: ... Something about living things and the difference between them and the things that are not alive... Horses don't fit in a world of automobiles. ... They're unpredictable, like flamingos in the game of croquet.
D: What about people? … Do they fit? … on the streets?
F: No, I suppose they don't really fit—or only by working pretty hard to make themselves fit.
(Bateson [1953] 1972: 41)
An exotic observer would probably judge that car traffic in the center of a big city on a highway surpasses human faculties; and indeed traffic surpasses human faculties in so far as it does not really place against each other neither men nor natural laws, but rather systems of natural forces humanized by the intention of the drivers and human beings transformed into natural forces by the physical energy of which they have made themselves the mediator. It is not the case any more than an agent operates on an inert object, nor of the return action of an object, as agent, on a subject alienated by itself and demanding nothing in return, that is a situation involving some passivity on either side: the beings confronting each other struggle both as subjects and as objects; and, in the code which they use, a small variation in the distance that separates them has the strength of a mute command. (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1966)
It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. ... They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. (de Certeau [1980] 1984: 97)
Herman and his colleagues used elegant formal analytic procedures to record and analyze flow data. They were able to specify the traveling wave as a causal structure of the traffic stream's rate of flow. With it they could specify other consequential structures of the wave and the traffic stream. But they were not able to make the concertedly achieved phenomenon of traveling waves instructably reproducible in needed details. They could not find or specify the details they needed, "From the helicopter" (literally and figuratively) they could find and demonstrate the wave as a causal structure. Indeed they were best able to locate and demonstrate the accordion wave, being outside the stream, from the helicopter, with photographs taken from the helicopter. But they needed as well to make it instructably reproducible in and as its local, endogenously achieved, procedurally adequate, coherent details as a great recurrency of an in-course line of traffic. They had to do so in each next actual case, in each case for a next first time, just in any actual case. (Garfinkel 2002: 163)
Note the schockwaves on the right lanes. Note also the cohorts on the left lanes. Note the "helicopter view." Note that we have no evidence as to how shockwaves and cohorts are actually produced by individual drivers dealing with other drivers. And note also the driver who bypasses the cohorts by driving on the access to the rest area. Arguably, the "helicopter view" give you a sense of the system but not of the methods through which the system is maintained.