What Is a Wink

Contents

1. The picture under the word
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. What the foundation holds
5. The mark does not say which it was
6. A wink refers to a name
7. One eyelid, several readers
8. Answering and denying
9. What it costs
10. An ordinary Tuesday

Priya and Marcus sit at opposite ends of a long table at a supplier meeting. The supplier’s account lead says that the delivery date is locked. Marcus has been through three of this man’s locked dates. He catches Priya’s eye and closes his left eyelid for about a second. Priya, who was holding the same sentence in her head, nearly smiles. Two seats from her a junior colleague, Owen, sees the eyelid close and looks down at his notes, sure that Marcus is nervous about something. The account lead sees nothing, and goes on to the next slide.

The plain picture of a wink is a good one. A wink is a message, a very small one. It has a sender, a receiver, a content, and a channel: the sender closes an eyelid, the receiver sees it, and the content gets across. It is cheap, it is private, and it can be denied. Done well it says a whole sentence without the sentence being said: we both know better, that was a joke, keep this between us.

Underneath is a container picture, and it has been good enough to run on. The content is in the wink, the way a letter is in an envelope, and the receiver opens it. What follows asks what is in the eyelid, and what the receiver is holding when she reads it.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam runs through the same place in all three. A message has its content in what is sent. In the first case nothing was sent, in the second the same thing sent has two contents, and in the third a symbol of a wink has three. In each, the reading went to wherever the reader’s record went.

The neighbours

Several earlier pieces stand close, and a reader could think I am repeating one.

What Is a Bluff is the nearest. It owns a bluff as a relation of three terms: a holding that was settled before the mark, a mark that is settled once made, and a reading in someone else’s denominator. It owns the point that a mark is read at the size the reader’s expectation about marks of its kind gives it, and it owns the tell, which is a present mark read as a partial record of a holding. I rely on the first two in the section on answering and denying, and I do not extend them. What differs is the question. A bluff is about a holding the reader cannot see behind a mark. A wink has no holding to hide. The question it raises is whether the mark was made at all.

What Is a Language owns the point that a vocabulary is a set of named conditions, and that acquiring a word adds a term to the imaginary side of the expectation. I rely on it. What I add is the case where the name is held by two people and is not said by either. What Is Managing Expectations owns the point that someone else’s expectation can be moved only by authoring records they will read. I rely on that too: a wink cannot author a record, it can only spend one that is already there. What Is a Hug and What Is Revenge own the author’s smaller reading of an act, and I do not use it here. A wink is read by its author and its receiver too, but the question below is about the receiver and about what the mark leaves unsettled for her.

What the foundation holds

Seven statements do the work, and I use them as the foundation states them. An act is a process, it may or may not generate an artifact, and an artifact is an imperfect historical mark. The foundation’s section on the host’s own act says that what the host holds in its prediction is its own making, not its foresight, and it draws a line: an act the host makes is the host’s own, and a reflex is decided by the same criterion, the host being its site and not its maker, so that it lands as an actual received. The expectation comprises subconscious prediction and ideas (P4). An idea is a named condition, and naming makes the relationship conscious (P7). Records update expectation forward and never re-open (R2). The human experiences only the quotient, which is the actual divided by the expectation (R8). The foundation also says of the phase of a mark, which idea it serves, that it is fixed by which idea has the actualizer, not by the mark and not by the maker.

A caution about the second statement. The foundation’s sentence on reflexes is marked there as that section’s own extension, and it carries a falsifier. I use it as stated and I do not widen it.

The mark does not say which it was

Take the eyelid that closed in the shelter and the eyelid that closed at the table. Watched from across a room, they are one movement: a lid down for about a second, up again, the other eye open. The philosophers’ version of this pair is old, and I take the pair from there. Ryle used a twitch and a wink as his example of two things that look the same and are not the same, and Geertz took it up in the first chapter of The Interpretation of Cultures, adding a parody of a wink and a rehearsal of a wink. I cite it for the pair and not as grounds, and I have not re-read it.

The foundation says what the difference is. In the shelter the eyelid closed in the man: he was its site. At the table Marcus made the closing: he was its maker. The relation of the host to the movement is different, and it is the whole difference between the two. It is also not a feature of the movement. A closing is a lid going down, whoever or whatever brought it down. The foundation says the same of phase, which idea a mark serves: it is fixed by which idea has the actualizer, not by the mark. What the face shows is the closing.

So the woman in the shelter has the closing and has to supply the rest. R8 says she meets only a quotient, and the quotient is the actual over her expectation. The actual is the closing. Her expectation comprises her prediction (what men in bus shelters at dusk do with their faces, trained by what she has seen before) and her ideas (a named condition about strangers who catch your eye, which she may hold). The sum decides which she reads, and no part of it is in the lid.

One thing I leave alone. The foundation has not settled whether a mark that no host made is an artifact, and the shelter eyelid is such a mark if the criterion is applied to it. I use the word mark for what either eyelid leaves and rest on neither answer.

A wink refers to a name

Suppose Priya has decided it was made. Marcus made the closing. What did he say with it? There is no vocabulary in an eyelid. A lid down for a second contains no sentence about delivery dates.

What she read was the account lead’s word, locked, and the three locked dates before it, and she and Marcus had talked about them over coffee on the second one. The pair of them hold a named condition. In the foundation’s locked sense an idea is a named condition (P7), and the name here might be nothing more than his dates. Marcus did not say it and did not have to. He pointed at it with a lid.

Hence the expectation she read it against is not only her prediction. It is also an idea she holds, on the imaginary side of the expectation (P4), and the wink works because it is there. Take it away and the same lid, at the same table, in front of Owen, is read as nerves. Owen’s reading is not wrong by his own expectation. He has no name to read it against, so his quotient is a different quotient (R8).

The two-layer point matters here and I should be exact about it. A wink has a public reading as a kind of mark, which readers who have met winks hold and which a stranger can read: something is shared here. That is part of the expectation of anyone who has met winks before, and it does not need a pair. What a stranger cannot read is the specific content, the particular name. The public layer is the next section.

One eyelid, several readers

Lay the readers out together, since the point is easier to hold in a table than in a paragraph.

Figure 01

One eyelid, four readings

Reader	What she already holds	What she reads
Priya	Three locked dates, and the coffee after the second. The name his dates.	A wink: the date is not locked, and he knows it.
Owen	Marcus as a steady colleague. No name for the dates.	A tic, or nerves. He looks down.
The account lead	Nothing of Marcus beyond the contract.	Nothing. He did not see it.
A stranger in the shelter	The public reading of a wink, and no record of the man.	Something shared that she does not share. She steps away.

The people are composites and the readings are the argument and not data. The first row is the case the construction is about; the last is the shelter, with a reflex and not an act behind it.

The last row is worth a moment. The woman in the shelter has no record of the man. What she has is the public reading, and the public reading says we share something. The mark, read that way, stands for a record, and her own record says there is none. The unease she felt is the quotient of that gap. A wink at a stranger is not a weak message. It is a mark that readers who have met winks take as a sign of a record, put to a person who has none.

Answering and denying

Priya smiles back. Does the smile prove the wink? It is a new mark, made by Priya, and it fits the reading she took it as a wink. It would look the same if she had misread a twitch. So an answer settles one thing, that the other person read it as made, and not whether it was. The first eyelid closed once. The record between Marcus and Priya now holds two marks, each read by the other, and nothing in either re-opens the first (R2).

Now suppose that at the end of the meeting Owen asks Marcus, “Were you winking at someone?” Marcus says, “Something in my eye.” The wink’s famous deniability is structural, and it is not a trick. The making is in the host, the mark is on the face, and the record holds the mark. A denial is a further mark, made in words. It does not turn the closing into a twitch, whether it is true or false, and it does not turn it into a wink either. It adds a reading beside the first. How Owen weighs it depends on what Owen’s expectation holds on how far Marcus’s sentences about his own acts can be taken. This is the structure the bluff piece found for a bluff, applied to a different question about a mark.

One more thing follows from a record that does not re-open. A wink cannot author a record. It can only spend one. Marcus can wink at Priya because three locked dates are already there for it to refer to. A pair who wink at each other about things neither has named can run out of record, and then a blink and a wink are hard to tell apart.

What it costs

The first cost is that a wink cannot be checked, by the receiver or by the winker later. The same cheapness that makes it a good way to say a sentence without saying it leaves the sentence unconfirmable. When Priya acts on it, she acts on her own reading, and that is all she has ever had.

The second cost falls on the third person. After a wink a room is in two parts: those who hold the name and those who do not. Owen did not hold it. He read nerves, and then felt, for a moment, that two people at the table had something he lacked. Marcus closed his lid for Priya and not against Owen, and still Owen is the host in the room on whom it landed as an exclusion. The foundation does not say what follows for the winker from that, and I do not either.

The third is that none of this makes a wink a poor tool. It is a very good one for a narrow job: telling one person, across a room, that a name they both hold is in play right now. It does that job at a price of a second and a deniable lid. The cost is that it can do no other job, and it is tempting to ask it to.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. Before you build on a wink, ask in words. The lid cannot settle whether it was made, and an answering smile settles less. “Was that a wink?” is a fair question, and the reply is a mark too, read against what you know of the person.
2. Wink only at someone whose record you hold, and only at something you have both named. If you cannot say what the name is, there is nothing for the wink to refer to.
3. Do not wink at a stranger. Readers who have met winks take the mark as we share something, and the reader’s own record says you do not.
4. When it matters, say it. A wink is the cheapest way to say what you could say, and the price is that the receiver cannot check it, and you, later, cannot either.
5. If you see a wink that was not for you, hold your reading as yours. Owen’s nerves were a true quotient of his own expectation. Do not carry it to anyone else as a fact about Marcus.
6. In writing, add the sentence. A winking face is a key press, read against the reader’s record of you. Where there is no record, the face reads as whatever the reader’s expectation supplies.