Blink: a thick description

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“Consider […] two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. Te two movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have has the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way […] That’s all there is to it: a speck of behaviour, a fleck of culture, and – voilà! – a gesture. 

for flute and oboe

5’00”

The point is that between what Ryle calls the “thin description” of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher…) is doing (“rapidly contracting his right eyelids”) and the “thick description” of what he is doing (“practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion”) lied the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived and interpreted, and without which they would not not (not even the zero.form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as nontwitches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids.”