Meditation on Ring and Representation

Friday early evening, I got on a bus, and saw some of my fellow third-year students, attired nicely, coming back from the Third-year Class Ring Ceremony.

To this in medias res ceremony, which was advertised as "a kind of big deal," I did not attend. As I looked at the people on the bus examining their new rings or toying with the nice wooden box that contained the ring, I was thinking.

Quite by the way, this practice of class ring is not found in Japan. Japanese college students, in general, as far as I can see, have much less sense of their "class" than most American college students do. In fact, there, the word "class" would normally designate a group of student taught together, and not a group of students who are graduating in the same year.

But that's not the (only) reason I don't wear those class rings. The real reason is that, to be honest and quite direct, to me they look ugly and inelegant. They are unnecessarily big, heavy, and thus inhibiting, for the detailed and delicate activities with which the fingers are often engaged.

Why must rings be so big? One of the reasons is that one inscribes information on it in the form of sign. For instance, the numbers "2008" are carved on the ring in order to signify that the ring indeed is a class ring for that particular class.

Or in the form of pictorial symbol. For instance, a (simplified and abstracted) portrait of Jeffersonian pillar on the ring surely signifies the University, and Mr. Jefferson's ideal.

In any case, a class ring represents the class for it it was forged. But here I must pose the question: why does a class ring have to represent the class in tangible ways?

A relevant aesthetic distinction here is the one between representation and imitation, or mimesis. The latter is a sub-category of the former.

What is representation? This is a real and tough question. But suffice it here to say that x represents y if (and not iff, nor only if) x can stand for y (and the expression "stand for" is deliberately vague). On the other hand, imitation can be more precisely defined in terms of representation, namely: x imitates y iff x represents y by virtue of its likeness to y. That is, a mimetic object of a thing represents that thing by being "like" that thing.

Examples will show this distinction clear. For instance, a statue of Homer represents Homer by being (allegedly) similar to how the actual person of Homer looked. But mere letters "Homer" can also represent Homer, although these letters themselves aren't like the person at all.

Similarly, I, as a student, represent the University of Virginia, although I'm not physically like the University. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive what it is to be "like" the University.

What am I getting at? My point is that, while I understand very well the representational value of a ring, I don't understand why that representation has to be mimetic. A plain ring without any ornamentation can just as well serve to represent anything, insofar as non-mimetic representation here is a matter of conferring.

Admittedly, one of the important advantages of mimetic object over non-mimetic representational object is, quite obviously, that the representational relationship is visible. Looking at the class ring, a stranger can tell what it represents (signifies). If the ring had no inscription nor image carved on it, it's impossible to know just by looking what it represents.

For instance, a picture of a tree represents that tree. But it may also represent, non-mimetically, certain memories associated with the picture, for me.

What this particular example suggests, then, is that wearing a class ring is not a matter of personal remembrance or commemoration, but it's more a matter of public declaration of communal identity.

But since I'm not particularly interested in such public display of my class identity, a ring is rightly out of my interest.

One can have a similar discussion about engagement rings. Some of them seem to be "mimetic." That is, some engagement rings seem to try to "imitate" such qualities as the wonder, the eternity, and the beauty of love, by means of fine ornamentation and use of rare jewels. Such attempts, in my view, unconditionally fail. It's not only ugly, but it's wrong. Some things cannot be imitated, though they may well be represented.

So this is a long, uninteresting meditation on ring and representation. (As always, I meant to be more concise but failed.) Representation really is a fascinating topic in philosophy of art, if only it is treated more properly, in a more appropriate place.

But the bottom-line here is that I'm not interested in rings. The only ring I may perhaps be interested in, of course, is the ring of Gyges (see Plato's Republic). Even that, I'm not that much interested in.