The Case of Cho Revisited

This is a republication of a first analysis of the Virgina Tech shootings. Although it is written in essay style, a more precise and detailed version submitted to the Oxford Journal of Criminology was refused publication on the basis that it was not a psychological or sociological theory, but a theory of discourse and Lacanian analysis. Truth of the Crime and Criminal: A Logical And Psychoanalytic Investigation by R. Groome Part I- The Case of Cho Seung-Hui  0- Introductory Remarks Cho Seung-Hui’s methodology of murder in the Virginia Tech shootings was no doubt delusional, but it was far from being ill-planned or illogical. On the contrary, Cho objectified the crime he was about to commit in a series of visible traits enabling him to not only identify his victims – the “rich, the snobs, the trust fund babies”, etc. – but to de-humanize them and himself through a vast array of technological devices: internet, cell phones, automatic weapons, digital cameras, etc. What is difficult to admit is that today, in the wake of the school shootings, a similar methodology is now being offered by the majority of experts – the psychiatrists, psychologists, the FBI and CIA agents – who are themselves seeking to objectify the crime by establishing a list of criteria or ‘profiles’ of visible traits that can identify school shooters or predict school violence in the future or after a threat has been made[1]. At one level, such methods are a natural reflex for the gathering of data and the acquisition of knowledge; at another, they become a paranoiac method of objectifying and de-humanizing others[2]. For such knowledge is not only specified by stereotypes, but is discharged in acts of aggression. Thus, the problem of profiling, whether of Cho or the experts, extends far beyond the recent school shootings to include terrorism, racism, and the modern phenomenon of the concentration camp. Beyond these complicities between law and crime, we aim to isolate a more elusive – if not invisible – trait that is systematically trivialized by an objectification of the crime and the criminal in visible traits. In isolating such an invisible trait, our investigation aims to de-objectify the crime, while humanizing the act, thus indicating the place for the autonomy of an experience in a criminological investigation that is inherently subjective. 1- Visible and Invisible Traits It is commonly stated: where there is smoke, there is fire – the smoke being the visible sign of something for someone. But what happens when we want to make the sign refer to the someone, i.e., where there is a fire, there is someone?  What are the difficulties of not only finding the person responsible, but convicting them if the fire was set unlawfully? The logic of the smoking gun is similar. What is the difficulty of determining the person responsible? For in a reference to psycho-pathological crimes, the standard oracle: "Guns do not kill people, but people do." is simply not true. When the expert must read a visible trait as no longer referring to something (as in the case of physics), but someone (as in psychology) the case becomes complex enough to call into question the very principles – or norms – that we take for granted in everyday life.  Indeed, such subjective ‘signs’ become  difficult, if not impossible  to recognize and will be called, for the purposes of this article. an invisible trait. In the school murders at Virginia Tech, we can speak of the knowledge of the crime written in visible traits as a matter for the police and the judge, while the truth of the criminal is written in invisible traits that call upon the psychiatrist and psychologist. The question remains, however, in the ever growing collusion between the human sciences and a public sector seeking to dominate such problems by force – thus reverting back to the visible signs of the police – are there psychologists and psychiatrists sufficiently disinterested and trained to read such invisible traits? For example, Cho, sometimes signed his name with a question mark, or introduced himself as “Question Mark”; or again, on the day of the crime Cho signed a packaged mail sent to NBC and tattooed himself with the name Ishmael X. Yet, in all of these cases, Cho was not simply lying or a criminal forger, since he actually believed in and identified with the name: it was the truth of the criminal, not a mere falsehood of the crime (as in the case of a writer of bad checks) that was being told in the form of a lie.  Such traits, in any case, remain unrecognizable to a theoretical or practical knowledge (a lie detector test) that would merely attempt to formulate the signification of an invisible trait as a false visible sign. A paranoiac method has, therefore, its limits: in passing to the act on the basis of a reading and writing of visible traits, such a knowledge, in order to be something more than just words, is systematically expressed in contradictory forms approaching delirium[3]. That Cho was indeed a “Question Mark”, is exhibited by the contradictory statements of  the medical and legal experts: for instance, K. Godbey (LCSW) petitioned the magistrate stating Cho was an “imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness”, while R. Crouse (Psychologist, Phd.), stated Cho’s “insight and judgment [were] normal”.[4] An insufficient or classical logic inevitably only finds a writing of such contradictions in modes of literary acting out or an aggressive passing to the act that literally ‘signs’ the other through punishment – even if this ‘other’ should become oneself, one’s nation, school, or family[5]. Similarly, and beyond the good intentions of the official experts, the systematic refusal – or inability – to read an invisible trait, not only reduces it to being mere literary writing, but silences it in the name of the standard modes of ‘out-patient’ treatment (the psychiatric prescription of psychotropes and therapeutic imperatives to be calm). Thus, opening up the question of the point at which mental health care can itself become a form of passive and active aggression.[6] I aim in this article to re-open an investigation of an invisible trait that tends to be trivialized to either the level of literature or to the visible traits of science. By making room in a criminological investigation for a ‘portrait’ of a criminal and the crime that refers to a stylization of a trait – or caricature – that is subjective, and not simply an objective profile, I  ask: Whose proper name signed this tragedy? I will show in Part II how the style of the criminal can be read like a signature left at the scene of a crime: as a mark and testament not merely of the crime in reality, but of the cruelty of the crime in its unreal dimensions. But for the moment, the next section will show how the preliminaries for the detection of the early warning signs and prevention of violence are essentially contained in learning to read an invisible trait.