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bagheera_sanI don't think it is going to get much better, so here is my Magnum Opus: The Doctor Who Termpaper it took half a year to write. I think the reason it took so long is because its a perfect example of Termpaper: You're doing it wrong. It's pretty silly, and convoluted, and I suspect that the cultural theory its based on sounds or is scary/stupid/weird, but at least you get to see me wax academically about Goo Snake Master. Or not, because it's pretentious tl;dr. (Number of French philosphers name-dropped: 2. Number of Jungian archetypes thrown in: several. Number of random capitalisations to show how SIGNIFICANT a term is: infinite.)
A POSTHUMANIST READING OF DOCTOR WHO
Definition: Posthumanism and post-human
Humanism has for the last five hundred years been a dominant worldview or philosophy that assumes that "'Man' naturally stands at the centre of things," that 'man' is "distinct from – and superior to – animals and machines" and that 'man' "shares with all other human beings a universal essence." To a humanist, all humans are on a basic level the same. They share essential traits and should have equal rights. Humanism also assumes that what it means to be human is incontestable and immutable. On the other hand, in the humanist worldview, humans are fundamentally different from everything else, and this is what gives our life meaning. Thus, humanism devalues any form of existence that is not human. Another aspect of humanism is that it is a Western philosophy and thus implicitly considers Western culture the epitome of "human nature" and for most of its history, the humanist human was a heterosexual white male without physical or mental impairments.
Seeing the problems inherent to this approach, posthumanism is critique, a continuation or an alternative to humanism, which aims to re-examine the humanist definition of "human", and show that it is a vague and obsolete concept, and tries to adapt our view of who we are to postmodern conditions. These conditions include technological developments which either allow us to change ourselves and our environment (bio-, info-, cogno-, nanotechnology), scientific developments which change our view of concepts like "human", "animal", "intelligence" and so on, and socio-political developments like globalisation, post-colonialisation and emancipation. While humanism isolates and idealises the human, posthumanism "seeks to recover the complex ways in which humans are entangled with non-humans" such as animals or machines, and while humanism sees "human" as a well-defined and static concept, posthumanism includes the possibility of change with the accompanying dangers, fears, desires and possibilities.
If the subject of humanism is the human, then the subject of posthumanism is the post-human. This does not necessarily have to be that which comes after the human, or some future development of humanity. It can also mean entities that already exist but are seen as sub-, super-, pre-, in- or trans-human.
Introduction [Note: Who fans can skip a lot of this]
Doctor Who was conceived by the BBC as a science-fiction family programme and is now the longest-running science-fiction series in the world: it ran from 1963 to 1989 and after a hiatus of sixteen years was continued in 2005 and is still running. Like many children’s stories it has elements of a coming-of-age story. It is a story about identity, and finding one’s identity, both for the alien Doctor and his human companions. But this identity, even in the title, is in question, and it is not quite human. The title asks, “Doctor Who?” and it has never yet quite been answered. The both the human and the post-human identity are still arriving.
The initial cast of characters consisted of Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, British school teachers, who follow one of their pupils, Susan Foreman, into a police box in a scrap yard after suspecting that something is not right with her. As it turns out, the blue 1950s police box is actually a TARDIS - a machine capable of time and space travel, and Susan and her grandfather, the mysterious Doctor, are time travellers from another planet. The Doctor kidnaps Barbara and Ian and an odyssey through time and space begins.
In the following years, the show's concept developed further. Susan and her grandfather were revealed to be aliens of a race called Time Lords, and exiles from their own planet. The TARDIS showed signs of sentience. The Doctor changed from a threatening and deceitful, almost villainous figure into a more benign if still mysterious character. Speaking in terms of archetypes, he always remains caught between Trickster and Wise Old Man. In the beginning, his motivation is simply to keep himself and Susan safe, but the character turns also out to be an explorer, and then gradually becomes a heroic figure, fighting monsters and righting wrongs. Most importantly, though, the cast of Doctor Who became fluid, enabling it to go on for such a long time. The only constant of the series became the Doctor and his TARDIS, whereas his "companions", usually young humans, usually only lasted for a number of serials. Keeping the Doctor as the central character became possible because the producers found a way to have him portrayed by different actors: when a Time Lord is killed or dies of old age, their body “regenerates”, and a new actor takes on the role. Each regeneration has a different appearance and personality, but the audience is still expected to see them as one continuous person, and most long-time viewers do.
1. Doctor Who as a humanist text
In many ways, Doctor Who is a typical example of a humanist science fiction text. While the underlying morals are not as codified and explicit as for example in Star Trek with its mission statement and ethical directives, certain key humanist values are evident: compassion, trust, courage, individuality and free will. In the beginning, the Doctor is a hostile force because he does not display these traits. Typically, the environment that fosters these qualities in him is that of a family (the core social unit in which a child is socialised): the white, human, hetero-normative pair of Ian and Barbara, and his grandchild Susan. This motif of "becoming human" is recurring in the series, which as mentioned above, is a coming-of-age tale. Representing the child growing up, though, are not just the youthful companions, but also the old Doctor. Once the Doctor has become the hero of the show, it is easy to dismiss his biological (and psychological) peculiarities as fanciful scene-dressing, a trope of the genre, and simply read the Doctor as a non-conformist, a member of the upper class who partly rejects his privilege to lead the life of a bohemian, intellectual adventurer. This view of him fits firmly into the image of the traditional humanist subject: a male white individualist, fighting inhuman monsters.
2. Monster Theory: Time Lords as post-humans
But it would be just as easy to read the Doctor as a post-human figure. Time Lords are able to regenerate because their bodies have been modified with the help of technology: they are genetically manipulated beings, always already artificial. They live in a near-symbiotic relationship with semi-sentient machines, the TARDISes. In the new 2005 series, the TARDIS has become an explicitly organic machine, something that “is grown” (The Impossible Planet, 2006) and has a heart (The Parting of the Ways, 2006), but also clearly technological parts: the time machine itself is a cyborg. To further illustrate this, nearly all of Jeffrey J. Cohen’s theses about the figure of the monster (Cohen, 1996, p. 3 – 26) can be applied to the Doctor or his species.
According to the first thesis, the monster is a cultural body, a product of its time. The ten different actors, and the multiple eras of Doctor Who always “go with the times”, since pop culture and children’s television needs to be up-to-date. Thesis two claims that the monster always escapes, dies and returns. Time Lords regenerate, dying and returning over and over again. The show itself has undergone many such transformations, and at least one big return. Thesis three: the monster escapes categorisation and appears at a time of crisis. Within the text, the Doctor is a radical individualist, a being with a mysterious past and no proper name, a “renegade” of his own species. He usually deals with crises or even causes them simply by appearing within a stable system. From a meta-textual perspective, Doctor Who was created in the early Sixties, a time of nascent social upheaval, and the whole series occupies almost the entire period of postmodernity with its rapid social and technological changes.
Thesis three: the monster is a hybrid creature and an “incorporation of the Outside” (Cohen, 1996. P. 7). Within the narrative of the show, the Doctor and his TARDIS serve as a plot device to get the human heroes into contact with the Outside and the Beyond, but they are themselves already part of this other world. The first “unearthly” creatures that the human heroes encounter are the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan. Furthermore, the character of the Doctor is actually a hybrid being consisting of (at the moment) ten different bodies and personalities. This fluid, discontinuous character does to a certain extent defy the traditional “rules” of what a “character” should be, and thus is a step towards the radical Other.
Cohen’s fifth thesis sees the monster as a force of prohibition, a being that through its forbidding presence limits human endeavour. Sometimes, the Doctor acts as a limiting force, aborting those human (and alien) endeavours he judges to be immoral. Less obvious, but even more limiting, is the way the Doctor’s otherness is portrayed. As often as not, the Doctor is an anti-hero and a tragic figure – at the same time as he makes a monstrous, post-human existence a possibility, he also limits its desirability, which explains why the show has always needed a human companion as more comfortable identification figure. Frequently, a limiting role within the text is also given to the Time Lords, who serve as a rather oppressive temporal police, judging and condemning changes of the “timeline”, while at the same time turning history into just another text, but one for which they claim sole authorship and copyright.
However, the Time Lords are depicted as bureaucrats, police, judges, and so on (even their criminals call themselves such things as “Doctor”, “Master” or “Meddling Monk”, echoing institutions such as the clinic or the church) and their main seat of government is probably not arbitrarily called the “Panopticon” (The Deadly Assassin, 197?) - every Time Lord is under constant surveillance(Trial of a Time Lord, 1986), and everything is recorded in their archive, the Matrix (The Deadly Assassin, 197?). They could be read as a take on Foucault’s controlling systems of power-knowledge. Critiques of humanist thinking target many of the issues Foucault points out. This kind of oppressive society tries to exclude everything that is sick, criminal, deviant or Other. This means that the post-human protagonist originates, quite fittingly, from a form of humanist system. It shows that the oppressors are also identical with the monsters. They are what they try to exclude and produce the kind of being they condemn.
Cohen’s sixth thesis also obviously applies to the Doctor, as Cohen sees the monster as an object of escapist desires and transgression fantasies. Thus, the portrayal of the show’s central character has both a subversive and a containing influence on the audience. Finally, Cohen defines the monster as that which we create and could one day become – in a word, the post-human.
3. Representations of the Human
If the protagonist is no longer human, then where are the humans in this text? They are his sidekicks. Of the Doctor’s 33 companions, 29 have been human or human-looking aliens, two (Susan and Romana) have been Time Lords, two (K9 and Kamelion) have been robots, 23 have been female and 9 have been male (if we do not count robots as gendered). That means that the representatives of “ordinary” humanity have been female at least two times out of three. Initially, the companions tended to be very humanist figures. Some of the Doctor's companions have been from the past, from the future or from non-Western cultures and yet none of them are fundamentally different from "present-day" companions. Similarly, when the Doctor visits the end of the universe in the year 100 trillion (Utopia, 2007), humanity still is the same. Their human nature is static.
This has notably changed in the new series. The first companion (for only two episodes) we see transformed into a post-human is Adam, who during an adventure in the future acquires cybernetic implants without the Doctor’s permission, and is promptly thrown out of the TARDIS as punishment – but allowed to keep the implants. In the episode The Parting of the Ways (2005) companion Jack gets shot and apparently killed, and in the last minute his other companion Rose looks into the “heart” of the TARDIS and gains deus-ex-machina (literally) superpowers that enable her to destroy the Dalek army and revive Jack. As a result Jack (in the spin-off series Torchwood, in which he is the lead character) has lost the ability to die. This character also challenges traditional humanist ideas through his omni-sexuality and the glimpses we get of his future fate: eventually, he turns into the “Face of Boe”, a giant, non-human head.
But while Jack and Adam allowed to keep their post-human identity, Rose has to give her power up quickly. Significantly, the Doctor takes this power away with a kiss. A similar fate is shared by companion Donna, who in the episode “Journey’s End” gains the mind and intelligence of a Time Lord, enabling her to control the TARDIS and save the world. Again, the Doctor points out that this power would kill her, and takes away not only her Time Lord powers, but also her memories of her adventures with him. On the one hand, we see emancipation at work, catching up with humanism: humanity is predominantly female in this text. On the other hand, the male heroes have already made the steps towards a post-human future. Their bodies get changed and enhanced, whereas the women have to be purified if they get contaminated with anything technological or alien. Posthumanisation, whether it is portrayed as positive or negative, means power, and that is not permitted to the heroines.
4. Villains and Monsters: the “bad” post-humans
Not only is Doctor Who’s main protagonist a distinctly post-human figure, but so are its antagonists. Texts in which both the hero and the antagonist are non-human are rare in the time of humanism (Milton’s Paradise Lost, Spenser’s The Fairie Queene) and perhaps symptomatic of pre-humanist and post-humanist contexts (entire bodies of pre-modern mythology, narratives about demi-gods like The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Ramayana, fairy-tales, but also post-modern pop-culture texts such as Buffy, superhero fiction or the Matrix).
While the worlds of Star Trek or Star Wars abound with alien species, most of these, be they friends or foes, are seen as people. The stories of Doctor Who, on the other hand, are populated by creatures that look frightening, are either non-sentient or irredeemably evil, creatures that are not defined as “people” and can thus be fought and killed without moral issues for the heroes. The Doctor has a “no killing” policy, but this does not extend to all species. Some of these monsters are immensely popular, especially with the younger audiences, and make up a huge percentage of the surrounding franchise. The most popular are the Daleks (first appearance: The Daleks, 1963) and the Cybermen (first appearance: The Tenth Planet, 1966).
4.1. The Daleks
The Daleks combine two key elements of post-human development as imagined by modern society: they are cyborgs and genetic mutants. The First Doctor and his companions first encountered them on their home planet Skaro (in a story clearly based on Wells The Time Machine), a world devastated by nuclear war, and inhabited by the peaceful, human-looking Thals and the aggressive and xenophobic Daleks. The Daleks have been turned into slimy blobs with tentacles by the radiation, so in order to move and fight, they live in metal casings. The only desire of the Daleks is to conquer the cosmos and exterminate all non-Dalek life. The Daleks are the Doctor’s deadliest foe, and there is no other species in the universe that he fears and hates quite this much. The Daleks represent the technological anxieties and desires of our time at their most primitive (and therefore most powerful) level: they are a nightmare of being turned into something inhuman, but they are also a power fantasy. It has been pointed out (Bignell, 2007) that this is why they appeal so strongly to children. The Daleks are the Id unrestrained, children without moral or parental supervision.
4.2. The Cybermen
The Cybermen appeared a bit later than the Daleks, and were never quite as popular with the audience, or as successful as foils for the heroes. They are the prototypical cyborg race: human(oid) beings who have augmented their bodies with technology, and in the process lost all emotion. In their first origin story they come from a planet that occupies the same orbit around the sun as Earth, in their second origin story (The Age of Steel, 2006) they are humans from Earth in a parallel universe. The new series also shows the first step of human-to-Cyberman conversion: headsets and mobile phones that merge with their users. In the twenty-first century, technological anxieties have become much more concrete, but also tinged with a self-conscious taste of irony. Another new aspect shows up in the spin-off series Torchwood in the form of the first Cyberwoman, updating both human and post-human imagery with some political correctness. The most threatening aspect of the Cybermen remains that while the worst a Dalek will to do you is kill you, the Cybermen want to cyber-convert all life to make it like them. The same motif was (years) later picked up by Star Trek in the form of the Borg.
And unlike the Daleks, who at least derive some enjoyment out of their monstrous state, the Cybermen are emotionless, and therefore not suitable for a power fantasy. While the Daleks look less human than the Cybermen, their personality is only reduced, whereas the Cybermen are completely devoid of it. Since they are much less popular than the Daleks, this proves what we may already suspect: personality and emotions are more important for the humanist self-image and viewer identification than physical appearance.
Neil Badmington (2000) identifies psychoanalysis among the initial “threats” to humanism, because it questions the idea that reason is the uniting and principal trait of human existence. The subconscious is decidedly unreasonable. The “fall” of reason as the sole identifier of humanity is evident also in the concept of the Cybermen. The Daleks are human beings stripped of all their higher functions of (ethical) reason, leaving behind only the savage subconscious without moral imperatives. The Cybermen are human beings stripped of their subconscious, leaving behind only cold, unfeeling reason, moral imperatives (they regard conversion as an act of altruism) without subjectivity or compassion. Both species are incomplete, to be human, they would need both reason and the unreasonable. In order to update itself, humanism needs to integrate the subconscious into its view of the human.
4.3. The Master
What role these monsters play in the negotiation of the Doctor’s identity (and thus the human and the post-human identity) becomes most evident in the case of the Master. Like the Doctor, he is a Time Lord and a renegade. If the Daleks are the Doctor’s worst enemy, then the Master is his most personal nemesis. Throughout the series he undergoes a number of monstrous transformations, hybridisations and contaminations: he burns to a half-dead corpse, inhabits a machine and stolen alien and human bodies, becomes infected with a virus that turns him into a savage animal hybrid, is killed again and returns as an amorphous gelid mass, dies again and is resurrected by the Time Lords, turns himself human – all a grotesque mirror image of the Doctor’s “normal” regenerations.
The Master serves as an outlet for all that which is frightening and monstrous about the Doctor, he is a negative image, a Jungian Shadow, a dark double of the hero. Not just the Master is the Doctor’s shadow self, but in a sense, all monsters in the text are. Usually, monsters represent that which we wish to exclude from ourselves, here, they represent the “bad” aspects not of the human, but of the post-human, thus allowing the show to have a “good” post-human hero.
5. Example readings
5.1. “The Evil of the Daleks” (1966)
With all this in mind, we can turn to a more in-depth analysis of individual stories from Doctor Who’s long history. “The Evil of the Daleks” is in many ways still symptomatic for humanist science-fiction. In it, the Daleks steal the Doctor’s TARDIS to force him to help them in an experiment. The Victorian Professor Waterfield describes the Daleks arrival: “creatures burst out of the cabinet, invaded the house, took away my daughter”. In one sentence, the Daleks are defined as monsters, playing on our most primal fears. But their aims are less simple.
MAXTIBLE: They, I mean the Daleks, tell me they have always been defeated by human beings.
DOCTOR: In the long run, yes.
MAXTIBLE: Possibly because of some factor possessed by human beings which is absent in Daleks? Perhaps they want to find out what it is, and transplant it into their race.
The Daleks want to test a human. The Doctor manipulates Jamie into taking part in the test, deliberately making him angry so he will give his best performance. In the test, Jamie manages to outwit his enemy and make a friend out of his attacker Kemel, which leads to success: they rescue Waterfield’s daughter. Based on this experiment, the Doctor distils the “human factor” and implants it into three Dalek test subjects. Maxtible explains: “Every feeling, every thought and impulse you had during your attempted rescue of Victoria Waterfield was recorded”, however, these are implanted into the Daleks as technology. A “positronic brain” holds the human-factor. The experiment is successful; the “human Daleks” play, they are friendly, they have a sense of humour, they question orders, they are childlike but will grow up, they are individuals with names. “Human” is defined a mode of behaviour. The human Daleks and the Doctor and his friends travel to Skaro, where the Emperor Dalek reveals the true purpose of the experiment: “The human factor has shown us what the Dalek factor was. Without knowing, you have shown the Daleks what their own strength is.” The Emperor explains the dynamic through which oppositions define each other. In the end, the human-factor Daleks start a civil war against their brothers, which the Doctor hopes will be their final destruction.
Unlike in “The Enemy Within” (1999), the opposition in this story is still human vs. Other. But as in “Human Nature” (2007) “human” is a quality that can be achieved and simulated, and transferred into aliens and machines. If the story were truly humanist, then the “human factor” could not be transferred into Daleks. But it can, and thus calls into question what about this factor is truly “human”. The borders between human and other are not nearly as clear as they seem. The role humans play in the negotiation of their identity is already marginal, the true agency lies with the Doctor and the Emperor Dalek.
5.2. “The Enemy Within” (1999)
After the series was terminated by the BBC in 1989 during Sylvester McCoy’s tenure as the seventh Doctor, an attempt to revive it was made in 1996 the form of the television movie with the title “The Enemy Within”. It was a co-production of British and American networks, and was meant to serve as the pilot for a new, American Doctor Who series. The movie starts with McCoy’s seventh Doctor, who is taking the ashes of the Master back to their home planet after the Daleks have executed the Master. But the ashes transform into slimy mass that slips into the TARDIS and causes it to crash in San Francisco in 1999. As soon as the Doctor walks out onto the street, he is shot by teenage gang members. Not quite dead, he is taken to a hospital, where the doctor Grace Holloway kills him on the operating table because his physique is not human. In the morgue, the Doctor regenerates into his eighth self. Parallel to this sequence, the sentient remains of the Master invade a human home and possess the body of a human male, which he then uses to try and steal the Doctor’s “remaining regenerations”. This theme of death and resurrection runs through the whole movie: during the climatic fight in the TARDIS, Grace and one of the gang members are killed by the Master and then resurrected by the TARDIS.
The different target audience, different producers, different format and higher production values led to a slightly different Doctor Who. Apparently, the producers felt that an alien, mysterious, asexual hero was too strange, and gave him a romance with Grace and had him claim to be “half-human on my mother’s side” (again humanity is coded as female). The awareness of the Doctor’s strangeness remains clearly visible, though, and the whole movie is concerned with defining and purifying him. The Doctor’s regeneration sequence and the Master’s possession are juxtaposed with scenes from a Frankenstein movie that a security guard in the morgue watches. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the Time Lords rise from the dead. Whereas the Doctor’s previous regenerations were usually portrayed as dramatic but natural, here they are deliberately portrayed as something monstrous. But again most of what is threatening about the Doctor is channelled into the Master: his dead body does not remain whole, but turns into “dirt”, then into an amorphous gelid mass (something that defies categorisation altogether), then this gelid mass turns into a snake, and finally it corrupts a human body. The villain carries the burden of representation and catharsis, he is much of what is excluded from the Human: the Dead, the radically Other, the Animal, Disease and Insanity. But this exclusion does not serve to reinforce the concept of “human”, the hero it purifies is already post-human, and all that remains is to define this new, post-human identity. Like the rest of the series, the movie never fully arrives at this definition.
5.3. “Human Nature” / “Family of Blood” (2007)
The episodes “Human Nature” and “Family of Blood” are among the most interesting for a posthumanist reading. In these episodes, the Doctor is faced with a powerful alien enemy, the “Family of Blood”. Instead of fighting them, he uses a piece of Time Lord technology, a so-called chameleon arch, to disguise himself as a human being. The arch turns his body biologically human – a change that is “invisible” in so far as he always looks human – and removes his Time Lord intellect, his memories and his personality from the human body. These essential but nonphysical parts of himself are stored in a fob-watch, and will be returned to him as soon as he opens it. Posthumanisation, and its reverse, “becoming human” are represented not as a gradual processes, but an event, a discontinuity, a sudden re-definition.
The human who results from this is John Smith, a school-teacher in 1913 England who has no memory of ever having been a Time Lord. This plot reveals a number of basic assumptions about embodiment. Firstly, the mind is embodied, but can be separated from the body and “stored” in a different physical prosthesis, here a piece of technology, the fob-watch. Secondly, the human body is ill-equipped to function as a prosthesis for a post- or superhuman mind (compare “The Parting of the Ways” and “Journey’s End”) – the Doctor cannot be human and himself at the same time. This also reveals a hierarchy between human bodies and technology: the latter is superior when it comes to the embodiment of post-human minds.
John Smith is represented as timid and he ultimately cannot defend himself and the students against the threat of the Family of Blood. On the other hand, he falls in love with the nurse Joan Redfern, and the episodes hint that if he stayed human, he would lead a long and happy life as a family man. The message seems to be that John Smith would be a happier person than the Doctor, but he could not be a hero, whereas the Doctor, because of his post-human nature, is stronger, but unhappier.
Another representation of this dichotomy is the episode “Utopia”. In this story, the Doctor and his companions travel to the end of the universe, where the remainders of humanity fight extinction. The biggest hope for humanity is the brilliant old Professor Yana, who is working feverishly to find a way to the fabled place Utopia. But it turns out that Yana also keeps a fob-watch. In truth, he is the Doctor’s mortal enemy, the Master. Before Yana can save humanity, he opens the fob-watch and turns into the evil Time Lord, whose first acts are to shoot Yana’s assistant and sabotage humanity. Unlike John Smith, Yana is definitely a better person than his Time Lord alter ego, and in his case, posthumanisation is a tragedy: again, the villain serves as a mirror image.
In the end, John Smith sacrifices his own chance at life, opens the fob-watch, releases the Doctor and turns into a Time Lord again to defeat the Family of Blood. Whereas staying human would be selfish and dangerous, giving up his humanity is traumatic but also heroic. It is also shown as a necessary choice here, something humans have to do to face the challenges and threats of life. The catalyst for posthumanisation is not the desire for power, but the threat of the Other. Finally, what the episodes imply is also that the Post-human has a desire to be human, a sort of nostalgia for a “simpler”, less powerful life. The Doctor, once he has tasted humanity, deeply resents having to be himself again, and cruelly punishes the Family of Blood.
But these two episodes make another statement about human nature, and perhaps one that is even more relevant for critical posthumanism than these issues of embodiment and choice.
The story is meant to be an examination of what it means to be human. John Smith is the average white male heterosexual humanist subject. “You are as human as they come,” companion Martha reassures him, but the audience knows it to be a lie. In truth, he is no more human than the Doctor. John Smith is fiction on the textual level just like the Doctor is fiction on the meta-textual level. He is created through technology, an artificial simulacrum of a human being, and since he fully believes in his own humanity, and finally even exhibits “symptoms” of being human in the humanist sense (free will, love, altruism), he is a Baudrillardian simulation of a human being. Human nature, that elusive thing that John Smith has and loses, that the Doctor desires, is revealed to be something created, invented, constructed, not an unchangeable, not an intrinsic property of something, but a temporary accomplishment.
Conclusions
Doctor Who reveals is a deep-seated insecurity about human nature, paired with a strong fascination with the idea of becoming something else. Whether taken at face-value or read against the grain, the series offers no final answers or message. It cannot, first of all because there are too many different authors and producers in its history, and no clear policy behind it, secondly because the transformation of humanism is not yet finished (and will perhaps never be) and finally because the show would end if it ever gave an answer and arrived at clear definitions. Its biggest capital is the undefined nature of its protagonist, the mystery which gives the Doctor his appeal, the titular question. But a posthumanist reading at least offers a mode for understanding the cultural significance of this unfinished definition process.
In a moment of irony, I listened to Big Finish's "Jubilee" yesterday, which I realised says much of what I'm saying, only it's more fun and more eloquent. I feel... redundant, now.
A POSTHUMANIST READING OF DOCTOR WHO
Definition: Posthumanism and post-human
Humanism has for the last five hundred years been a dominant worldview or philosophy that assumes that "'Man' naturally stands at the centre of things," that 'man' is "distinct from – and superior to – animals and machines" and that 'man' "shares with all other human beings a universal essence." To a humanist, all humans are on a basic level the same. They share essential traits and should have equal rights. Humanism also assumes that what it means to be human is incontestable and immutable. On the other hand, in the humanist worldview, humans are fundamentally different from everything else, and this is what gives our life meaning. Thus, humanism devalues any form of existence that is not human. Another aspect of humanism is that it is a Western philosophy and thus implicitly considers Western culture the epitome of "human nature" and for most of its history, the humanist human was a heterosexual white male without physical or mental impairments.
Seeing the problems inherent to this approach, posthumanism is critique, a continuation or an alternative to humanism, which aims to re-examine the humanist definition of "human", and show that it is a vague and obsolete concept, and tries to adapt our view of who we are to postmodern conditions. These conditions include technological developments which either allow us to change ourselves and our environment (bio-, info-, cogno-, nanotechnology), scientific developments which change our view of concepts like "human", "animal", "intelligence" and so on, and socio-political developments like globalisation, post-colonialisation and emancipation. While humanism isolates and idealises the human, posthumanism "seeks to recover the complex ways in which humans are entangled with non-humans" such as animals or machines, and while humanism sees "human" as a well-defined and static concept, posthumanism includes the possibility of change with the accompanying dangers, fears, desires and possibilities.
If the subject of humanism is the human, then the subject of posthumanism is the post-human. This does not necessarily have to be that which comes after the human, or some future development of humanity. It can also mean entities that already exist but are seen as sub-, super-, pre-, in- or trans-human.
Introduction [Note: Who fans can skip a lot of this]
Doctor Who was conceived by the BBC as a science-fiction family programme and is now the longest-running science-fiction series in the world: it ran from 1963 to 1989 and after a hiatus of sixteen years was continued in 2005 and is still running. Like many children’s stories it has elements of a coming-of-age story. It is a story about identity, and finding one’s identity, both for the alien Doctor and his human companions. But this identity, even in the title, is in question, and it is not quite human. The title asks, “Doctor Who?” and it has never yet quite been answered. The both the human and the post-human identity are still arriving.
The initial cast of characters consisted of Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, British school teachers, who follow one of their pupils, Susan Foreman, into a police box in a scrap yard after suspecting that something is not right with her. As it turns out, the blue 1950s police box is actually a TARDIS - a machine capable of time and space travel, and Susan and her grandfather, the mysterious Doctor, are time travellers from another planet. The Doctor kidnaps Barbara and Ian and an odyssey through time and space begins.
In the following years, the show's concept developed further. Susan and her grandfather were revealed to be aliens of a race called Time Lords, and exiles from their own planet. The TARDIS showed signs of sentience. The Doctor changed from a threatening and deceitful, almost villainous figure into a more benign if still mysterious character. Speaking in terms of archetypes, he always remains caught between Trickster and Wise Old Man. In the beginning, his motivation is simply to keep himself and Susan safe, but the character turns also out to be an explorer, and then gradually becomes a heroic figure, fighting monsters and righting wrongs. Most importantly, though, the cast of Doctor Who became fluid, enabling it to go on for such a long time. The only constant of the series became the Doctor and his TARDIS, whereas his "companions", usually young humans, usually only lasted for a number of serials. Keeping the Doctor as the central character became possible because the producers found a way to have him portrayed by different actors: when a Time Lord is killed or dies of old age, their body “regenerates”, and a new actor takes on the role. Each regeneration has a different appearance and personality, but the audience is still expected to see them as one continuous person, and most long-time viewers do.
1. Doctor Who as a humanist text
In many ways, Doctor Who is a typical example of a humanist science fiction text. While the underlying morals are not as codified and explicit as for example in Star Trek with its mission statement and ethical directives, certain key humanist values are evident: compassion, trust, courage, individuality and free will. In the beginning, the Doctor is a hostile force because he does not display these traits. Typically, the environment that fosters these qualities in him is that of a family (the core social unit in which a child is socialised): the white, human, hetero-normative pair of Ian and Barbara, and his grandchild Susan. This motif of "becoming human" is recurring in the series, which as mentioned above, is a coming-of-age tale. Representing the child growing up, though, are not just the youthful companions, but also the old Doctor. Once the Doctor has become the hero of the show, it is easy to dismiss his biological (and psychological) peculiarities as fanciful scene-dressing, a trope of the genre, and simply read the Doctor as a non-conformist, a member of the upper class who partly rejects his privilege to lead the life of a bohemian, intellectual adventurer. This view of him fits firmly into the image of the traditional humanist subject: a male white individualist, fighting inhuman monsters.
2. Monster Theory: Time Lords as post-humans
But it would be just as easy to read the Doctor as a post-human figure. Time Lords are able to regenerate because their bodies have been modified with the help of technology: they are genetically manipulated beings, always already artificial. They live in a near-symbiotic relationship with semi-sentient machines, the TARDISes. In the new 2005 series, the TARDIS has become an explicitly organic machine, something that “is grown” (The Impossible Planet, 2006) and has a heart (The Parting of the Ways, 2006), but also clearly technological parts: the time machine itself is a cyborg. To further illustrate this, nearly all of Jeffrey J. Cohen’s theses about the figure of the monster (Cohen, 1996, p. 3 – 26) can be applied to the Doctor or his species.
According to the first thesis, the monster is a cultural body, a product of its time. The ten different actors, and the multiple eras of Doctor Who always “go with the times”, since pop culture and children’s television needs to be up-to-date. Thesis two claims that the monster always escapes, dies and returns. Time Lords regenerate, dying and returning over and over again. The show itself has undergone many such transformations, and at least one big return. Thesis three: the monster escapes categorisation and appears at a time of crisis. Within the text, the Doctor is a radical individualist, a being with a mysterious past and no proper name, a “renegade” of his own species. He usually deals with crises or even causes them simply by appearing within a stable system. From a meta-textual perspective, Doctor Who was created in the early Sixties, a time of nascent social upheaval, and the whole series occupies almost the entire period of postmodernity with its rapid social and technological changes.
Thesis three: the monster is a hybrid creature and an “incorporation of the Outside” (Cohen, 1996. P. 7). Within the narrative of the show, the Doctor and his TARDIS serve as a plot device to get the human heroes into contact with the Outside and the Beyond, but they are themselves already part of this other world. The first “unearthly” creatures that the human heroes encounter are the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan. Furthermore, the character of the Doctor is actually a hybrid being consisting of (at the moment) ten different bodies and personalities. This fluid, discontinuous character does to a certain extent defy the traditional “rules” of what a “character” should be, and thus is a step towards the radical Other.
Cohen’s fifth thesis sees the monster as a force of prohibition, a being that through its forbidding presence limits human endeavour. Sometimes, the Doctor acts as a limiting force, aborting those human (and alien) endeavours he judges to be immoral. Less obvious, but even more limiting, is the way the Doctor’s otherness is portrayed. As often as not, the Doctor is an anti-hero and a tragic figure – at the same time as he makes a monstrous, post-human existence a possibility, he also limits its desirability, which explains why the show has always needed a human companion as more comfortable identification figure. Frequently, a limiting role within the text is also given to the Time Lords, who serve as a rather oppressive temporal police, judging and condemning changes of the “timeline”, while at the same time turning history into just another text, but one for which they claim sole authorship and copyright.
However, the Time Lords are depicted as bureaucrats, police, judges, and so on (even their criminals call themselves such things as “Doctor”, “Master” or “Meddling Monk”, echoing institutions such as the clinic or the church) and their main seat of government is probably not arbitrarily called the “Panopticon” (The Deadly Assassin, 197?) - every Time Lord is under constant surveillance(Trial of a Time Lord, 1986), and everything is recorded in their archive, the Matrix (The Deadly Assassin, 197?). They could be read as a take on Foucault’s controlling systems of power-knowledge. Critiques of humanist thinking target many of the issues Foucault points out. This kind of oppressive society tries to exclude everything that is sick, criminal, deviant or Other. This means that the post-human protagonist originates, quite fittingly, from a form of humanist system. It shows that the oppressors are also identical with the monsters. They are what they try to exclude and produce the kind of being they condemn.
Cohen’s sixth thesis also obviously applies to the Doctor, as Cohen sees the monster as an object of escapist desires and transgression fantasies. Thus, the portrayal of the show’s central character has both a subversive and a containing influence on the audience. Finally, Cohen defines the monster as that which we create and could one day become – in a word, the post-human.
3. Representations of the Human
If the protagonist is no longer human, then where are the humans in this text? They are his sidekicks. Of the Doctor’s 33 companions, 29 have been human or human-looking aliens, two (Susan and Romana) have been Time Lords, two (K9 and Kamelion) have been robots, 23 have been female and 9 have been male (if we do not count robots as gendered). That means that the representatives of “ordinary” humanity have been female at least two times out of three. Initially, the companions tended to be very humanist figures. Some of the Doctor's companions have been from the past, from the future or from non-Western cultures and yet none of them are fundamentally different from "present-day" companions. Similarly, when the Doctor visits the end of the universe in the year 100 trillion (Utopia, 2007), humanity still is the same. Their human nature is static.
This has notably changed in the new series. The first companion (for only two episodes) we see transformed into a post-human is Adam, who during an adventure in the future acquires cybernetic implants without the Doctor’s permission, and is promptly thrown out of the TARDIS as punishment – but allowed to keep the implants. In the episode The Parting of the Ways (2005) companion Jack gets shot and apparently killed, and in the last minute his other companion Rose looks into the “heart” of the TARDIS and gains deus-ex-machina (literally) superpowers that enable her to destroy the Dalek army and revive Jack. As a result Jack (in the spin-off series Torchwood, in which he is the lead character) has lost the ability to die. This character also challenges traditional humanist ideas through his omni-sexuality and the glimpses we get of his future fate: eventually, he turns into the “Face of Boe”, a giant, non-human head.
But while Jack and Adam allowed to keep their post-human identity, Rose has to give her power up quickly. Significantly, the Doctor takes this power away with a kiss. A similar fate is shared by companion Donna, who in the episode “Journey’s End” gains the mind and intelligence of a Time Lord, enabling her to control the TARDIS and save the world. Again, the Doctor points out that this power would kill her, and takes away not only her Time Lord powers, but also her memories of her adventures with him. On the one hand, we see emancipation at work, catching up with humanism: humanity is predominantly female in this text. On the other hand, the male heroes have already made the steps towards a post-human future. Their bodies get changed and enhanced, whereas the women have to be purified if they get contaminated with anything technological or alien. Posthumanisation, whether it is portrayed as positive or negative, means power, and that is not permitted to the heroines.
4. Villains and Monsters: the “bad” post-humans
Not only is Doctor Who’s main protagonist a distinctly post-human figure, but so are its antagonists. Texts in which both the hero and the antagonist are non-human are rare in the time of humanism (Milton’s Paradise Lost, Spenser’s The Fairie Queene) and perhaps symptomatic of pre-humanist and post-humanist contexts (entire bodies of pre-modern mythology, narratives about demi-gods like The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Ramayana, fairy-tales, but also post-modern pop-culture texts such as Buffy, superhero fiction or the Matrix).
While the worlds of Star Trek or Star Wars abound with alien species, most of these, be they friends or foes, are seen as people. The stories of Doctor Who, on the other hand, are populated by creatures that look frightening, are either non-sentient or irredeemably evil, creatures that are not defined as “people” and can thus be fought and killed without moral issues for the heroes. The Doctor has a “no killing” policy, but this does not extend to all species. Some of these monsters are immensely popular, especially with the younger audiences, and make up a huge percentage of the surrounding franchise. The most popular are the Daleks (first appearance: The Daleks, 1963) and the Cybermen (first appearance: The Tenth Planet, 1966).
4.1. The Daleks
The Daleks combine two key elements of post-human development as imagined by modern society: they are cyborgs and genetic mutants. The First Doctor and his companions first encountered them on their home planet Skaro (in a story clearly based on Wells The Time Machine), a world devastated by nuclear war, and inhabited by the peaceful, human-looking Thals and the aggressive and xenophobic Daleks. The Daleks have been turned into slimy blobs with tentacles by the radiation, so in order to move and fight, they live in metal casings. The only desire of the Daleks is to conquer the cosmos and exterminate all non-Dalek life. The Daleks are the Doctor’s deadliest foe, and there is no other species in the universe that he fears and hates quite this much. The Daleks represent the technological anxieties and desires of our time at their most primitive (and therefore most powerful) level: they are a nightmare of being turned into something inhuman, but they are also a power fantasy. It has been pointed out (Bignell, 2007) that this is why they appeal so strongly to children. The Daleks are the Id unrestrained, children without moral or parental supervision.
4.2. The Cybermen
The Cybermen appeared a bit later than the Daleks, and were never quite as popular with the audience, or as successful as foils for the heroes. They are the prototypical cyborg race: human(oid) beings who have augmented their bodies with technology, and in the process lost all emotion. In their first origin story they come from a planet that occupies the same orbit around the sun as Earth, in their second origin story (The Age of Steel, 2006) they are humans from Earth in a parallel universe. The new series also shows the first step of human-to-Cyberman conversion: headsets and mobile phones that merge with their users. In the twenty-first century, technological anxieties have become much more concrete, but also tinged with a self-conscious taste of irony. Another new aspect shows up in the spin-off series Torchwood in the form of the first Cyberwoman, updating both human and post-human imagery with some political correctness. The most threatening aspect of the Cybermen remains that while the worst a Dalek will to do you is kill you, the Cybermen want to cyber-convert all life to make it like them. The same motif was (years) later picked up by Star Trek in the form of the Borg.
And unlike the Daleks, who at least derive some enjoyment out of their monstrous state, the Cybermen are emotionless, and therefore not suitable for a power fantasy. While the Daleks look less human than the Cybermen, their personality is only reduced, whereas the Cybermen are completely devoid of it. Since they are much less popular than the Daleks, this proves what we may already suspect: personality and emotions are more important for the humanist self-image and viewer identification than physical appearance.
Neil Badmington (2000) identifies psychoanalysis among the initial “threats” to humanism, because it questions the idea that reason is the uniting and principal trait of human existence. The subconscious is decidedly unreasonable. The “fall” of reason as the sole identifier of humanity is evident also in the concept of the Cybermen. The Daleks are human beings stripped of all their higher functions of (ethical) reason, leaving behind only the savage subconscious without moral imperatives. The Cybermen are human beings stripped of their subconscious, leaving behind only cold, unfeeling reason, moral imperatives (they regard conversion as an act of altruism) without subjectivity or compassion. Both species are incomplete, to be human, they would need both reason and the unreasonable. In order to update itself, humanism needs to integrate the subconscious into its view of the human.
4.3. The Master
What role these monsters play in the negotiation of the Doctor’s identity (and thus the human and the post-human identity) becomes most evident in the case of the Master. Like the Doctor, he is a Time Lord and a renegade. If the Daleks are the Doctor’s worst enemy, then the Master is his most personal nemesis. Throughout the series he undergoes a number of monstrous transformations, hybridisations and contaminations: he burns to a half-dead corpse, inhabits a machine and stolen alien and human bodies, becomes infected with a virus that turns him into a savage animal hybrid, is killed again and returns as an amorphous gelid mass, dies again and is resurrected by the Time Lords, turns himself human – all a grotesque mirror image of the Doctor’s “normal” regenerations.
The Master serves as an outlet for all that which is frightening and monstrous about the Doctor, he is a negative image, a Jungian Shadow, a dark double of the hero. Not just the Master is the Doctor’s shadow self, but in a sense, all monsters in the text are. Usually, monsters represent that which we wish to exclude from ourselves, here, they represent the “bad” aspects not of the human, but of the post-human, thus allowing the show to have a “good” post-human hero.
5. Example readings
5.1. “The Evil of the Daleks” (1966)
With all this in mind, we can turn to a more in-depth analysis of individual stories from Doctor Who’s long history. “The Evil of the Daleks” is in many ways still symptomatic for humanist science-fiction. In it, the Daleks steal the Doctor’s TARDIS to force him to help them in an experiment. The Victorian Professor Waterfield describes the Daleks arrival: “creatures burst out of the cabinet, invaded the house, took away my daughter”. In one sentence, the Daleks are defined as monsters, playing on our most primal fears. But their aims are less simple.
MAXTIBLE: They, I mean the Daleks, tell me they have always been defeated by human beings.
DOCTOR: In the long run, yes.
MAXTIBLE: Possibly because of some factor possessed by human beings which is absent in Daleks? Perhaps they want to find out what it is, and transplant it into their race.
The Daleks want to test a human. The Doctor manipulates Jamie into taking part in the test, deliberately making him angry so he will give his best performance. In the test, Jamie manages to outwit his enemy and make a friend out of his attacker Kemel, which leads to success: they rescue Waterfield’s daughter. Based on this experiment, the Doctor distils the “human factor” and implants it into three Dalek test subjects. Maxtible explains: “Every feeling, every thought and impulse you had during your attempted rescue of Victoria Waterfield was recorded”, however, these are implanted into the Daleks as technology. A “positronic brain” holds the human-factor. The experiment is successful; the “human Daleks” play, they are friendly, they have a sense of humour, they question orders, they are childlike but will grow up, they are individuals with names. “Human” is defined a mode of behaviour. The human Daleks and the Doctor and his friends travel to Skaro, where the Emperor Dalek reveals the true purpose of the experiment: “The human factor has shown us what the Dalek factor was. Without knowing, you have shown the Daleks what their own strength is.” The Emperor explains the dynamic through which oppositions define each other. In the end, the human-factor Daleks start a civil war against their brothers, which the Doctor hopes will be their final destruction.
Unlike in “The Enemy Within” (1999), the opposition in this story is still human vs. Other. But as in “Human Nature” (2007) “human” is a quality that can be achieved and simulated, and transferred into aliens and machines. If the story were truly humanist, then the “human factor” could not be transferred into Daleks. But it can, and thus calls into question what about this factor is truly “human”. The borders between human and other are not nearly as clear as they seem. The role humans play in the negotiation of their identity is already marginal, the true agency lies with the Doctor and the Emperor Dalek.
5.2. “The Enemy Within” (1999)
After the series was terminated by the BBC in 1989 during Sylvester McCoy’s tenure as the seventh Doctor, an attempt to revive it was made in 1996 the form of the television movie with the title “The Enemy Within”. It was a co-production of British and American networks, and was meant to serve as the pilot for a new, American Doctor Who series. The movie starts with McCoy’s seventh Doctor, who is taking the ashes of the Master back to their home planet after the Daleks have executed the Master. But the ashes transform into slimy mass that slips into the TARDIS and causes it to crash in San Francisco in 1999. As soon as the Doctor walks out onto the street, he is shot by teenage gang members. Not quite dead, he is taken to a hospital, where the doctor Grace Holloway kills him on the operating table because his physique is not human. In the morgue, the Doctor regenerates into his eighth self. Parallel to this sequence, the sentient remains of the Master invade a human home and possess the body of a human male, which he then uses to try and steal the Doctor’s “remaining regenerations”. This theme of death and resurrection runs through the whole movie: during the climatic fight in the TARDIS, Grace and one of the gang members are killed by the Master and then resurrected by the TARDIS.
The different target audience, different producers, different format and higher production values led to a slightly different Doctor Who. Apparently, the producers felt that an alien, mysterious, asexual hero was too strange, and gave him a romance with Grace and had him claim to be “half-human on my mother’s side” (again humanity is coded as female). The awareness of the Doctor’s strangeness remains clearly visible, though, and the whole movie is concerned with defining and purifying him. The Doctor’s regeneration sequence and the Master’s possession are juxtaposed with scenes from a Frankenstein movie that a security guard in the morgue watches. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the Time Lords rise from the dead. Whereas the Doctor’s previous regenerations were usually portrayed as dramatic but natural, here they are deliberately portrayed as something monstrous. But again most of what is threatening about the Doctor is channelled into the Master: his dead body does not remain whole, but turns into “dirt”, then into an amorphous gelid mass (something that defies categorisation altogether), then this gelid mass turns into a snake, and finally it corrupts a human body. The villain carries the burden of representation and catharsis, he is much of what is excluded from the Human: the Dead, the radically Other, the Animal, Disease and Insanity. But this exclusion does not serve to reinforce the concept of “human”, the hero it purifies is already post-human, and all that remains is to define this new, post-human identity. Like the rest of the series, the movie never fully arrives at this definition.
5.3. “Human Nature” / “Family of Blood” (2007)
The episodes “Human Nature” and “Family of Blood” are among the most interesting for a posthumanist reading. In these episodes, the Doctor is faced with a powerful alien enemy, the “Family of Blood”. Instead of fighting them, he uses a piece of Time Lord technology, a so-called chameleon arch, to disguise himself as a human being. The arch turns his body biologically human – a change that is “invisible” in so far as he always looks human – and removes his Time Lord intellect, his memories and his personality from the human body. These essential but nonphysical parts of himself are stored in a fob-watch, and will be returned to him as soon as he opens it. Posthumanisation, and its reverse, “becoming human” are represented not as a gradual processes, but an event, a discontinuity, a sudden re-definition.
The human who results from this is John Smith, a school-teacher in 1913 England who has no memory of ever having been a Time Lord. This plot reveals a number of basic assumptions about embodiment. Firstly, the mind is embodied, but can be separated from the body and “stored” in a different physical prosthesis, here a piece of technology, the fob-watch. Secondly, the human body is ill-equipped to function as a prosthesis for a post- or superhuman mind (compare “The Parting of the Ways” and “Journey’s End”) – the Doctor cannot be human and himself at the same time. This also reveals a hierarchy between human bodies and technology: the latter is superior when it comes to the embodiment of post-human minds.
John Smith is represented as timid and he ultimately cannot defend himself and the students against the threat of the Family of Blood. On the other hand, he falls in love with the nurse Joan Redfern, and the episodes hint that if he stayed human, he would lead a long and happy life as a family man. The message seems to be that John Smith would be a happier person than the Doctor, but he could not be a hero, whereas the Doctor, because of his post-human nature, is stronger, but unhappier.
Another representation of this dichotomy is the episode “Utopia”. In this story, the Doctor and his companions travel to the end of the universe, where the remainders of humanity fight extinction. The biggest hope for humanity is the brilliant old Professor Yana, who is working feverishly to find a way to the fabled place Utopia. But it turns out that Yana also keeps a fob-watch. In truth, he is the Doctor’s mortal enemy, the Master. Before Yana can save humanity, he opens the fob-watch and turns into the evil Time Lord, whose first acts are to shoot Yana’s assistant and sabotage humanity. Unlike John Smith, Yana is definitely a better person than his Time Lord alter ego, and in his case, posthumanisation is a tragedy: again, the villain serves as a mirror image.
In the end, John Smith sacrifices his own chance at life, opens the fob-watch, releases the Doctor and turns into a Time Lord again to defeat the Family of Blood. Whereas staying human would be selfish and dangerous, giving up his humanity is traumatic but also heroic. It is also shown as a necessary choice here, something humans have to do to face the challenges and threats of life. The catalyst for posthumanisation is not the desire for power, but the threat of the Other. Finally, what the episodes imply is also that the Post-human has a desire to be human, a sort of nostalgia for a “simpler”, less powerful life. The Doctor, once he has tasted humanity, deeply resents having to be himself again, and cruelly punishes the Family of Blood.
But these two episodes make another statement about human nature, and perhaps one that is even more relevant for critical posthumanism than these issues of embodiment and choice.
The story is meant to be an examination of what it means to be human. John Smith is the average white male heterosexual humanist subject. “You are as human as they come,” companion Martha reassures him, but the audience knows it to be a lie. In truth, he is no more human than the Doctor. John Smith is fiction on the textual level just like the Doctor is fiction on the meta-textual level. He is created through technology, an artificial simulacrum of a human being, and since he fully believes in his own humanity, and finally even exhibits “symptoms” of being human in the humanist sense (free will, love, altruism), he is a Baudrillardian simulation of a human being. Human nature, that elusive thing that John Smith has and loses, that the Doctor desires, is revealed to be something created, invented, constructed, not an unchangeable, not an intrinsic property of something, but a temporary accomplishment.
Conclusions
Doctor Who reveals is a deep-seated insecurity about human nature, paired with a strong fascination with the idea of becoming something else. Whether taken at face-value or read against the grain, the series offers no final answers or message. It cannot, first of all because there are too many different authors and producers in its history, and no clear policy behind it, secondly because the transformation of humanism is not yet finished (and will perhaps never be) and finally because the show would end if it ever gave an answer and arrived at clear definitions. Its biggest capital is the undefined nature of its protagonist, the mystery which gives the Doctor his appeal, the titular question. But a posthumanist reading at least offers a mode for understanding the cultural significance of this unfinished definition process.
In a moment of irony, I listened to Big Finish's "Jubilee" yesterday, which I realised says much of what I'm saying, only it's more fun and more eloquent. I feel... redundant, now.
