You’ve nearly 800 words to get through before I mention Doctor Who again. Buckle up.
The Genesis of Meaning
Roland Barthes, in the latter half of the 20th century, was, with Foucault and Derrida, one of the triumvirate of French post-structuralists, philosophers of meaning, who traced what underpinned the axiomatic cultural cues that had hitherto been largely unexamined. They accepted the structure of meaning that came from Saussure’s interrogation of how language created meaning, but insisted the meaning was generated by the reader rather than the author, because of the many broad impacts of culture upon meaning that could well be beyond what the author intended. You may have heard the phrase “death of the author” which is how Barthes expressed this – whatever the author may place and intend, what really mattered was what the reader apprehended, and that could be informed by any number of associations beyond the author’s express intention. Barthes was probably the most accessible of the three outside of academia, his ruminations upon soap powder being rather more readily digested than either of the other pair’s interrogation of classical texts or archaeology.
From the advertising copy for soap powders Barthes would infer deep seated prejudices of the dominant culture (French, for him, although Western culture generally), regarding race and empire, or gender, or whatever might emerge as axiomatic (that is, so ubiquitous and given as to never be questioned), and, therefore, not usually picked apart and tested. It was, however, these very axioms that advertisers sought to pluck and have resonate for you so that you might be persuaded to part with your cash. You might not be registering these cultural cues, but they spoke to you. They were part of how you constructed meaning, even if you didn’t realise it. Culture was a system of signs which, like words, generated meaning. This relationship of signs was called semiotics.
But there’s the rub: when tested, the axiomatic can tell you a great deal about what an individual cultural producer, or, in indeed, an entire culture, are meticulously avoiding confronting, what they are determinedly NOT talking about. It isn’t a matter of conscious evasion – the culture loads some prejudices so deeply that, without exerting effort, for many they can’t even be recognised. Interrogating the semiotics of culture could give a way of seeing the deeper grammar of culture, the meanings beneath the meanings we might first register.
Barthes would trace meaning, implication, resonance, consequence. Nothing would simply be, everything was built on something else. One might put it this way – he would not believe the world to be a disc, riding a turtle, riding four elephants, not least because of the inevitable implied question: “what are the elephants standing on?”. Many would wish to dismiss this problem and simply suggest that “it’s elephants all the way down”, the couple of levels of amphibian / pachyderm narrative sufficient to get them through the night. And why not? That’s largely how we did it for thousands of years, from Isis and Horus to the Garden of Eden to Kali: a culture would provide a narrative that put something there should a question be asked for which there was, then at least, no answer, and which the culture would then invest in as a mass psychosis almost, just to park the existential angst.
Then came The Enlightenment, and picking things to pieces would become a veritable virtue. Cutting things up to see how they worked, molecules, then atoms, and then even realising that “atom” was a misnomer cos you could go even smaller. Possibly even to ethereal resonating strings. Possibly. Reality itself might be entirely counter-intuitive, indeed, quantum mechanics might even suggest it was contingent upon observation.
Makes turtle bearing elephants look downright pedestrian.
The classical world had wrought civilisation out of embracing and imposing axioms, creating a consensus out of nothing, upon which they built societies. It was brutal, but it worked, but that could only take us so far. Then came The Enlightenment, science, medicine, mass literacy, which then led to population explosion, worldwide commerce, and competition on a whole new scale. Understanding become more important than blind acceptance in order to cultivate social cohesion. Science took over from religion. Wisdom was not to be bestowed, instead understanding was to be sought, understanding how things worked, how they related to each other and so, in terms of physics, what matter was made of, and, in terms of culture, what was the stuff from which meaning was made.
It became important to understand the implications of convincing people to buy your soap powder by invoking resonances. Which resonances? Well, blackness, whiteness, burning away contagion, the same resonances that had served as apologia for empire, rapine and murder.
The high watermark of this semiotic interrogation of culture was probably the1980s. A lot has happened since. Most saliently, we are now in what some call the “post truth” era, where meaning melts into soup, and tribes that cleave uncritically to axioms are, in what is a fundamental betrayal of the Enlightenment project, taking hold again, to a degree which risks ushering in a new Dark Age.
Confusion of the Doctor
Doctor Who is now 60 years old, and there have just aired three specials in celebration, or, to be more precise, three specials and a Children in Need (CiN) skit, all featuring the 14th Doctor, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the 10th Doctor, because they’re both played by David Tennant.
The third special featured The Toymaker, an eternal, elemental being from outside of our universe for whom physics does not apply. Godlike in power, his merest whim is made manifest.
Inadvertently summoned by the Doctor at the edge of the universe from the void beyond, he rocks up on earth, and utilising TV to feed humanity a suggestion that spurs them to psychotic levels of certainty, a madness of homicidal paranoia and conspiracy descends, all humanity driven beyond any engagement with their fellows unless it’s combative, all entirely retreating into their own personal certainty, unmitigated by any reference to evidence, reason, to any meaning.
In the finest traditions of Doctor Who, it is a parable attuned to our time, to what our culture is doing right now.
There is one little problem, however, and that is this – over the course of the four (including the Children in Need skit) episodes of this 14th Doctor’s run, Russel T. Davis (RTD), showrunner and writer, exhibits exactly the flight from meaning and resort to dogmatic certainty that he would satirise.
The Point of the Daleks
It starts with Davros in the CiN skit. Davros is not in a wheelchair. Davros is walking around. I had simply assumed that this was presenting Davros before he suffered the missile strike that nearly killed him (this is all gone into back in 1975s Genesis of the Daleks), but then, in the accompanying behind the scenes show Doctor Who Unleashed RTD says that this is a decision about not presenting the disabled as evil.
Now, in one sense there is an argument from semiotics here which I accept, and that is as regards unconscious prejudice directed at the disabled, but I would contend that the semiotics of disability and morality are, when confronting a legacy matter, better served by addressing who and what Davros is, confront the fact that there was a time when popular culture was a much more unexamined axiomatic landscape, and then explore within the narrative precisely why we wouldn’t do it that way now. The story of changing mores in civilisation is the story of the progressive project, what informed us into being what we are now. It is important to understand that story.
Together with this we ought to take the opportunity to present more positive roles for the disabled, something RTD does do in two of these episodes in the character of Ruth, a wheelchair using scientist with UNIT, and therefore an ally to The Doctor. A “goodie”, if you like. RTD quite evidently finds the semiotic inheritance of 60 years of history, and some mores that are, shall we say, less aware than ours, to be difficult, possibly embarrassing. This is a great pity, because they present the opportunity to tell the story of our culture through that time, but that opportunity is cast aside, in favour of attempt to brush the whole matter under the carpet; that wheelchair thing, it never happened, no, you didn’t see it, I didn’t see it, honest, guv, I wasn’t even there!
The implication being that we were never the people who would do that. But, we were the people who did that.
If you’re going to rewrite history, however, there’s a great stinker of a difficulty, and that is the Daleks themselves. The BBC, and now Disney (they now co-produce), are not going to do away with The Daleks (although, please, rest them a bit – they had two appearances during the entire seven year run of Tom Baker, and that was one of the very best periods for DW). The Daleks are mutated Kaleds, they are not robots. Inside that casing there is a mutated – disabled if you like – humanoid, and they’re evil as only metaphors for Nazis can be. So, the semiotic logic RTD is following would require him to never have the Daleks appear ever again, and for all that I’m an advocate for their being used sparingly, doing away with them entirely is a bit stupid. They – as Nazi analogues – are the counter to the Enlightenment figure of the doctor, the doctrinal tribal bigots to his / her progressive explorer scientist. They don’t have to appear in a story to provide this counterweight, we all know about Doctor Who and the Daleks. The Doctor carries the resonance of their encounters whoever s/he’s facing down this Saturday.
Therefore, the silly ducking of the issue of disability regarding Davros is intellectually dishonest on two fronts – firstly, in the attempt to pretend that our culture doesn’t bear a problematic set of inherited axioms, and, secondly, if the Daleks are to be still around at all, then the sanitisation of Davros is immediately subverted, redundant and meaningless on every level.
The Curse of History
However, this isn’t the end of the well-intentioned but ill thought through treatment of disability. In Wild Blue Yonder, the middle of the specials proper, there is a pre-credits prelude which, so far, seems to be unconnected to anything else. The Doctor and Donna happen upon Newton and, yes, he’s under the apple tree they crash into. So far, so Doctor Who. However, the Newton portrayed n Doctor Who is charming and deemed to be “hot”. The fact is, however, that Newton was a miserable git, indeed, it has been widely conjectured that he was on the autistic spectrum, and that his well-attested misanthropy was a symptom of his frustrations in a less enlightened age. What’s more, when you consider that a similar assessment has been ventured regarding Einstein, there emerges a narrative of a certain cast of mind being particularly well suited to a certain type of abstract thought. The nuerodivergent may have particular challenges that result in frustrations in daily life, but my – aren’t we all better off for them and what they’ve given us? Therefore, this re-writing of history to able-wash this towering intellectual figure as charming and “hot”, when he was actually frustrated and often miserable, is a far more profound attack upon those who vary from a given “norm”, especially when their very awkwardness is likely an effect of the very nuerodivergence that is likely the very well-spring of the incredible contribution they have made to civilisation.
Representation is important, and, as mentioned, we do see a positive role for a disabled character in person of Ruth of UNIT. The shenanigans around the status of Davros is well-intentioned, but very clumsily addressed, and then the same essential issues apparently fail to register at all with RTD as regards Newton, a far more egregious problem because Newton was astonishingly real and not just a fairy tale Hitler.
Which then brings us to the matter of race. Because this Newton, as well as charming and “hot”, is evidently Asian.
The Claws of Good Intentions
Again, I think I see what was intended here, but there’s a profound problem. The scene is set in 1666. Over the next hundred years Britain’s expansion of Empire rages across the globe, and Clive takes India, spurring a sequence of carnage that runs from that invasion to successive mutinies, to Amritsar, to partition. Had it been possible for an Asian to rise so high in British academia, to become an MP, indeed, to become trusted as the Master of the Royal Mint, would Clive have been given such rein in India? It is narratives of racial inferiority that permitted the slaughter such as us British visited upon empire.
Racial and cultural identities are not meaningless, history is not fluff. History is heavy with meaning and consequence. Racial and cultural identities have often been wielded as sticks with which to pummel people. Whitewashing this aspect of history is not progressive. Pretending that race never really mattered or meant anything to anyone is a lie. Telling the real story of people of colour through British history is progressive, but mixing it all up into meaningless soup is not. People died on the way here. That must be respected, and new generations must know of it.
Doctor Who has always confronted these prejudices, usually through analogues on distant planets, but it must be remembered that Capaldi’s Doctor was content to simply lamp a racial bigot of the early 1800s. Race, and the price of such thinking, is usually a plot point, through 6 decades of Doctor Who. It was not something to be dismissed. And, just as in the instance of Davros, the legacy of what we are as a culture is laid bare. As it should be. Because only then can it be properly addressed.
I’ve always appreciated this dimension to Doctor Who as a text. It was originally conceived to be about science and history, and thus were the first two stowaway companions a science teacher and a history teacher. Sure, the Reithian polemic has rather diluted over time, but it was never abandoned. This is still the BBC. It is still the job of Doctor Who to flag up such issues during the course of a good rollicking adventure yarn.
Revenge of the Semiotics
The semiotics of what we have told ourselves about race and disability (and gender identity and much besides) matter because they tells us what we are avoiding. In RTDs dismissal of the meaning and consequences of racial identity there seems to be an urge to avoid the harsh, nasty facts of imperialism and conquest. I wonder – and this is pure conjecture, but I think it fits – if it isn’t about a middle-class urge to create a distance in complicity with these horrible events? If so, that is not progressive. The post-enlightenment progressive must recognise their responsibilities. These issues demand they be looked right down the barrel. We are – distantly – complicit in the sins of empire, even us tofu-eating wokerati, and if we want to avoid repeating those sins, possibly even make some reparation for them, they can’t be fudged. They must be recognised and spoken of.
I fully recognise that many of the objections raised to RTD’s takes on disability and race on this matter on social media were not the objections I have raised here. A bigot can have apoplexy over these things, and I am not making common cause with them. However, there was a response made to racists and then to me which so catastrophically plays into the prejudice and idiocy of the bigot that it must be called out. It goes something like this –
“There’s a police box flying through time and space and the bit worrying you is Newton’s skin colour”.
The idiocy of this response MUST be confronted: the TARDIS is a fictional device, Newton was a real and culturally significant person, indeed, one of the most influential figures of the last 500 years. To compare and contrast them like this is a categorical error – but a telling one. People are falling to distinguish between fact and fiction. And, sure, Newton in Doctor Who need not be a rigorous biography (we’re here for fun!) but to wipe away the nuerodivergence that was likely essential to his great contributions to science, or to pretend that he didn’t live in an age of normalised racial division, is to do far more harm than any good. Autistics need to know that people like them have made massive contributions to the world, and ethnic minorities in Britain need it to be understood that they have had to make a fight some of us have not had to wage.
Yet RTD will assert his belief in the virtue of rewriting history into something that is simply false very stridently. His is an attitude that is quite prevalent, that re-writing our history in our cultural production is a good. It is well intentioned.
It is an end which will justify the means.
Doctor Who has repeatedly addressed the justification that the ends justify the means. Most pertinently, Davros will bring peace to the universe. He will do this by destroying all non Dalek life. Then the universe will know peace. Universal peace. The ends justify the means.
The critique of “the ends justifies the means” has been a trope of, not just Doctor Who, but speculative thinking generally, ever since the Nuremburg trials. The bad guys never believe they’re the bad guys, just that they’re the guys lumbered with the messy bits on the way to utopia.
The Dogmatists of Death
Of course, the dogmatism that emerges as sides dig into their respective trenches of the culture wars is more obvious in the ravings out on social media (and sometimes even the press media) against The Doctor being a woman, or The Doctor being black, or there being a trans character who is living in a family who are all being very ok with it. There, however, it’s much easier to rebut, because Doctor Who always expressed the Enlightment project of informing and entertaining, as defined originally by the generation who had known the horror of the trenches, and later insisted upon by the generation who defeated the Nazis. They would conjure fairy-tale cyborg Nazis in full body wheelchairs so that kids could be introduced to ideas such as the evils of racism and the necessity of resisting tyranny (and, by other means, explore gender politics for that matter). If you wish to take the view that narratives which suggest that racism is an evil and women should enjoy the same rights and status as men are “preachy”, well, I therefore promise you that Doctor Who has always been preachy. It has. There has often been a polemic undertow to Doctor Who. To employ an anachronism (and if you can’t do that when discussing Doctor Who, when can you?) Doctor Who has always been “woke”.
RTD recognises the modern tendency of a flight to certainty, to the axioms of the tribe, to the suspension of reason, to the abandoning of meaning in favour of feeling, but this hasn’t stopped him falling foul of it himself. Denying the neurdivergent their hero, cherry picking Davros from out amongst the Daleks in a way that denies what the Daleks themselves are and always have been, both these errors are the result of well-intentioned efforts to advance a progressive agenda, but, having abandoned meaning, he gets it wrong. The progressive effort is not a matter of picking a team and supporting it right or wrong. That was religion. It is, rather, an expression of a rational – and that’s important, it’s rational – morality. And a rational morality ought not be concerned with being nice, or convenient, because what makes it rational is the understanding that there are consequences and resonances, ripples. Consequences to sugar in tea, for instance. And those consequences are not only to what we decide and do. That which we decide and do are themselves the consequences of what people before us decided and did, often hundreds of years before we were born. It isn’t immediately apparent what something means, why some things happen – they must be examined.
The Ripples Through Time
All of these resonances and consequences may not resolve themselves to the convenience of our sensitivities, and that is something that must simply be accepted. Sometimes, the universe is telling you that you were the baddies. That doesn’t mean you have to stay the baddies. You can choose to progress. But, to become the goodies, you have to have an appreciation of what good and bad are. And pretending that nothing really means anything, and that it’s all a jolly, meaningless soup, won’t give you that.
It is therefore essential that we know who the people through history were. Who they really were. Even if that truth is uncomfortable. And the cues of understanding, the semiotics, are key to that. So, it really does matter that Newton was awkward and white, and pretending that Davros wasn’t disabled really does get in the way of understanding key issues of the latter half of the 20th century and now.
