Doctor Who? What's He Talking About? Performativity and the First Doctor

When the Daleks create a replicant Doctor in The Chase (1965), they are perhaps aware that the repeat-act brings instability and danger to the conventional order [...] A perilous performative? … more, to borrow one of Austin’s terms, an ‘unhappy’ one.

This chapter addresses the question of his identity using the concept of ‘performativity’ as initially formulated by Austin (1962) and reworked by Derrida (1988) and Butler (1990). There is no interest here in how the First Doctor becomes the second, third or nth, but rather in how the First Doctor becomes himself [...]

This method of enquiry will reveal that William Hartnell’s characterization is not uniquely his property, but is simultaneously the Doctor and the mark of the Doctor, a mark that leaves the Doctor open to the perils of appropriation. Such appropriation manifests itself in the programme [...] as well as in the many comics, novels, fan fiction and audio books published since. All authors of such work draw from a conventional sign-system of verbal and non-verbal languages that performatively enact the character of the Doctor, some more faithfully than others.

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