‘Do We Need to Talk about Prince Harry?’

CROSS-DISCIPLINES, CROSS-PURPOSES?

This cross-disciplinary response to the call for papers combines an interest in care as a heavily laden term in the current COVID-19 context, with a consideration of the ways in which the concept of care might figure in the current tussle between critique and post-critique in the humanities. Critique is understood here as the conventional (arguably institutionalized) mode of critical engagement with texts in the humanities. Such engagement is generally understood to be underscored by an ethical concern with the political efficacy of texts, the very thing that proponents of post-critique view as overly suspicious and symptomatic readings. Championed by literary and cultural scholar, Rita Felski, post-critique encourages a reader to engage in thinking and feeling with a text, rather than against in what she refers to, after Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, as ‘the practice of suspicious reading’ (Felski 2015: 3). Within this debate we find ourselves drawn to the sensitivities of performance studies and its capacity to attend to the tender detail of vulnerable objects, often through the register of ambivalence, as a way to tease out how critique and post-critique might come together in what we are calling ‘careful critique’, rather than remain in their current oppositional state.¹ Careful critique does not shy away from the antagonisms between critique and post-critique. Rather, it adopts an approach that considers critique’s interrogation of the political and post-critique’s language of affect and attachment as necessary to meet both the demands of a complex ‘object’ as well as the ethical imperative of academic care.

The point of this essay is not merely to provoke. It is instead, to consider how we as critics and scholars might engage more effectively with complex ‘objects’ while acknowledging the importance of ambivalence in untangling the concept of care. This is an exploration we believe will be of value to those working across performance studies, literary studies and creative arts.

We situate our discussion around the first episode of The Me You Can’t See (Kapadia and Porter 2021) on Apple TV+, ‘Executive Produced by Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry’. The Me You Can’t See is a documentary series that follows the journeys of celebrities and non-celebrities alike as they discuss the impacts of personal trauma on their mental health and emotional well-being. The first episode opens with an intimate sit-down interview between Oprah and Prince Harry, whose story of trauma and recovery is interwoven throughout the rest of the show. The series has care – care of the self, care of others, carelessness and carefulness – as central tenets of its performance. By leaning into our ambivalence towards Harry as a member of the British Royal family, a celebrity and as he is situated in this show, a ‘survivor of trauma’, we argue that The Me You Can’t See is a performance in which care, critique and post-critique collide in ways that facilitate consideration of the complexity of each term and the importance of ‘taking care’ when approaching a text, whether literary, performative or other.

Felski understands critique as fundamentally insistent on reading texts ‘against the grain’ of their own (apparent/surface) arguments and on assuming an antagonistic stance towards the text (1). But critique – in this context – would approach the figure of Harry as symptom and find him an extension of white colonial privilege, albeit transplanted to America in the guise of individuality, and we argue that such an approach does not capture the complexities of Harry as our ‘object’ of analysis in this paper.

WHO CARES?

We argue that the debate between critique and post-critique has significance not only for literature, but also for performance studies, particularly because of performance theory’s history of upholding radical form as politically efficacious and championing critical art practices over popular mainstream forms. While it is not within the scope of this paper to track the emergence of post-critique in detail, it is important to note the range and depth of responses to the ‘challenge’ of post-critique and its general typification of critique as negative. The stock-in-trade of critique shares many of the epistemic values of performance studies, as Elizabeth Anker writes:

Uniformly central to critique has been a methodology erected on faith in the epistemic yield of qualities like difficulty, complexity, indeterminacy, ambivalence, paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction. Those qualities have been enlisted to conduct manifold types of intellectual-pedagogical labor. (Anker 2020: para 4)

Felski calls her book The Limits of Critique; modify the noun ‘Limit’ with the adverb ‘Political’ and you capture the challenge; to accept limits is to moderate our overamped claims for the political influence (importance) of our critical and pedagogic practice and thus, implicitly, of our favoured objects and fields. But it is not just about admitting that reading popular novels such as Sally Rooney’s Normal People may not topple the Prime Minister of the UK; post-critique asks us to think about what and how we write about and focus on in our research. And what and how we teach. Postcritique is positioned as an urgent antidote to the (apparently) institutionalized practice of critique, with its heightened claims both for its own powers and the unbounded influence of its objects of analysis; it responds to the crisis in the humanities by questioning both our unexamined fetishization of form as inherently political (a text must harbour signs of dissonance and dissent to justify its merits (Felski 2015: 17)) and how we care for and about our subjects and objects – hence, how we analyse and teach literature and performance.

THE ‘METHOD WARS’

Post-critique proposes a different critical relationship to objects of analysis and to the modes of consumption of their audiences and readers; it asks that we critics and academics show not so much that we ‘know’, as that we ‘care’; this care translates into the classroom, and into our pedagogy. Coming from a humanities context, in particular literature and literary theory, Felski points out that what was once radical (a Marxist reading, a feminist reading, a postcolonial reading, etc.) has been reduced to a set of theoretical tools that can be put on and taken off, like a set of lenses at the optometrist; rather, she argues, scholars should spend less time looking behind a text for hidden causes and suspicious motives (that is, doing critique) and more time placing themselves in front of it to reflect on what it suggests, unfolds or makes possible.

It is argued that critique’s conscious and unconscious overuse of the ‘de-’ has led to an impoverished vocabulary for describing what art works do, which post-critique and its language of affect and attachment seeks to remedy (Felski cited in Giusti 2019). What was once groundbreaking and transformative is now predictable, or even de-rigueur, argues post-critique; students know the dance of demystification and they can all perform ‘professional pessimism’ (Felski 2015: 128). Dogma rules. As a result, this embroilment is being characterized as a ‘method wars’ between critique and post-critique (Anker and Felski 2017: 2).

The charge against critique is both formal and political; it is what Felski calls ‘againstness’ (2015: 17). In the familiar gambit, critique sets out to reveal the ‘constructedness’ of what appears natural (16) – one of its favourite verbs is ‘problematize’ (15). Unlike the duped audience aboard the ideological vessel, who are happily sucked into a whirlpool of false consciousness, critique apparently stands on the shore and shakes their head at the very idea of getting on board, when all the time they knew they couldn’t swim.²

Critique is negative, says Felski; it treats the text as having dark ideological intentions, cloaked in words, and the critic’s role has been to reveal these hidden intentions to the unwitting reader. And you thought that reading was something you did for fun? Silly you! Critique needs an object of analysis; it is parasitic even (but is not all analysis, to some extent?). And yet, despite its secondary parasitic status, it will wrestle meaning from the resistant text and emerge triumphant. Critique is intellectual; critique is political; critique lends much-needed ballast to the academic life-raft. Critique says that what we are doing here in the universities is important, that it matters and not just to our students (who are supposed to matter most). In short, critique bigwigs itself, and from Felski’s perspective our students are sick to death of it.

Such caricatures are part of the fun, perhaps, but jokes aside, we can recognize that, for many of our students, critique is elitist, a victim of its own ‘critiquiness’ (Castiglia 2017: 214). Bruno Latour hastened the wholesale arrival of postcritique when he asked: ‘Why has Critique run out of steam?’ (2004: 225). Latour positions humanities scholars as modern Sancho Panzas, swinging deconstructed swords in the wind. The tone of this seminal article is war weary. With a premonitory power considering Trump, fake news and climate-denial, Latour claims that ‘the danger would no longer be coming from ideology posturing as fact … but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases!’ (2004: 227, emphasis in original).

ENTER PERFORMANCE. THE PRINCE AND THE MEDIA MOGUL

In considering what Prince Harry has to do with all this, we find ourselves not so much on the fence, but in an academic transitional zone, dealing with our own historical issues of attachment.³ We thus propose the adoption of a careful approach to critique, one that registers the challenges of post-critique while demonstrating a genuine care to have it placed together with critique in productive dialogue that might see our disciplines flourish, instead of strangled in stalemate.

Amanda Stuart Fisher writes that:

importing the values and practices of care into performance … can also become a mode of critique, offering a way of reading and interrogating practices that feel careless or that seem to exploit rather than attend to the suffering of its participants and cocreators. (Stuart Fisher 2020: 10)

‘Care’ here is shorthand for ‘critique’ – the latter a critical practice that demonstrates that we critics and academics ‘care’ by ‘outing’ exploitation and carelessness. This use of the term is very different from that discussed by Felski and highlights the complexity of introducing rich, soft terms like ‘care’ into formerly exact and bounded academic discourse. What is lost, and what is found in such a move?

To consider these variables we turn to our text, The Me You Can’t See. Let us first respond to the show on its own merits and desires; hold our critical horses and adopt a dramaturgical perspective so as to analyse how this performance works. The first episode begins with a montage of celebrities and noncelebrities overlaid with a sweeping musical score and snippets of individual voices before arriving at a sit-down interview between Harry and Oprah. The establishing shot with its inclusion of film equipment (cameras, lighting, microphones) provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the ongoing deliberate yet carefully curated unveiling of Harry’s personal life and his highly publicized recovery. The setting is warm and cosy: a palette of whites, beiges and browns. Ambient lighting streams through the window looking out onto a peaceful garden. An apparently relaxed Harry and Oprah sit opposite each other in matching armchairs and similarly casual dress. Nothing too scary here, no suits and formal attire, the show is telling viewers from the outset that this is intimate, personal, that we are being invited in, behind the curtains. This atmosphere of access and visibility operates not only in relation to our two on-screen subjects and the viewer, but in the curatorial choice to acknowledge that this is indeed a production dependent on technical workings usually kept off-screen. Setting the scene this way implies to us watching that everyone involved in the production is aware that it is exactly that: a production. It is an unspoken acknowledgement from producer to audience: we know you know it is a show; now, on with the show. In revealing its manufacture, the show paradoxically presents itself as authentic. The implications of this initial shot are clear: we are reassured that no matter how professionally produced, edited and manicured the content to come, this series is open and honest and raw.

It does not take long for Critique to resurface. After all, there is something jarring about this curatorial decision; it might even be described as evoking what Asher Warren calls ‘sneaky feelings’ (2020: 12) (more on this later). By openly acknowledging its own staginess, the show can be seen to pre-empt responses of ‘suspicious’ critics. In this sense, Harry is beyond critique. Critique (and/or the critic) is forced to reconsider its accusations/questions of inauthenticity and theatricality for fear of rehashing a tired formula of critical ‘go-tos’. The shot attempts to circumvent an uncaring (see critical) response by providing symbols of the film crew’s hard work. Without them, there is no Oprah and Prince Harry in conversation. And since we, the audience, are given access to this candid pre-show moment, we get the sense that there is no Oprah and Prince Harry without us. This is a series made by people about people for people.

It is not hard to watch, though. Harry is interviewed by Oprah, who is good at her job. He speaks directly and openly to the camera, and unlike the bounded stuffiness of the Royal Family in Britain, with their over-decorated lives, everything here is sunny and modern, serene even. It is America, where we are free of the past, and free to re-make ourselves. The geographic/ spatial binaries have never been so clear. The interview resembles the therapeutic setting, with Oprah as the armchair therapist, and Harry as representative not of British Monarchy, not of white privilege, not of a Royal We – not even the Imperial ‘I’ – but as just a little ol’ American me, just trying to be an individual hell bent on recovery and betterment, like the rest of us.

It is a seemingly self-aware performance of care, which neutralizes critique by appealing to the caring approach of post-critique. However, in adopting a post-critical attitude of empathy with Harry’s performance, surely the historical and political context is disavowed and obfuscated? How do we reckon with postcritique’s disavowal of the political in favour of the personal and its tendency to overlook issues of structural power and privilege within an environment of mass globalized care? Felski proposes a postcritical reading that will no longer ‘diminish or subtract from the reality of the texts we study, but … amplify their reality as energetic cofactors and vital partners in an equal encounter’ (2015: 185). But we can never be equal to Oprah and Harry.

None of the stereotypes of critique fielded in this essay are true in the broadest sense, as many academics have argued. And yet, one senses that post-critique is nudging not so much a truth, as a reality: the humanities are not as they were. However, by exploring the concept of care, in its ethical and critical dimensions, we argue that caring cannot be the same as liking, in the on/off binary logic of thumbs up/thumbs down – I like/don’t like the Royal Family, therefore I like Harry (or hate him) and therefore care/ don’t care about he and Meghan. The move to post-critique would seem to champion a neoliberal subjectivity that has the potential to obscure this difference; a crucial difference to which critique can and should attend. We believe a reliance on one or the other is not enough to do our ‘object’ justice. Instead, a careful critique allows for a reading of Harry’s performance that shifts between critique and post-critique to attend to our own ambivalence about how to reckon with an ‘object’ of analysis that sees the horrors of lived trauma not only publicized, but monetized? How to wrestle with the realities of trauma when fashioned through a world of marketing, branding and undeniable privilege?

IS HARRY NOW THE PRINCE OF TRAUMA?

The celebritization of the modern monarchy and its association with global trauma began with the death of Princess Diana and changed both the monarchy and the role of the media in reporting key events. As The Me You Can’t See demonstrates, the death of Diana has played a key role in authenticating the new narrative of Harry and trauma.⁴ But it is not so simple as a man finding peace. As Harry continues the unsettling of global monarchy and media celebrity that began with his mother, the entanglement of rogue royal and media becomes a generational saga that seemingly demands a post-critical gaze for fear of minimizing tragedy. If, as Laura Clancy suggests, Harry might be viewed as a ‘post-royal’ (2021b: 222) who is breaking with and unsettling the Firm and its traditions, the royal counter-narrative of the Diana story is continued and trenchant critique cast aside in favour of that world of affects and performances that exceed icons and narratives (Sofoulis 1997: 18). Global mourning (at the death of Diana) thus wears the same crown as global recovery (Harry, recovering from the trauma of royalty/death of Diana).

The suspicious viewer, armed with the cold-eyed academic tools of critique and thorough understanding of Stuart Hall’s legacy, has a firm grasp on things: we read the monarchy as ‘a capitalist corporation oriented towards, and historically entrenched in, processes of capital accumulation, profit extraction and other forms of exploitation’ (Clancy 2021a: 330) and understand media culture as ‘systems of representation [that] ‘produce consent’’ for the royal family (Clancy 2021b: 30).’ In Harry’s performance of care, celebrity, COVID-19 and media globalization collide as Global capital and Oprah Inc. scramble to bring us together in caring collusion as a one-world market. At the risk of appearing old-fashioned, we might briefly disinter Louis Althusser and argue that it is in the very act of responding to Harry that the subject/viewer recognizes themselves as both individual and global, interpellated not by an ecumenical United Nations vision of nations, continents or Utopian collectives unified under the banner of anything so grand or unachievable as ‘End Global Poverty’, but through the spectre of individual psychologized narcissism that collapses the history of the Firm as a vehicle of colonial violence and structural inequality, to replace it with a global narrative of personal trauma and individual betterment (Althusser 1971).

As a real live post-royal, perhaps Harry is the ultimate post-critical subject. As with the death of Diana and the outpouring of global grief, so there is with Harry a longing to be united in a non-critical, non-cynical, non-ironic post-critical moment of viewer attachment and empathy, two attitudes that post-critique upholds. Google reviewer Deanna Driedger states:

I can’t imagine how anyone could give this series a low rating. I suspect their opinions have nothing to do with the content or the approach to sharing the content. I suspect their rating is rooted in some animosity towards either Oprah, Harry, the other featured public figures, or worse themselves for suffering with their own mental health crises and a rejection of individuals and systems that promote enhanced coping and recovery. (Driedger 2021)

At this point, attempts to critique Harry give us pause. We can point out the contradictions and tell our journal readers what this is ‘really all about’; we can engage in criticism ‘at a distance’. But is this a ‘caring’ response, and is it enough? Does it help us understand anything about the historical moment? How might a careful critique bridge the distance between ourselves, as academics, and the millions of viewers, those 85 per cent who at the time of its first airing gave a high approval rating to Harry and his series about mental health?

Performance studies’ commitment to careful description offers clues as to another way forward, and in line with post-critique’s articulation of critique’s failings, there is often in performance analysis close attention to mood, tone and affect – an attunement to ambivalence that invites a shifting response to the text.⁵ Indeed, in attending to ambivalence perhaps we might begin to understand what it is that the global audience finds in Harry’s speaking out and promoting the importance of mental health. Harry performs as the figure desperately trying to flee his status, pointing out in the interview that the happiest times of his life were the ten years in the army, where he could be just like everyone else. Yet despite this desire to be just a regular person in uniform, the interview draws repeatedly on his family history and endless footage of his mother fleeing the paparazzi, to underscore his trauma and embed him in a plot that precedes him. The footage provides some sense of the intensity of life under the gaze of the media and the world, and this supports his point about the relief of army life. It also allows Harry to frame his own struggles with mental health, grief and loss. But it seems – to us at least – to illuminate the problem at hand. Harry is seen wrestling with his sense of self and his desire for freedom, trying to shed light on his struggles with mental health and his desire to journey from rigid class-bound Britain to the land of self-transformation: from We to I to Me; from his unique and inherited status as prince to self-made man. Yet, to do so, he must engage in what seems like an eternal return to the scene of the crime; to the House of Windsor and the story of the death of his ‘hounded’ celebrity mother, Diana and the paparazzi: over and over again.

There is a tension at play here between pretence and performance and the idea of opening the story up, of revealing something previously invisible – Harry’s suffering. And yet many spectators find profundity. They feel as if they are being let in on something, that they are finally seeing the ‘real me’ that has been invisible or obfuscated until now. For these spectators there is nothing ambivalent at work here. As another Google reviewer, Gokul Sagar (2021), puts it: ‘Prince Harry’s presence stunningly rehashes the fact that these issues affect the pauper and the prince alike and makes you see beyond the identity and connect on a personal level.’

Critics remained critical. Daniel D’Addario in Variety magazine writes:

Placing in such close proximity the depths of human suffering in the 21st century with Harry’s admittedly challenging and sad tale only emphasizes a certain indulgence on the part of ‘The Me You Can’t See,’ a burnishing of Harry’s legend that works at cross-purposes with the mission of the show. Among the ways therapy works is the stripping-away of pretence. Conducting a session in public, in a context meant to restate and emphasize the harms done to the very famous person in treatment and to help justify his decision to restart his life, would seem to do the opposite. (D’Addario 2021)

CARE AND THE CRITIQUES, A MEETING

To critique this performance, we have to ask difficult questions about motivation, about marketing and branding, about its utility as a vehicle for the prince to monetize the drama of his struggle to achieve an ‘ordinary’ life and to escape or leave behind the trauma life experience has vested on him. We must consider the modern monarchy. What is the function of performing this trauma and of setting the scene with images of intrusion, stories of hounding, of fear and of distress, sharing personal stories of childhood on a globalized stage? What does this do for those viewers, some of whom may be watching to feel heard or seen through the stories? As we write this we feel as if we are encroaching on dangerous territory with these questions. We have a sense that we might be having the kinds of ‘sneaky feelings’ Warren talked about in his recent essay ‘Our Town’ where he explains that ‘a sneaky feeling is a type of “bad affect” that gets under your skin, a niggle or distraction that takes you out of the theatrical moment’ (2020: 12). While he is talking about entering into a theatrical moment and subsequently a theatrical community, we adapt the idea here to try to elucidate the sense of feeling as if we are not the people this show is speaking to and yet knowing by admitting this – by writing it down – we may be positioning ourselves as ‘better than’, ‘distant from’ those to whom Oprah and the prince are trying to reach. We too have experienced stress and trauma, but we do not seem to buy it. We are drowning in ‘bad affect’, it seems. We wonder whether we are letting our academic critique loose on something that is not for us. After all, this is a show about sharing. It is not high art or avant-garde performance. Do we even have the right? Perhaps this is the time for us to embrace the ‘love’ Felski thinks is important when she writes: ‘Anyone who attends academic talks has learned to expect the inevitable question: “But what about power?” Perhaps it is time to start asking different questions: “But what about love?”’ (Felski 2015: 17).

Perhaps we can ask both.

A CEASEFIRE?

Harry’s performance creates a space in which we can examine the tensions between critique and post-critique. As a performance of care already complicated by questions of celebrity and authenticity, branding and marketing, deeply rooted trauma and curated vulnerability, it insists on new modes of critical relations, rather than provoke an either/or stance – to critique or post-critique (Swoboda 2021). It demands, we argue, careful critique. That is, the performance invites us to take our time in formulating a response that considers the complexity of care as it relates to academic analysis and certain performances. During these ‘method wars’, Harry’s performance requires a different approach with a plurality of perspectives that looks beyond the antagonisms of the critique/ post-critique debate. It is not necessarily about liking, but caring deeply enough to engage, to respond and to acknowledge without this defensive urge to dismiss.

Take Harry’s performance: he utilizes much of the ‘de’ attributed to critique to re-make and re-shape his self-narrative and public persona. The professional detachment and distance that comes with being a Royal is cast aside in favour of personal attachment to publicized recovery and betterment. Family has usurped Firmily. He is now both Critic and Carer in that, to attend to his family’s safety and his own struggles with mental health, he critiques (and criticizes) the establishment that raised him, only to ruin him. The affective turn fundamental to post-critical thought lends itself nicely here as it enables critique to open to a more embodied approach that does not deny feeling (sneaky or otherwise). Perhaps we can care (or not!) about Harry’s message – sympathize, empathize, appreciate – but still maintain a critical awareness of Harry as a privileged public figure, a performer, a celebrity, a brand. One might appreciate him using his platform to shine a light on mental health, but it is also a platform that needs to be questioned (why isn’t the series free? At what point do we feel like we’re being told to care? among other things). Being critical and postcritical allows us to be careful and generous. This response is not only caring towards our ‘object’ of analysis (especially when that ‘object’ itself tackles questions and concerns of care), but towards ourselves as academics, as writers and lifelong learners.

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

In our reading, Harry’s performance becomes an ambivalent space in which an either/or approach to analysis cannot capture the conceptual slipperiness of ‘care’ – care of the self, care of others, carelessness and carefulness, the different kinds of critical care, as well as questions of care regarding the researcher and their ‘object’ of analysis. To critique Harry risks being seen as an ‘uncaring’ response to a man willing to publicize his vulnerability to shine a necessary spotlight on mental health. A post-critical interpretation focuses on the affective force of this vulnerability at the expense of questioning the politics of performing care as a polarizing figure whose conflicting roles as tormented royal, savvy media mogul, mental health advocate and self-styled prince of trauma give rise to Warren’s stubborn ‘sneaky feelings’ (2020: 12). Acknowledging that Harry is a complex ‘object’ of analysis opens us up to consider ways in which the tensions between critique and postcritique can be teased out without compromising the integrity of one approach for the other. We also note that both approaches require careful consideration by the author of the point of engaging in an analysis of the selected ‘object’. In essence then, whatever the mode of analysis, it requires a careful approach to the act of critique and deep consideration of the complexities involved. This program was seen by millions and is touted as having an approval rating of 85 per cent. Considering this, surely, we as academics – as humans – must interrogate power while remaining open to ‘love’.

Notes

1 While we have focused on Felski in negotiating this terrain, the topic of spectatorial ambivalence has been examined in performance studies by scholars including Broderick D. V. Chow (2018), Helena Grehan (2009) and Emma Willis (2021).

2 More recent discussion admits that laying the ‘blame’ at critique may well be misdirected (see Anker 2020).

3 See Felski (2020: xiv).

4 The enormous outpouring of grief following Diana’s death is well documented. See Re:Public (1997).

5 The concept of ‘attunement’ has been used recently by many scholars. For more details on ‘attunement’ see, for example: Lipari (2014), Felski (2015) and Grehan (2019, 2022).