Mental Labor and the Cultural Work of Agency Panic

In the last twenty years historians and cultural analysts have thoroughly reconsidered the meaning of the 1950s. Once (mis)-understood as a time of suburban anomie and Cold War anxiety and, at the same time, nostalgically, as a golden moment of prosperity and consensus, the postwar period now appears well-fraught in the literature. In this context, it's fair to ask if the field really needs one more book self-avowedly reinterpreting the "mainstream fiction" of the 1950s, even one that persuasively corrects the influential claims of Thomas Hill Schaub and Morris Dickstein that mid-century literature "abandoned the economic for the psychological" (1). On first glance, Hoberek's book appears merely to extend this fundamental rethinking of the postwar period. But, in my mind, one of the least expected results of the decentering of the experiences of the Organization Man in postwar accounts has been the ability to see what once appeared to be an objective description of mid-century American society as an class-specific effort by members of the professional-managerial class to claim a universalizing authority to shape society to their imperatives. Indeed, the ability of white-collar workers to see their world as uniform was effectively, if perhaps unconsciously, a bid to defend their hegemonic position in American society, a position they perceived as increasingly insecure. As Timothy Melley shows in Empire of Conspiracy (2000), cultural critics, fiction writers, social scientists, and FBI Director Hoover all noted disturbing threats to individual agency in the postwar period. Impersonal agencies of social control—variously figured as advertising, the total organizations of mass society, secret government agencies, or conspiratorial subcultures—were not only targeting individuals with hidden forms of influence understood to be "malevolent, centralized, and intentional" (Melley 5). These organizations were accreting to themselves precisely the qualities middle-class white-collar men feared they were losing: freedom, autonomy, agency, relevance, and moral judgment. In response, they championed a classically autonomous form of personhood, the assertion of which ideal provoked deep and specific anxieties. How could an Organization Man act freely and in his own interest in the creeping conformity of the consumer republic when consumption, not citizenship, was the preferred mode of participation in the public sphere? How could he make moral and aesthetic judgments given his sense of increasing cultural impoverishment in "middlebrow" culture? Even given his personal and political commitments to "containment" and "security," how could he protect himself and his family from the enemies within in a time of domestic surveillance, political and otherwise?²

Hoberek's book helps us see that the Organization Man's apparently psychological responses to the emerging social structures of postmodernity were actually misguided efforts to stake a claim for economic, political, and cultural authority predicated on a new form of labor: mental labor. According to Hoberek, by the end of World War II, the New Deal consensus among corporations, the federal government, and labor unions seemed to have solved industrial labor problems. More problematic, as the postwar period developed, was white-collar workers' sense of rootlessness and declining agency. Positioned as permanent salaried employees, with limited decision-making and goal-setting authority, white-collar workers could no longer claim to embody public authority premised on ownership of property or small capital. Accordingly, they staked their claim on owning the products of their minds: their ideas, their aesthetics, their style, and their identities. For Hoberek, the terms of this claim explain the mid-century move to psychological themes in literature and yoke the psychological inextricably to the economic. In the context of real fears of downward mobility, the narratives of threatened individuality so beloved of middle-class postwar social critics, novelists, and late twentieth-century literary critics, are a coherent class-based response to new forms of middle-class economic life.

Hoberek explores this thesis in both familiar and unexpected territory, pairing works of fiction with works of social criticism, often producing startlingly new connections between different groups' lived experience of the postwar period. For example, in the third chapter, Hoberek pairs Ralph Ellison with E. Franklin Frazier—the...