Vincent J. Miller

Through a balanced analysis of commodification and consumer culture, Vincent J. Miller constructs a coherent argument about American Christian culture. In chapters 2 and 5 he offers an indictment of the historical development of commodification and a defense of consumer culture. Just to give some highlights, I will analyze and compare chapters 2 and 5. These chapters are key; Miller names Chapter 2 the “core” of his argument and foreshadows his positive argument in Chapter 5 a number of times (3; e.g. 50).
In “The Commodification of Culture,” Miller takes a narrative approach to explain the process by which capitalism in the twentieth century moved from the marketplace into the way Americans relate to culture. In a “productivist” vein, he tracks the ways commodification is a product of the economic systems of production in which it grows (33). By scrutinizing the structures of household life, he hopes to unmask the places where formation takes place against its object’s will. Here commodification is seen as a pernicious agent of alienation. Marx is a conventional place to start when exploring alienation as a productivist. Marx’s analysis explains how creative workers become passive consumers under a wage system and engage the world in terms of commodities. All relationships become subject to the terms of exchange. When rituals and religions become commodities they are shorn of their meanings and connections as effectively as the products of labor. In his stinging appraisal of the rise of Fordism and the tyranny of Taylor’s workplace efficiency plans, Miller traces the single-family home as an indicator and agent of the increase in alienation and commodified relationships. I will use this track in an analysis below. Miller uses Lefebvre, Debord, Baudrillard, and Jameson to demonstrate the way media culture drives the commodity to the forefront of desire. Miller’s chatty narrative makes a host of complex social theory seem logically accountable, and the reader watches the steady decline and colonization of culture from commodity to free-floating postmodern signifier. Next in the story, as the insatiable demands of Fordism guaranteed its end, analysts struggled to claim the character of “post-Fordism” (67). The behemoth of consumer culture becomes more nimble and scrambles to appropriate cultural content to display. More content and more dexterity means smaller niche markets, where consumers find fewer relationships with people but ever more objects to desire. At the end of this chapter, the consumer is largely a passive dupe who hopelessly plays right into her zip code predictions of buying and chooses disembodied artifacts to decorate her anchorless life.
“The Politics of Consumption” takes the opposite tact and redeems consumers as agents. Miller highlights the complexity of the oft-oversimplified relationship of corporate and popular cultural production. Miller claims “distinction” or cultural capital (both Bourdieu’s terms) are gained in the interplay between groups, but once corporations appropriate an artifact, it no longer has political power. No matter how on the edge a trend was, once I can buy it at Target, it no longer contains its original subversive power. The consumer agency comes in the form of “bricolage,” in this sense, the creative use of commodified objects. Miller highlights de Certeau’s optimistic belief in consumer creativity with whatever materials they are given (156). Miller would like to sober de Certeau’s analysis with a solid look at the realities of production and its control. Consumer culture in the West consistently destroys other cultures, and acts of subversion need solid critical grounding to be effective. Miller illustrates the sly use of narrative to take control of spaces even in the midst of commodified culture. It is not the object of production that consumers control but the space around the object. Recreated and retold space gives people political and religious agency. At the end of this chapter, the consumer is living on the edges of her commodified world, still economizing relationships, but actively seeking to reclaim her agency and the space of her culture.
By portraying both pessimism and a tempered optimism, Miller gives an apparently balanced look at consumption. He spends the latter part of the book exploring strategic ways Christians, especially Western/American Catholics, can honestly encounter consumption and consumer culture. I found the analysis in the earlier part of the book more generally useful in guiding my understanding of religion’s encounter with this culture. To show the usefulness of his analysis before his tactical material, I can use Miller in my own biblical studies work. Here I can briefly turn his lens on the main material of my study, i.e. the Bible. Where once Bibles existed only on ornate altars and in only the most elite homes, they made the move to the average Protestant Christian family at about the time Miller’s analysis of America begins. The family Bible held the recorded history of family— births, deaths, marriages—and was an object of some reverence. Readings from the Bible guided everyday life in many families as intergenerational groups. Moving into the single-family home meant moving away from the family Bible, then into individual rooms where each family member decides which or whether to own a Bible or other sacred text. The dizzying array of Bibles available at any bookstore (to say nothing of a specialty shop) gives some measure of the extent to which the Bible is a personal item, available in isolation from a community to offer therapeutic self-help. The Bible is a commodity that is in danger of losing its political friction, status, community, and context. Christians are continually misdirected and seduced by the allure of texts as naked artifacts rather than meaningful and whole pieces of faith. The hope that I hold for the redemption of the text is in the creative use of the spaces around it and in the active engagement of people with their text (201).… (altro)