Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Material Culture and Mass Consumption
To refer to society as "constructing itself" is to signify that these activities are based on historically given forms and peoples, and that both the subject and the object of this process are cultural, rather than natural, forms. This notion of the self as a cultural form constantly re-evaluation by social criteria is opposed to the concept of an essentialist natural self masked by the artificial nature of culture as commodity.
Culture "constructing itself"? Huh. Weird as that sounds, Miller uses those words to emphasize the way that even things that people take for granted are the result of being created within culture, taken up by the masses, and repeated to the point that everyone thinks that's the norm.
Like women wearing lipstick. Innate quality? Not really. But will anyone bat an eyelash? Only if it's a fake eyelash batted by drag queen—whose makeup stylings people may, surprisingly, find less "normal" than that of biological women.
On top of construction, the topic of consumption has been another key aspect of cultural theory, as the growth of industrialization and mass production led to the rise of consumer culture (where the economy is based on people buying stuff they don't really need). Miller's point, however, is that consumerism doesn't necessarily mean that people are slaves to the commodity or that mass production causes complete loss of individuality. Truth? You decide.
One of critics' main arguments against mass culture is that it is homogenizing: it takes away the artistry and human effort put into production, flooding the market with identical goods bought by hordes of increasingly mindless consumers. For critics, this consequently results in a loss of individuality and meaning (Walter Benjamin had plenty to say about that).
What Miller suggests, however, is that consumers have the ability to personalize the goods that they purchase—even if goods are mass-produced, they can still mean different things to different people and people can make them their own. One person's stylin' footwear is another person's flowerpot.
This ties in with cultural studies more generally, as it brings us back to the question of how readers and viewers respond to texts—are they powerless in the face of the text or do they have the capacity to take an active role in the creation of meaning?