User:Cesarharada/Surculture
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In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, surculture is a cultural force complementary to subculture interfacing high culture and popular culture within culture. Like subculture, surculture is a quality that can be applied to a product or embodied in an active minority group. While subculture is characterized by a systematic opposition to the dominant culture (counterculture) ; surculture playfully celebrates dominant culture while being (sometimes involuntarily) critical. While subculture has a tendency to hide and reclaim, surculture tends to show up and claim the larger culture they belong.
Surculture is often associated with pop culture, a certain naivety and a sense of innocent immediate pleasure provided by contemporary society by-products and behaviours. More than a philosophy or a lifestyle, surculture is a spontaneously happy and colorful attitude or an intellectual status in reaction to a potentially absurd and violent post-industrial civilization.
Identifying surculture, qualitative approach
Before being a solid social body (group), surculture is an attitude, an intellectual and emotional state or response to the environment, it is highly contextual. Surculture can also be described as an exaggeration, emphasis of the characteristics of contemporary mainstream culture. When the critical characteristic of surculture is extreme we can qualify of detournement.
Surculture can also be a "superficial" style, relating it to the simulacra, caricature, the grotesque or even prank.
Japanese hostess are very notorious for being exhuberant surcultural vectors : creative trend setters.
The punk subculture movement has some isolated good examples of surculture as they manifest happily.
Mechanism, Cultural Feedback
It is useful to locate surculture as component of culture. Like subculture and and mainstream culture, surculture interfaces and interprets high culture and popular culture. Surculture and subculture have a qualitative complementary activity, and they both have inherent critical functions, being outside of mainstream. Subculture is easily recognizable in that role of critique (philosphy) when critical surculture is usually much harder to identify, due to its apparent celebrational and fun nature, which often precipitates disputes about its potential of sarcasm or the contrary : lack of criticism. Much more than subculture, surculture is outwardly ambiguous.
cultural feedback
simultaneity control theory parallel activity Cultural vector
a fine line : a work | it's interpretation
Surculture common misunderstandings
Surculture is not a group containing cultures as subgroup. Surculture is a group contained inside culture, like subculture or mainstream culture.
dev. size, it is a subculture group theory parrallel
Surculture is neither synonimous of "superior in quality" to culture or being produce for/by an elite.
Artefacts
borrowing to subcultures
dada situationniste no concept Scion Space, Culver city, CA. October 4th 2008. Gabriel Ritter, Curator of Tokyo Nonsense says : What brings all these artists together is the theme of non-sense and the city of tokyo. These artists are young, they don't have a lot of options open to them, and what they see around them compounds that, and in reaction to that, maybe non-sense is the only thing left that they can use to react to what is surrounding them. Is what you are surrounded by is meaningless, or does not make sense, or seems absurd, to critique that also requires an equal amount of none-sense or absurdity or meaninglessness to somehow make sense of none-sense, if that's even possible.
punk
References
- Marx's argument
- After Marx
- Jean Baudrillard, a theorist whose System of Objects borrows from Marx
- Guy Debord
- Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (full text)
- Georg Lukacs's theory of Class consciousness and his concept of reification
Links
- social sciences portal
- high culture
- low culture
- mass culture
- information age
- collective thinking
- battle of class
- social innovation
- anthropology
- Counterculture
- List of subcultures
- Popular culture
- Underclass
- Underground culture
- Urban culture
- Urban sociology
- Youth subculture
- Art world
- Adolescence
- Folk culture
- History of subcultures in the 20th century
- Intercultural competence
- Lifestyle
- dada
External links
References
--cesarharada (talk) 04:34, 29 September 2009 (UTC)