User:Cesarharada/Surculture



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 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 a self-determinated act we can qualify of detournement.

Surculture can also be a "superficial" style, relating it to the simulacra, the fetish, caricature, grotesque, satire, parody or even prank.

Japanese hostess are very notorious for being exhuberant involuntary proactive surcultural vectors : creative trend setters. The punk subculture movement has some isolated good examples of surculture as they manifest happily. Examples of contemporary detournement include Adbusters' "subvertisements" and other instances of culture jamming. The comic artist Brad Neely's reinterpretation of Harry Potter, Wizard People, took Warner Brother's first Harry Potter film, The Sorcerer's Stone, and substituted the original soundtrack with a narration that casts the hero as a Nietzschean superman. There is a often a modern existential angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom, motivating surcultural actors.

Mechanism, Cultural Feedback
Surculture is a component of culture. Like subculture and and mainstream culture, surculture interfaces and interprets high culture and popular culture with surcultural actants (Actor-network theory). 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 celebrative and fun nature, which often precipitates disputes about its potential of sarcasm or the contrary : lack of criticism. More than subculture, surculture is ambiguous.



Surculture is an irreplacable element for Culture Control Theory or cultural feedback. Culture control theory borrows from culture (as defined in social studies) and Control theory (an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics, that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems). It is important to underline that culture control system differs greatly from engineering control system because interactions are happening directly simultaneously in both direction, in parallel or with a lot of friction ("noise" or "entropy") a complex system.

What makes Culture Control Theory unreliable is the lack of method of qualitative evaluation of an isolated cultural artefacts or action, and the difference between the actant intention and audience 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.

Agriculture surexploitation

someone with too much culture/ knowledge

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

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