Recuperation, in the
sociological sense, is the process by which
politically radical ideas and images are twisted,
co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed and commodified within
media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the
cultural appropriation of any subversive works or ideas by mainstream culture. It is the opposite of
détournement, in which images and other
cultural artifacts are appropriated from mainstream sources and repurposed with radical intentions.