Counter-culture comes about when…
“A member of an archaic culture who acknowledges the limits of his own model and compares it to the one that is being formed as an alternative, from inside or outside his model, is creating…. in a positive sense, ‘counter-culture.’ Counter-culture is thus the active critique or transformation of the existing social, scientific or aesthetic paradigm…. It is the only cultural manifestation that a dominant culture is unable to acknowledge and accept. The dominant culture tolerates parasitic counter-cultures as more or less innocuous deviations, but it cannot accept critical manifestations which call it [the dominant culture] into question. Counter-culture comes about when those who transform the culture in which they live become critically conscious of what they are doing and elaborate a theory of their deviation from the dominant model, offering a model that is capable of sustaining itself.”
— Umberto Eco, Does Counter-culture Exist?, p. 124.
