Ran across this nice tidbit from Umberto Eco:

"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." (from "Does Counter-culture Exist?")

While a agree with the distinction that the dominant culture and counter-culture are mutually constituted, i.e. one cannot exist without the other, I think that calling the synthesis that moves beyond the two prior paired opposites "counter-culture" is misleading. John Brockman calls it "the third culture" (but he is also referencing C. P. Snow's "two cultures" literature). In my own work, I call the mode of civilization that is characterized by network culture "panarchy." Nonetheless, Eco's primary point is that the third culture exists as an alternative to either of the previous modes only when it becomes autopoietic, which is of course a signature property of complex systems as discussed by Varela and Maturana in their work on dissipative structures.