Recuperation, in this technical sense, was the word the Situationists chose to refer to the process by which politically radical positions, creations, and images are spun, taken over, absorbed, defused, and then commodified within mainstream commercial culture and bourgeois society. This turns them into part of the continuing Spectacle of the capitalist mass media machine, and thus these radical positions and views are interpreted through a neutralized representation that removes the anti-mainstream thrust or radical difference of the original.
For example, when hippies were turned into a market and characters on sitcoms, and there were ads that said things like “now that you have longer hair, you’ll need a different shampoo!” Recuperation is cultural appropriation, taking ideas, images, themes, and works made by subversive countercultural forces and turning them into another aspect of commodified mainstream culture. Recuperation is the opposite of détournement, in which images and other cultural artifacts are appropriated from mainstream sources and repurposed with radical intentions.
See also détournement