ABSTRACT
This chapter questions the effects and limitations of advertising critique today. In the rst half, I argue that advertising critique does little to disrupt advertising as a capitalist institution. Instead, it mediates the critics’— academic and otherwise-practical acquiescence to the very effects targeted by advertising critique, albeit from a critical distance. The theoretical foundation of this argument comes from Slavoj Žižek’s theorizations on how ideology works by disidentication and how, counterintuitively, literal identication with ideological claims is subversive. In the second half of the chapter, I suggest what a truly corrosive engagement with advertising might look like. To that end, I esh out two instances, one from the United States and a second from South Korea, in which the smooth operation of advertising was disrupted.
