The increasing dominance of visual communication puts pressure on professional communicators and students of rhetoric to understand the nature of the scopic regime and how competing ways of seeing affect communication networks and the societies they serve. This document focuses on the attempts of the early twentieth-century avant gardists to profoundly shift social realities by challenging the scopic regime of their time through book design. Their attempts to seize agency through aesthetics failed to directly enact a new social order, but the avant gardists succeeded in establishing the necessary visual grammars for new ways of visually presenting information, including the International Style. This current (and global) scopic regime embraces a particular relationship among text, image, and reader that allows us to cope with the cacophony of information and objects. To understand the International Style and other competing ways of visual communication, one must understand the major movement that came before: the Avant-Garde, which itself included movements we now call New Typography, Suprematist, and Constructivist. Principally building upon Richard Lanham's assertion that we live in a "economy of attention," Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's notion of agency as promiscuous, Anthony Giddens's work on the duality of social structures, and Martin Jay's conception of the scopic regime, this document traces the work of key avant-gardists and in so doing adumbrates how book design has combined and continues to combine aesthetics with social action.