By the late 1960s, Guy Debord was able to confidently pronounce that

This axiom, the opening words of his tract The Society of the Spectacle, rewrites the famous opening lines of Karl Marx's Capital cited earlier: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist system of production prevails presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’,” while the next sentence echoes an even more famous line from The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air.” Debord's axiom launches a section of his text entitled “Separation Perfected,” the sentiment expressed in this second sentence: dwelling in the incessant, awe-inspiring exhibition of imagery that consumes us all, we have been separated from our natural modes of being. We live, instead, in a world of misrepresentations, enormously attractive but essentially deceptive images whose array we do not control, and which is managed against our interests. Sound familiar? The section ends with his second axiom: “The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” (Fig. 5.1).

For all of their rhetorical exaggeration—The Society of the Spectacle is, before it is anything else, a polemic—Debord's statements remain relevant to the critical understanding of the exhibitionary economies that today persist—and, indeed, appear to prevail—as modern conditions of production turn into contemporary ones. Debord ostensifies his axioms as a series of self-generating statements, in the manner of Euclid's Geometries and Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the philosophy of history,” but mostly by patching and pasting from Marx on commodity fetishism and from then recently released early writings by Marx, notably his “Theses on Feuerbach.” This technique, a verbal collage, enables him to take several interesting tracks as he moves from the first to the second axiom. These tracks are not random. Each maps a historical trajectory into the present. For our purposes, his most relevant points concern the exhibitionary character of capitalism, which he rightly sees as fundamentally, and deceptively, visual in its operations—as, in a word, an iconomy.