a quote:
"Like others before him Mitchell acknowledges the fact that we live in a society dominated by pictures and visual simulations. The current preoccupation with media images goes so far as to constitute a "common culture" (1) which defines our era -- an era Mitchell describes as the end of postmodernism. The postmodern mode of representation is one which represses language and absorbs it into image. Even modern thought itself is re-oriented around visual paradigms which threaten to overwhelm any possibility of discursive mastery. This fixation with representation gives rise to Mitchell's speculation that "the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the image" : he sees the need for a study of picture theory as predicated on the notion that we live in a culture dominated by pictorial image, yet remain unable to understand the power of the picture despite an abundance of theories on the subject."