The Battles around Images: Iconoclasm and Beyond issue of Image and Narrative explores the different strands of the image/text relationship.

W.J.T. Mitchell, in this interview in the issue, distinguishes between postmodernism and the pictorial turn. Of the former he says that postmodernism has always struck him as a temporary place-holder, one that served important polemical and critical purposes in the 1970s and 80s, but has now itself been consigned to a relatively brief historical moment. This moment is being replaced by the return to the picture. Of the pictorial turn he says:

The notion that we live in a culture dominated by images, by spectacle, surveillance, and visual display, is so utterly commonplace that I am sometimes astonished at the way people announce it as if they had just discovered it. My aim has been to subject this commonplace to critical and historical analysis, to question whether and where and to what extent it is true, and what it means...To some extent I think of the "mass" version of the pictorial turn as a perennial and recurrent phenomenon, the turn as a cultural "trope" that recurs whenever a new image technology, a new medium, or new apparatus of spectacularization or surveillance comes along. Thus, the invention of artificial perspective, or alphabetic writing, or moveable type, or photography are accompanied by a sense that a "pictorial turn" is occurring, one which is often seen as threatening traditional modes of knowledge and behavior-or (more characteristically within modernism) threatening an atavistic return to tribalism, irrationality, superstition, illiteracy-the entire repertoire of stereotypes associated with idolatry and (let's not leave out) ideological mystification.

The notion of idolatry almost always involves a distinction made between proper uses of images (performed by "people like us") and improper uses of images (performed by "people like them"- whoever they might be). It often has religious roots involves the destruction of images because it is assumed that images have power. Michell ads:

I think that many of the modernist master-narratives (say of Marxism, psychoanalysis, or of modern art and philosophy) were iconoclastic in very fundamental ways. They tended to treat images as the object of destructive critique, of critical operations that would dispel their power, eliminate them from consciousness, and smash them once and for all. Ideology critique, for instance, was consistently portrayed as a practice of emancipation from a false consciousness depicted as a repertoire of seductive and false images. Ditto for psychoanalysis and its relation to imagination and fantasy. The history of philosophy, from Plato's banishment of the artist to Richard Rorty's "linguistic turn," resolutely set its face against the image. As Wittgenstein put it, "a picture held us captive, and we could not get outside of it." Heidegger thought that modernity had trapped humanity in an "age of the world picture," and that philosophy (or poetry) might find a way out of it.