W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry.
"Linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, and various models of "textuality" have become the lingua franca for critical reflections on the arts, the media, and cultural forms. Society is a text. Nature and its scientific representations are "discourses." Even the unconscious is structured like a language."
The interactions of pictures and texts imply that all media are mixed media, and it is their linkage to issues of power, value and human interest that actually matters, instead of the boundary itself.