Michael Fishbane used the title Text and Texture for a book in 1979 . A text only has surface, but it is a textured surface, thick with interwoven webs of signification. The issue is what kinds of strategies, filters, and grids an interpreter uses to hear or look at the text. As these strategies, filters, and grids value and devalue signs in the text, the interpreter sees, hears, or perceives one kind of texture rather than another. On the one hand, this means that texts have no meanings in and of themselves.
Texts contain signs to which reader-interpreters attribute meanings.