Peter Barry's discussion of textuality notes that "its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation – they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of".
Roger Webster frequently uses metaphors of ‘weaving’, ‘tissue’, ‘texture’, ‘strands’, and ‘filiation’ when talking about the structure of texts.
Barry describes this as a "structuralist approach to literature, there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain them".
[3] A textuality consists of base-texts, "those that define a textual community and form a part of the necessary cultural competence of its members",[4] result-texts, "bids that have just been accepted and entered circulation, as well as those that have done so some time ago but are still being considered recent arrivals by their recipients",[5] mediated by an operational memory, "a shared (and internally contradictory) mental space of the cultural community and its various subgroups where texts are produced and processed",[6] which contains different kinds of knowledge, standards and codes shared to different extent by the carriers of the culture.
The word text arose within structuralism as a replacement for the older idea in literary criticism of the "work", which is always complete and deliberately authored.
[8] For Derrida, this approach requires putting too much emphasis on speech: Barry says that "one of structuralism's characteristic views is the notion that language doesn’t just reflect or record the world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see".
It is a literary tool that can never be defined like an exact science and that will always be influenced by the writer's life, such as, their upbringing, education, culture, age, religion, gender, and multiple other persuading factors.