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Texts

Texts are, broadly speaking, sets of signs which leave traces - on paper, on stone, in memory, in dreams, in sounds, in the air, in the unconscious, and so on. They inevitably include signs (or aspirational signs) from a range of systems of difference, each of which could be 'motivated' (by the creator of the signs /texts), or just presented to the recipient as an opportunity, a space, an affordance, an invitation for the recipient to 'move in/to' - to use, appropriate, explore, interact with, or consume - as they wish. 

Signs, including the relationships embedded within them, and their relationships with the physical, social, (etc) environment, are always dynamic, because they are inherently a mix or a blend of the arbitrary-and-the-conventional - at many levels see phonemes and monemes, above).  

Texts are (also) sets of signs which may appear at the same time, (or in a particular sequence), possibly also at the same place (virtual or otherwise), and which may - or may not - form part of a coherent whole.  That is partly up to the creator of the text, and partly up to the reader - or a mix (possibly even a 'balance', an interplay) between all of them.

Note: texts, and signs, are also 'not' the signs that they leave out. Absences signify too. 

Traces and Threads

Tim Ingold's "lines" (in his book by that name), are fascinating. They include the marks, the creations, of human activity. They can be 'connectors', and/or 'vectors' (which point to something, too).  They blend quite seamlessly into the by-products, the residues and the tracks of animate life more broadly, or even biological events. These may be seen as, or interpreted as 'texts' by humans, regardless of whether they were or were not the results of specifically human activity to start with.  

Texts, in this view, include both the more conventional 'texts', as in 'writings', but also a variety of 'lines,' including those made and found in nature as well as in human activity - primarily, for our purposes, letters of the alphabet (or sets of characters) of writing systems, but they also include all kinds of other connections and vectors - such as trajectories of travel, trade 'links', border 'lines', lines of flight (of birds, for instance, or munitions - in war) dividing lines like water-sheds, 'lines of desire' across landscapes, even 'lines of credit', and so on. 

Following Tim Ingold's book, lines can be divided into specific types: traces and threads (although, he writes, "by no means all lines fall into either category, but perhaps the majority do"):

A trace is "an enduring mark left in or on a (solid) surface by a continuous movement" - whether as a deliberate act of creation, or as just as a by-product of day-to-day activity. 

Stigmergy (animal scents left behind - accidentally or purposefully) are perhaps half-way between traces and threads. They are also, interestingly, often part of self-organisation in complex systems. 

A thread is found 'in the air'. It's most likely to be flexible, and it is "a filament of some kind, which may be entangled with other threads, or suspended between points in three-dimensional space." The bodies of animate beings (for instance ourselves), can also be seen as "complex connected bundles of threads" - blood vessels, nerves, ligaments, etc.