In an effort to follow up on my post about the term “subtext” I ended up delving into some cultural theory, including stuff like Roland Barthes, structuralism and semiotics. It’s sort of an interesting angle on the whole thing, although I find their language to be overly academic and obtuse most of the time. In any event, there is definitely some interesting stuff in it.

I like how they use the word “text” to describe pretty much any cultural artifact which can be “read”. A text could be a book, a movie, a newspaper article, a song, a news event. All kinds of different crap. And they talk a lot about things like how meaning is to be derived from these texts and heady stuff like that. Personally, I prefer to use the term “story” because that, to me, feels a lot more personal and readily identifiable than the word “text.”

This got me thinking more about the definition of “subtext” that I was looking for. If you follow the above definition of text, I would describe a subtext as a smaller text embedded in another one. So the subtext is stories which exist ecapsulated within other stories. Further down that chain of thought then, the context of a story would refer to the over-arching story which this one exists in.

The whole thing is not unlike those Russian nesting dolls, where you open one up and theres a smaller one, then open that up, and there’s another one, and so on. It’s pretty close to that word people like Ken Wilber use to describe complex systems, holons. A holon, if I understand it correctly refers to something that is both a “whole” unto itself, as well as being part of something larger. Like how a cell is also part of an organ which is in turn part of an organism, which is part of an ecosystem, etc.

So then you could say this triad of context/text/subtext is a way to navigate up and down levels of “story holons”.