The Tartu-Moscow School: dialogue with avant-garde epistemologies

Abstract

In this work, our main objective is to revisit the Tartu-Moscow School from the perspective of Avant-Garde Epistemologies, to address the different stages of this important trend, as well as to outline the significant transdisciplinary advances developed within it. In this regard, we emphasize the transdisciplinary nature of the School, which transcends the merely interdisciplinary one, a point we will elaborate upon. Throughout the School’s various stages, the initial cognitive fields were enriched by others, and currently we can mention the following, some more relevant than others: Linguistics, Literature, Communication, Anthropology, Sociology, History, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, and the Arts, among others. Placing the Tartu-Moscow School within an Avant-Garde epistemological dialogue entails applying premises from six critical epistemologies: ancestral epistemologies; complexity, transdisciplinarity, decoloniality, epistemology of the South, and a revisited materialist epistemology. Given the scope of this work, we will only revisit some of these epistemological premises to observe their function within the theoretical and methodological frameworks of this trend. In the following sections, we will explore the trajectories of some key categories, such as culture, semiosphere,  text, and the explosive and graduating processes in cultural development.