STRUGGLE IN THE SIGN

The book credited with being the starting point of modern linguistics, Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (see above, §2.6), famously declares that langue, a language, is a social fact, and that social force holds the system together so powerfully that no individual can change the language. Changes occur in parole ‘speech’, and if eventually the community accepts the change, the whole system shifts to form a new langue. But the social space which language occupies for Saussure is not political: every member of the speech community possesses the language, he says, in identical form. There is no scope for one speaker to manifest power over another, since langue has no individual dimension. What individuals do is a matter entirely of parole.

Despite the apolitical nature of his analysis, the shadow of Saussure would loom large in subsequent attempts at a political account of language. If not reacting against Saussure's idealisation of a homogeneous speech community, such accounts are likely to be based on a methodology deriving from the structuralism he is credited with founding, or to be reacting against that very structuralism.

Nowhere did Saussure's Course have a deeper influence in the decade following its publication than in Russia, where it was initially received as consistent in spirit with the ‘formalism’ then in vogue. But over the course of the 1920s serious questions were raised about the commensurability of formalism with the basic Marxist view that every central facet of human experience is social in its origin and operation.