Re-socialising Saussure : Aleksandr Romm’s Unpublished Review of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Abstract

As one of the most original and intellectually daring linguistic works of its epoch, Valentin Vološinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language provoked controversial reactions, reflected in the published reviews of the book. However, it is perhaps the unpublished review by Aleksandr Romm that presents a particular interest, as an autonomous attempt to re-conseptualise both Vološinov's and Saussure's linguistic thought. A member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the first translator of Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale into Russian, Romm had been an enthusiastic follower of Saussure's work and opposed the general anti-Saussurean movement in Soviet linguistic and literary studies of the late 1920s. In his review of MPL, Romm offers an original resolution of Vološinov's antinomy between the so-called ‘abstract objectivism’ and ‘individualist subjectivism’ or, in other words, between the two opposite approaches to language as a specific object of scientific inquiry. In contrast to Vološinov, he does not refute langue, but seeks to combine the Saussurean and Humboldtian frameworks to produce a dialectical view of both langue and parole as simultaneously social product and linguistic activity. This is achieved by introducing a third concept, the word (slovo), which Romm interprets in a phenomenological sense, demonstrating a strong influence of Gustav Špet's ideas and the ‘Špetian’ progress of the scholar's views on Saussure. Although unfinished and unpublished, Romm's review remains an extremely interesting document, which does not only serve as an example of the evolution of Saussureanism, but also as a testimony to the shift of paradigms in Soviet linguistics of the late 1920s.