A defence of an 'immanentist' account of social form and experience

In defence of South African discursive social psychology, this paper provides a brief account of social form and experience as immanent in discursive practices. Social order and social institutions must be viewed as no more and no less than the sedimentation of coordinated human practices, and that any attempt to explain the 'objectivity' of the human made social world by recourse to biological or cultural essences is to entirely misunderstand its ontology. I argue that this immanentist perspective provides a more adequate account of the social psychology of social transformation, and steers clear of some potential political problems associated with cultural essentialism.