select from its intrinsic desires, ideas and dispositions those that may fit into theperceivable societal contours—and to choose what to do with the remains that do not fit.

However, since this pre-linguistic, pre-iconicthinking sans image, as discussed above, has no definite contour nor contents yet, it does not come withconsolidated mental forms representing such prospective desires in a manner that could be examined,processed and acted upon.

The structural constitution of governance thus characterised is that by definition governancerequires the involvement of two kinds of active structures coupled together [ 6,7 ]. The first kind, isthe cognitive agency performed (as of today) by human minds. It is necessary for the performance ofcognitive selections, for symbolic encoding and decoding of such selections and for recognising theobservations of the produced effectuality and continuity. The second kind of structure is the perceivedcontour (by cognitive agencies) of the social system as a whole. (This description is very similar todescribing chains of causes and effects and connecting events which are otherwise unconnected. Suchchains, Hume argued, cannot be logically grounded. They are but manifestations of habits (repetitionafter Deleuze). Apparently, this more fundamental causal chaining is performed by individualminds as well.) In summary, the ontological status of a social system is inherently circular andirreducible. It exists only by virtue of being perceived as actually impacting the state of affairs andits particular impacts are observable as such only by virtue of this perceived existence. Moreover, wewill further claim, that it is mostly the coherence of the emergent recurrent patterns, not the particulardeterminations performed by the participating human minds, that are the actual ‘governors’ of thehuman realm.

is contoured by what the agent perceivesin the social context

examining the options available to individual persons weighing a decision vis-a-vis theirperceived socio-symbolically cohered contour. For that, let us look at a few concrete examples.