Plural is a modern definition for the antique idea which is described by the word Many.
The shift which makes them differ, is due to the reversal that Industry imposes to Humankind
who has become dependant from its own creation. After being made of many elements, the world
today is made of code; the ego thus acquire an all different perspective

The foolowing answer tries to make this intellectial evolution pleasant,
Since it is not easy for many, feeling uncertain to face ecology;
a meditation upon its last animation may foster some intuition.

The REPRESSION and the Formation of the INDIVIDUAL

Psychology (and other neural sciences), teaches that in the human world, the identification of an object depends on the repression of its background.

Several examples help adopting this point of view:
Neurosis happens when ego's parts are severed and exiled with the repression, in the background.
Stress is an hyperactive repression of the Background.

The notion of background can also be seen in the dimension of Time; where it can represent the Past (or the Future). The idea that someone did not pre-esisted to oneself is a specific repression which is called Narcissism.
Especially Psychoanalysis reveals this degree in the individualization process.

The analysis of Reflection (Psychoanalysis) suggests that the background can engulf the identity, in the traditinal case of Nirvana. Excepted when it persists during the adult life, it a normal phase of development - which shows that in the human world, as well as it is repressed, the background is reflected. These two situations of the background are combined together, thus framing the Human drive.

PLAN uses the traditional model of analysis of Psyche and deciphers the culture of Industry which executes it in the social world. Plato's millenary old model of the cave, brought up to date by Lacan shows the two spaces in front (left) and beyond (right) the mirror (Psyche). The client (and/or consumer, according to a circuits perspective) occupies the real space in front of the mirror which consists of the manufacture and its product (both constituting an artificail, imaginary reality).

Pic.10 : Manufacture and Products make the mirror
in which the Citizen's background is reflected

As humans access their truthes in the twist of a reflected background, analysis discloses its illusion in whimsical circumstances - such as frustration, inverted in the background as the character of a leader.

Pic.20 : Click the figure to visit the mechanism of
work with social hierarchy

Once analysed the perspectives of social existence, insight of the Real space (left in the diagrams) is enlightened. This knowledge has been seen for the first time when The Renaissance gave the world to Mechanics. Formulas  help distinguish the reflected Background (right/beyond the mirror) form the Background Condition of life (left/in front of the mirror). This is today's intellect's provision for a practical access to the complex Environmental issue. The human mind is so geared for processing his "real-yet-invisible" backgound which stands in front of the "repressed-for-an-object" mirrored background.

This mental exercise is administred by the analysis of the Psyche (Psychoanalysis). After having given in Narcissism (with the Transference of dual psychoanalysis - an actualization of the Past which indicates immaturity) in its preamble during the 20th Century, the Freudian Era opens to the Environmental logic as it matures into PLAN ; PLAN assumes that the Background Condition is accessible in the mirror of linguistics (objectivation and repression of the background) which reveals a Code.

Pic.30 : Subjectivity reveals the existence of a Code. Its logic differs from
that of the said objectivity of Industry (as a series differs from a sum)

PLAN's procedure  makes this assumption an experience. The many excractions of PLAN's session  unveil the real background condition that is a plural tense before what is usually known for collective knowledge. The Freudian diagram identifies it with the external world  where Lacan called the 'real' object 'abjects'. There is the matter of the drive which processes Civilization, reflected in the antique logic of The One and the Many. Today, it is openly popularized in the logic of Genome and Gene which is requiring an Ethics and calling for politics.
My answer for the definition of the plural could not be more explicite - the rest is experience (practice of PLAN), and that is Ecology.

© CYBEK of New York, 1999.