Laura JANARA Draft: please do not cite without permission
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judgments rendered possible by a multiplicitous perspective on the polity’s complex and irreducible
pluralism.
Practically speaking, how does one learn and exercise this multiplicitous way of seeing? First,
the virtuoso must learn to move across space to break up the immediacy and unity of the three-
dimensional box of the visual field. To prepare for warfare, a Machiavellian metaphor for politics in
general, Machiavelli recommends the “continual theorizing” born of ongoing movement across physical
terrain. A ruler should “study the lie of the land” by “climbing the mountains, descending into the
valleys, crossing the plains, fording rivers, and wading through marshes.” Such experience in spatial
diversity, he argues, usefully translates to unfamiliar spatial contexts by sensitizing a virtuoso to the
multifarious challenges of all types of terrain (P, 1995, 47, 46).
Deftly slinking around in the shadows to
sniff out traps and to discover where he may lay his/her own, the modus operandi of Machiavelli’s fox is
precisely this: to grasp a context from as many spatial standpoints as possible, collecting multiple
visions. This is what enables the fox to know many things, unlike Berlin’s hedgehog who knows one big
thing (Berlin, 1993). In the Discourses, Machiavelli describes the chase “as an imitation of war” perhaps
because the pursuit of a fox instructs one experientially in the foxy movement that virtuosos must
themselves cultivate. “[A]nyone who has this experience” of spatial terrain learned in activities like the
chase “knows, in the blink of an eye,” many things at once: “how that plain lies, how that mountain rises,
where that valley goes, and all other similar things, of which in the past he has gained a solid
understanding” (D, 1997, III:39, 346-7).
The virtuoso also gains multiplicitous knowledge of the human landscape through movement
across time. Circumstances continually change, Machiavelli says, so for a virtuoso to be as well prepared
as possible to respond, s/he must exceed the immediate present, a singular time dimension such as that
registered by linear perspectivism, by looking carefully at the past. The study of history, a central
Machiavellian pedagogical prescription, yields not a transcendent view of the human condition. Rather,
reflecting Machiavelli’s medieval/Renaissance sense of historiography, he recommends the study of
history because it exposes the reader to the many experiences of many humans as recorded in language,
the yield being “practical knowledge” (D, 1997, p. 18). For instance, “we always have recourse to those
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Convention