Paul Virilio: a critic ofinternational business?

From dromoeconomics to hypermodernorganization and beyond

John ArmitageDivision of Media and Communication, School of Arts and Social Sciences,

Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Abstract

Purpose – To investigate the importance of the work of French cultural theorist Paul Virilio forcritics of international business.

Design/methodology/approach – The article employs Virilio’s and others’ writings on“dromoeconomics” or the political economy of speed and “hypermodern” forms of organization withthe aim of expounding a “Virilian” approach to the critique of international business. This standpointnecessitates a discussion of dromoeconomics in addition to deliberations on “hypermodernorganization”. Two jointly authored articles by the author are introduced and explored as examples ofa Virilian perspective on international business.

Findings – The author argues that whilst a Virilian point-of-view regarding the field of internationalbusiness might initially appear as inappropriate to orthodox critics, a deeper examination reveals itsusefulness.

Originality/value – The article considers Virilio’s groundbreaking cultural theory in view ofcontemporary debates over international business, dromoeconomics, and hypermodern modes oforganization.

Keywords International business, Cultural studies, Organizational culture

Paper type Viewpoint

IntroductionAt first sight, the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio is an unlikely nominee asinspiration for an article appearing in an academic journal titled critical perspectives oninternational business. After all, Virilio’s career has been one of an artist in stainedglass, of a critical concern with cultural questions relating to urban and military spacefrom the perspective of a dedicated Christian and political activist rather than as ascholar of international business. With the architect Claude Parent, for example, Viriliofounded the Architecture Principe group and review of the same name in 1963,although Virilio’s active political militancy during the evenements of May 1968 led toan irretrievable break with Parent. In 1969 Virilio was nominated Professor at the EcoleSpeciale d’Architecture in Paris, before becoming its Director in 1975 and its Presidentin 1990. He retired in 1997. Virilio’s research interests, then, can hardly be said to havebeen focused on the globalization of production and consumption. Rather, they havebeen centered on the organization of exhibitions on the themes of war and urbanism,

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

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The author would like to thank Joanne Roberts for her valuable comments on a previous versionof this article.

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media, democracy and terrorism (e.g. Virilio, 2003a) in addition to editing andcontributing to a variety of influential periodicals, including Liberation and Les TempsModernes. Virilio’s critical and award winning writings and activities are not thereforeconcentrated on socio-economic change but on the politics of architecture, the power ofspeed, the organization of war, and the political and environmental affects of newinformation and communications technologies such as the internet.

Thus, the cultural significance of Virilio’s work does not flow from anycontributions he has made to the development of, for instance, the emerging disciplineof critical management studies. Instead, it springs from what might be termed his“left-Heideggerianism”. For Virilio is a theorist who is interested in Heidegger’s workas the basis for radical or progressive philosophical and socio-institutional critique(see, for example, Kellner, 2000, p. 118). It was, for example, Virilio’sleft-Heideggerianism that inspired his initial architectural and photographicinquiries, documented in Bunker Archeology (Virilio, 1994a), into the Atlantic Wall,the 15,000 German bunkers constructed during the Second World War along thecoastline of France to prevent Allied invasion. The Atlantic Wall also stimulatedVirilio to develop his war model of urban space and speed, power, military force anddisappearance. Accordingly, in The Function of the Oblique, Virilio and Parent (1996)outline their efforts to initiate an urban regime based on their theory of the “obliquefunction”, which, while founded on uneven planes and bodily disorientation,nevertheless resulted in the construction of the Church of Saint-Bernadette du Banlayat Nevers in 1966. Virilio’s later Foucauldian and Deleuzian influenced writings on “theoverexposed city”, “improbable architecture” and “critical space” are contained in hisThe Lost Dimension (Virilio, 1991a), and, most recently, City of Panic (Virilio, 2005a).Likewise, in Speed & Politics (Virilio, 1986), an essay on “dromology” (the compulsivelogic of speed), as in his The Information Bomb (Virilio, 2000a) and Negative Horizon(Virilio, 2005b), Virilio is largely unconcerned with, for instance, an internationalappraisal of management activities. Rather, his motivation stems from his ownsuggestion that successive technological revolutions imply both the disappearance ofgeographical space and a new cultural politics of real time. Pure War (Virilio, 1997), bycontrast, is a book-length interview with Virilio by Sylvere Lotringer. Popular Defense& Ecological Struggles (Virilio, 1990), Strategy of Deception (Virilio, 2000b), DesertScreen (Virilio, 2002a), and Ground Zero (Virilio, 2002b) on the other hand, discuss theuse, primarily by the US military-industrial complex, of “pure power” (the enforcementof surrender without engagement) and the case for revolutionary resistance to war andterror. In recent works, like The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Virilio, 1991b), TheVision Machine (Virilio, 1994b), The Art of the Motor (Virilio, 1995), Open Sky (Virilio,1997), Art and Fear (Virilio, 2003b) and, with Lotringer, The Accident of Art (Virilioand Lotringer, 2005), Virilio argues that the present historical, social, and culturalperiod is characterized by a new “aesthetics of disappearance”. Moreover, and muchlike Arthur Kroker (2004) and Jean Baudrillard (2005), Virilio claims that the aestheticsof disappearance is the source of the current crisis of cinematic images, a crisis that ispresently obliterating the distinction between our mental images and the virtualimages generated by the new technologies of perception, such as surveillance cameras,virtual reality, and cyberspace.

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Hence, on the face of it, Virilio’s writings are cultural critique articulated at thehighest level of theoretical abstraction. Certainly, his work develops aleft-Heideggerian yet ultimately transdisciplinary conception of power thatencourages a reflexive and critical consideration of questions of subjectivity and theimportance of numerous architectural and dromological, political, military andtechnological forces relevant to contemporary society. Furthermore, Virilio’s writingsoppose positivist perspectives on representation and the management of power, solelybased on his own biographical, religious, and intellectual experiences. At the sametime, Virilio routinely challenges configurations of control, the state and the politicalfrom a standpoint that appears ignorant of, or, worse, indifferent to, other eithermainstream or critical cultural, let alone managerial, theorists. He is, for instance,apparently oblivious of the many and varied cultural challenges to political andorganizational orthodoxy in train today, such as the spectacular rise and power ofoppositional politics and organized internet activism (Kahn and Kellner, 2005,pp. 75-100). Nor are those of his philosophically inclined and radically discursivewritings which do touch on the nature and dialectic of globalization and internationalbusiness (e.g. Virilio, 1997, pp. 69-86) particularly academically rigorous or based oncareful empirical study. More to the point, to incorporate Virilio’s work into one’s ownis difficult as it is only recently that it has come to be recognized by other culturaltheorists as unique and also because it repeatedly challenges its own priorsuppositions. Virilio’s writings, which he labels “the archeology of the future”, are,then, almost without exception, highly speculative interventions, as opposed towritings that are academically exact or engaged with the countless and increasinglypublic voices of those involved in formulating a critique of international businessaround the globe such as Naomi Klein (2001).

Thus far, then, I have presented a short description of Virilio’s life history andvarious reasons as to why the major driving force of his theoretical efforts to advanceour insights into contemporary culture might not be appreciated by readers of criticalperspectives on international business. In the following sections, however, and forobvious reasons of manageability and space, I shall not attempt to convey all thecentral themes of Virilio’s work alluded to above. Alternatively, I will focus on how,alongside other analysts of international business such as Phil Graham (Armitage andGraham, 2001, pp. 111-123) and Joanne Roberts (Roberts and Armitage, 2006), I havepaid critical attention to the themes of “dromoeconomics” (the political economy ofspeed) and “hypermodern” forms of organization within the discipline of criticalinternational business studies.

To be clear at the outset, I refer to the hypermodern as a short hand for“hypermodernity” or the present historical and social era, primarily in the advancedinformation and consumer-driven societies of Europe, North America, Australasia andJapan (Mattelart, 2003; Lipovetsky, 2005). The exact dating of this era is not aparticular issue of debate. Borgmann (1992, pp. 78-109), Kroker and Cook (1986) andKroker et al. (1990, pp. 443-459) all locate its beginnings in the 1980s. But, unlikeKroker and Cook, for instance, I do not consider the current transition purely as aradical rupture with modernity. Instead, I regard hypermodernity as a heightened levelof modern intensification, as a tremendous force whereby acceleration above all is usedas a factor of production proportionately more than ever before. To accelerate, of

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course, means to go, to happen, or cause something to travel or occur more rapidly thanpreviously. It is to speed up or bring about something sooner than expected or toincrease the velocity of the territorial, the human, and the social body together withtheir reactions. Virilio (1986), for example, has spoken of the contemporary significanceof approaching the history of the world not merely from the perspective of the politicaleconomy of wealth, of money and capital, but also from the standpoint of the politicaleconomy of speed. For today as economic globalization unfolds it appears that what weare witnessing is an escalation in the velocity of new information and communicationstechnologies, in the social divisions between those who have access to speed and thosewho do not, and, most of all, in the elimination of real space by real time, a conditionwherein new information and communications technologies put the speed of light towork over great distances and without delay. As Virilio (in Virilio and Armitage,2001a, p. 185: original italics) puts it: “the speed of light does not merely transform theworld. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!”. Inother words, a phenomenon such as economic globalization is simply unthinkablewithout the exploitation of the speed of light, or, to put it another way, without thecomplete spatial and temporal transformation of our world. Hence, to appreciate theprefix “hyper-” it is important to approach it literally, namely, in terms of above, over,or in excess, as in indicating an abnormality or as indicative of a social conditionhaving a greater than usual quantity of a given constituent, for instance, the excessesof the political economy of speed. Nevertheless, in broad terms, hypermodernitysignifies the multiple transformations that have taken global capitalism to a new stagethat is both radically different from yet continuous with the preceding regimes ofnational and international capitalism. Phil Graham and I (Armitage and Graham, 2001,p. 114) have described this contemporary “dromoeconomic” order of the politicaleconomy of speed as “hypercapitalism” – as a form of accelerated capitalism foundedon processes of circulation and self-valorisation and on increasingly ephemeral orsymbolic commodities associated with new information and communicationstechnologies. McKenna (2004, p. 17) has usefully and more recently definedhypercapitalism as:

[. . .] the operationalization and inculcation of knowledges as social practices. Anothercharacteristic is that surplus value is increasingly being built on “self-valorizing things”, orphenomenological capital, what Bauman (1998, p. 44) refers to as “the illusion of wealth”.Other important features of hypercapitalism are its technocratic hegemony . . . and itsoperation as a knowledge economy (hypermediated compilation, storage and application ofdata; increasingly technologized modalities of social interaction; the dominance of the cultureindustry, with its attendant simulacra over traditional industries).

Having now defined the concepts of the hypermodern and hypermodernity, I want toturn to an explanation of the importance of this article, which is that it is anexamination of the value of Virilian cultural theory and a demonstration of the utilityof the concepts of dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization for critics ofinternational business. Yet I shall argue that it is just as vital to move “beyond” theconcepts of dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization, even if these ideas arecrucial to my understanding of Virilio’s and Virilian contributions to the critique ofinternational business as well as to the analysis of theoretical work in this field and theassessment of its impact.

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Consequently, in the second section, below, I will consider dromoeconomics andhypermodern organization in relation to two recent and pertinent articles with theintention of presenting them as illustrations of a Virilian viewpoint on the critique ofinternational business. However, in the third section, I shall endeavour to signify theimportance of going into the beyond. Here, I will examine the significance of Viriliancultural theory for critics of international business before briefly discussing theimportance not merely of reorienting and mobilizing Virilio’s and Virilian-inspiredwritings but also of the need to develop new concepts, such as dromoeconomics andhypermodern organization, with a view to presenting an alternative set of concerns,interpretations, and contributions. Nevertheless, prior to the conclusion, in the fourthsection, I shall offer a short critical appraisal of Virilian contributions to hypermoderncultural theory and critique, whilst reviewing their possibilities and likely futureinfluence within the context of a critical perspective on international business.

From dromoeconomics to hypermodern organizationIn what ways, then, can critics of international business read Virilio’s cultural theoryproductively? In this section, I will concentrate on Armitage and Graham’s (2001,pp. 111-123) “Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed” and Roberts andArmitage’s (2006) “From organization to hypermodern organization: on the acceleratedappearance and disappearance of Enron”. My principal objective is to offer a critical orhypermodern account of contemporary international business in the advancedsocieties. However, the significance of this section emanates from the fact that it isfirstly an investigation into the efficacy of Virilian cultural theory and secondly, that itis an instance of the value of ideas such as dromoeconomics and hypermodernorganization for present-day commentators on international business. However, let usbegin with a consideration of dromoeconomics and the search for a political economyof speed before embarking on the question of hypermodern organization.

Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speedPublished in the British cultural studies, critical theory, and philosophy journal,parallax 18 (Volume 7, Number 1, January-March 2001), Armitage and Graham’s (2001)“Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed” offered an unconventionaltheoretical viewpoint on hypermodern cultural, political, and economic practices.Deploying a mixture of tools supplied by Marx (1973, 1976), we proposed a provisionalconceptualization of dromoeconomics, or, a political economy of speed. It is vital todocument that our broader line of reasoning about excess speed deviated significantlyfrom postmodern ideas of political economy in addition to that of customary Marxistframeworks. In their place, our fusion evolved from our separate contributions to theconcepts of “hypermodernism” (Armitage, 2000) and hypercapitalism (Graham, 2005).Certainly, we argued that the two opposing energies of war and international tradedrove the obligation to conceive of dromoeconomics. For such seemingly adversativebut in fact mutually dependent logics discovered by Virilio and Marx, we argued,established their “suspension” in a kind of organized form of irrational rationality.Such (ir)rational rationality we labeled “hypermodern managerialism” as anabbreviation for the comprehensive, allegedly developed, and sophisticated form of“sociopathic managerialism” now at work in the advanced societies. Hypermodern

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managerialism, we suggested, is an (ir)rationalist material standpoint that at presentreaches into nearly all aspects of human existence. Consequently, research intodromoeconomics had become essential since war had become industrialized whilstinternational trade had turned into absolute war. In the present period, in other words,war and international trade are identical in their hypermodern managerialist stress onthe necessity for a political economy of speed.

By means of the concepts of excess speed and overproduction, alongside others suchas war, international trade, suspension, hypermodern managerialism, and the politicaleconomy of speed, we concluded that the introduction of the idea of dromoeconomicswas recognition of the fact that hypercapitalist societies are “dromocratic” by nature.They are societies that are extremely energetic, continually moving and ruled byprevailing (in)sensitivities to the politico-economic rationale that their internationaltrade and militarized technologies require. Dromocratic societies, as a result, linger inperilous instability whilst feverishly disregarding the destruction being inflicted bytheir own universal and violent (ir)rationalities. Progressing to an authentic knowledgeof dromoeconomics in the era of hypermodernity consequently involves anappreciation of the political economy of speed. However, it also demands anappreciation that Virilio’s highlighting of dromology and Marx’s examination ofoverproduction offer opportunities for considering hypermodern accounts of war andinternational trade that diverge radically from those presented by either postmodern orlong-established Marxian political economists (e.g. Mandel, 1975). Our initial programfor a political economy of speed, then, rested on the idea of suspension. Nevertheless,this is just one feature of dromoeconomics. It is in no way authoritative orcomprehensive. We merely wished to identify what we deemed were notable yet undertheorized facets of hypermodern managerialism and the need for speed, namely, themanifestation of these in the arena and (ir)rationalities of contemporary internationaltrade and war. To underscore hypermodern managerialism, we argued, was essentialsince war is a key component of international trade. Hence, hypermodern trade andwar are the present-day underpinning of the globalization of dromoeconomics. Movingahead to an appreciation of dromoeconomics, notwithstanding its conceptualcomplexities was, we maintained, for these reasons no longer a choice but anobligation. In concluding, therefore, we suggested that our idea of dromoeconomicswas important, not because it was yet one more neologism but because of the essentialquestion it introduced, the question of the political economy of speed.

From organization to hypermodern organization: on the accelerated appearance anddisappearance of EnronAvailable in the international business and management journal, Journal ofOrganizational Change Management (Volume 19, Number 5, September, 2006),Roberts and Armitage’s (2006) “From organization to hypermodern organization: onthe accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron” is a contemplation on theconcept of organization in addition to an introduction and expansion upon the idea ofthe hypermodern organization. In this article, Joanne Roberts and I described thehypermodern organization as an institution primarily rooted in a close to obsessivelevel of modern intensification and speed up. Thus, we aimed to contribute ahypermodern conception of organization to the literature on organizational change

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management. Indeed, we argued that existing perspectives on organizational changemanagement have failed to acknowledge either the emergence of hypermodernity orthe hypermodern organization. To exemplify the hypermodern organization weinvestigated the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron, the American,Houston-based, energy company established in 1985, and which rose to prominenceand ultimately disgrace after its stunning disintegration in 2001. Certainly, there hadalready been a great deal of discussion about the fluctuations of Enron in the literatureon change management (e.g. Fox, 2003). However, our intention was not to restate theebb and flow of the Enron scandal but to relate another narrative wherein itsaccelerated appearance and disappearance was characterized as a paradigm of thehypermodern organization. Accordingly, through an investigation of Enron, we aimedto reveal the significance of the hypermodern organization over and above theaccelerated managerial repercussions of appearance and disappearance for othercontemporary organizations.

Drawing on existing and original notions of organization and speed, appearance,hypermodernity, and a unique case study of Enron’s accelerated disappearance as ahypermodern organization, we concluded that the concept of organization, indeed thevery idea of organizational form itself, is presently undergoing a transformation ashypermodern organizational forms appear in societies set apart by the onset ofhypermodernity. Additionally, in trying to look further than the archetypalorganizational form (i.e. pre-modern, modern, and postmodern organizations), wewanted to delve into the specific aspects of the hypermodern organization. Through aconcentration on the importance of speed to the hypermodern organization, therefore,we were able not only to address a significant oversight in current debates over themanagement of organizational change, but also, to take up the organizational changeliterature by means of the establishment of the hypermodern organization and ourscrutiny of Enron as a prototype of this form of organization. Thus, in presenting a fullexplanation of the accelerated appearance and disappearance of the hypermodernorganization of Enron, we argued that such developments were, in large, part anunavoidable result of its hypermodern character. Moreover, whilst other studies of thedownfall of Enron concentrated on the malfunctioning of its corporate governance, wepreferred to focus on a previously ignored facet of Enron’s disappearance, namely, thisparticular hypermodern organization’s addiction to speed.

As may be anticipated, numerous repercussions for the management oforganizational change arose from our model of the hypermodern organization. First,we revealed that the current socio-political and economic milieu is triggering thegrowth of increasingly hypermodern and, crucially, transitory organizations. As aresult, it is more and more an obligation on hypermodern organizations to developahead of the hypermodern form or, alternatively, to revert to a prior, perhaps modern,organizational form if they are to evade their own accelerated disappearance from thelandscape of hypercapitalism. In brief, and notwithstanding the immediate benefits tobe gained from the acceleration of an organization’s performance, the extreme speed ofthe hypermodern organization is not an enduring but a transitory condition. Managersmust be, for these reasons, attentive to this aspect of the hypermodern organization tobe able to work out survival strategies for themselves, for their colleagues, theirworkers, and their shareholders. One potential strategy is to segregate hypermodern

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activities from postmodern and modern activities. Hence, before the entire organizationtakes on hypermodern characteristics, it may seek to arrange itself around provisionalhypermodern ventures combined with less ephemeral modern or postmodern projects.

What we tried to do in this article, consequently, was to tackle a basic flaw incontemporary organizational theory by way of a presentation and embellishment of theidea of the hypermodern organization. Further hypermodern theoretical and empiricalinvestigations into other organizations are necessary to corroborate and enlarge uponour work in this regard. But the overall direction of future research is clear. It is amatter of concentrating on issues relating to accelerated rates of corporate growth, tothe acquisition strategies of corporations other than Enron, and, especially, to thoseinternational businesses that are, or become dependent on, a move away fromstrategies anchored in industrialized or “heavy” assets, to those founded on financial or“light” assets driven by the quest for speed. It is critical to understand that theappearance of the hypermodern organization is derived from the pivotal importance ofacceleration, from dromoeconomics or the political economy of speed. For without suchan understanding, managers will neither be in a position to recognize loomingaccelerated organizational change nor be able to halt it before it devours the entireorganization. Any effort to expand our knowledge of the transient hypermodernorganization must, then, be based on additional research into the myriad features ofhypercapitalism within the context of a hypermodernity that currently governs thecontemporary socio-economic terrain.

Thus, the significance of this section resides in the fact that it has sought to appraisethe benefits of Virilio’s cultural theory and lay bare the effectiveness of theVirilian-inspired concepts of dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization, by wayof a discussion of two contemporary and relevant articles, offered as examples of aVirilian perspective on the critique of international business.

Into the beyondEven so, in this section, I maintain that it is equally important to go beyond ideas suchas dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization. For, regardless of how essentialthese concepts are to an interpretation of Virilio’s and Virilian contributions to thecritical, theoretical, and empirical analysis of the impact of international business, it is,nevertheless, essential to develop them still further. Indeed, in what follows, I want toconsider the importance of Virilio’s cultural theory for critics of international businessthrough a discussion of the significance of redirecting and activating his and otherVirilian writings, in addition to the requirement to make available new concepts thatelucidate different interests, analyses, and offerings.

Clearly, the first point to make is that it is possible to characterize Virilio as a criticof international business. Despite the fact that Virilio is a cultural rather than a socialor economic theorist, therefore, his writings are of significance to those researcherswho take a critical view of international business. However, what I also want to stressis that critical researchers into international business must be prepared to venture intothe arts, and into cultural issues involving, for example, the meaning and importance ofthe global corporatization and militarization of urban space, in addition to the politicalbehavior of international businesses. To be a critic of international business,consequently, does not preclude a critique of architecture any more than it precludes

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the study of political activism and economic events. In other words, an analysis ofinternational business that incorporates the work of a radical architect like Virilio doesnot prevent a critique of global production systems and consumption patterns, or, forinstance, the role of international business in the organization of the so-called “War onTerror” and their combined influence on the city, the mass media, and democracy.These latter and associated themes, I suggest, should be included in any truly criticalperspective on international business. Moreover, as I have tried to show, Virilio’s andVirilian writings represent merely one alternative approach through which such anaction plan can be implemented regarding the critique of global political economy, theimpact and pace of international business, the commercialization of warfare and therole of the corporation in the worldwide development of new information andcommunications technologies.

An equally noteworthy further point is concerned with the cultural significanceof Virilian writings for those working in critical management studies. For Virilianleft-Heideggerianism is a theoretical standpoint that is just as applicable toprogressive philosophical and socio-legal analyses of the organizations andenvironments constructed by international business. There is, for example, noreason why Virilian left-Heideggerianism must be limited to the critique ofarchitecture, photography, and war. In fact, Virilio’s war model of urbandromology is already being utilized to discern the logics of economic and militarypower, the forces of globalization, and the disappearance of the social and societyby theorists of culture and organization in a variety of contexts (see, e.g.Armitage, 2001, pp. 131-148; Bishop and Phillips, 2004, pp. 61-75). What is ofcrucial importance today, however, is the attempt to reorient, re-evaluate, andre-theorize Virilio’s urbanism from fresh perspectives. Virilian inspired criticalmanagement theorists, for instance, might wish to concentrate on the bewilderingspatial effects of international business on human corporeality and its cognitiveseparation from the increasingly simultaneous destruction of public or social spaceand the construction of private or corporate space in “the hypermodern city”(Armitage and Roberts, 2003, pp. 87-104). Also of significance is the question oflinking Virilio’s urbanism to the spatialized history of Foucault (1980, pp. 63-77) orto the “geophilosophy” of Deleuze and Guattari (1994, pp. 96-97), where the role ofunforeseen urban events is highlighted in conjunction with an emphasis onambient architectural settings. Here, the critique of space, inclusive of the space ofinternational business, commences not with a “cause” or a “history” but with a“becoming”, with the end of geography replacing the beginning of urban history,with terror, rather than security.

Likewise, it is a matter of mobilizing Virilio’s work thus far, of going beyond Speed& Politics and dromology, in the name of innovative Foucauldian and Deleuze-Guattariinflected projects centered on introducing movement into reflections on information,war, perception, and geopolitics. Setting Virilio’s “metaphysics of speed” (Winchester,1999, pp. 159-166) in motion is not, then, beyond the ability of critical managementtheorists engaged with the character and impact of international business. Yet this lastis also a question of initiating Virilio’s metaphysics of speed with particular referenceto the continuing revolution of technoscience, to the slow disappearance of therepresentation of geographical space and to the transfer of hypermodern cultural

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politics into real time or a series of “chronotopias” and “chronodystopias” (Armitageand Roberts, 2002, pp. 43-54). For the contemporary representation of war, inparticular, is increasingly disappearing into a beyond that is eradicating all traces of itspreviously mediated appearance. Consequently, regarding Virilio’s writings on warand security, environmentalism, liberation struggles, strategy, misinformation,violence, the military-industrial complex, power and resistance to power, it is amatter of unearthing from his work a movement that can interconnect with themethods presently adopted by critical management theorists in such a fashion that itreworks their previous understandings.

One way of making Virilio’s work on aesthetics and disappearance, on perception,technoscience, terror and catastrophe, move, of contemplating his writings whilstconcurrently interjecting and developing new concepts, is, of course, by introducingideas such as hypermodernity, dromoeconomics, and hypermodern organization.Nevertheless, it is not a matter of, say, substituting hypermodernity for postmodernityfor no reason. Rather, it is a question of focusing on another set of contemporaryhistorical subjects, social modulations, and cultural flows. Such themes, intonations,and currents not only comprise the signs of rising levels of escalation and speed up,“social overload” (Jeudy, 1994), along with the ever more mediated representations ofhypercapitalism and the aesthetics of disappearance, but also, the emergence ofhypermodern organizations such as Enron. Much like Kroker’s (2004) andBaudrillard’s (2005), then, a Virilian aesthetic twists conventional criticalmanagement methodologies and whirls through a range of cultural crises whilstgravitating towards the cinematic, to a passionate engagement with cognitive andcybernetic imagery, and to the contemporary leap into the new technologies ofperception which, increasingly, map the human body and virtualize the mind.

Hence, in this section, I have highlighted and argued for the importance ofcommunicating and galvanizing Virilio’s writings, and for the significance of theconcepts of dromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity.However, I have done so with the intention of opening up innovativeVirilian-inspired ideas regarding unconventional theorizing, empirical investigations,and interpretive critiques of the global socio-economic and cultural effects ofinternational business.

AutocritiqueNaturally, before concluding, it is imperative to testify that there are numerousdifficulties with both Virilio’s and Virilian cultural theory. Consequently, in thissection, I shall present a concise critique of Virilian hypermodern cultural theoreticalwritings and an appraisal of their possible bearing on the discipline of criticalinternational business studies.

Clearly, as I have already indicated, I have no intention of implying that aVirilian-inspired cultural approach to the critique of international business is problemfree. Far from it, given that Virilio himself utilizes sophisticated theoretical concepts atthe speed of light and writes in sentences that frequently run to half a page or more. Inaddition, it is sometimes hard to separate in Virilio’s writings the left-Heideggerianismfrom the “right-Heideggerianism” in that, like “right-Heideggerians”, such as RobertMugerauer (1995), Virilio is a theorist for whom Heidegger presents an interpretation

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of, for example, subjectivity as a key factor in what might be labeled the “Great Poemof Being”. Occasionally, therefore, Virilio seems to be advocating a kind of“homecoming” from the inexorable hypermodern forces of architecturaltransformation and acceleration, from political authority, militarization, andtechnologization for the human spirit. Virilio’s work thus often supports an ethic of,for instance, representation or organization that is non-exploitative in its relation to theintellect and emotions of the individual human being and to the Earth’s ownsensibilities. An outstanding illustration is Virilio’s dazzling adaptation and expansionof Heidegger’s (1971a, pp. 145-161; 1971b, pp. 165-182) “Building dwelling thinking”and “The thing” as regards questions of environmental ethics. What Virilio (1997,pp. 58-68) calls “grey ecology” is critically involved with “the sudden pollution ofdistances and lengths of time that is degrading the expanse of our habitat” (Virilio,1997, p. 58; original emphasis). From Virilio’s perspective, then, the environmental andquasi-religious components of Heidegger’s writings are of identical intellectual interestto the forces of left-Heideggerian destruction as a foundation for a critique of powerand a meaningful analysis of extant thought concerning, for example, the state andrelated political institutions like the military-industrial complex.

However, as Nigel Thrift (2005, pp. 353-364) has observed, Virilio’s and Virilianwork is apocalyptic in tenor and topic, deficient in academic scrupulousness, andfree of the sort of empirical evidence that is usually associated with social scienceresearch and which is readily available in the writings of other cultural theoristsand practitioners, inclusive of those of critical management theorists. There are, asa result, various blind spots in Virilio’s work, with one of the most apparent being,as Kellner (2000, p. 120) has noted, Virilio’s replacement of a “moralizing critiquefor social analysis and political action”. Virilio’s own methodology, in particular, isin consequence inclined to disregard the effects of organized “cyberactivism”(McCaughey and Ayers, 2003) or the use of new information and communicationstechnologies as tools for social transformation and the affirmative re-definition ofvarious communal and individual identities. It follows that it is relatively easy todemonstrate how Virilio’s philosophical leanings and radically discursive worksfall short of the acid test of social science, or how they can be portrayed aslaments for an earlier, more complete world, before the onset of globalization, oreven, as a darkly romantic protest against corporate capitalism. Undoubtedly,integrating Virilio’s writings into a critical perspective on international businesswill be no easy task.

Nonetheless, Virilian critical cultural theory does represent an original, if at timesoblique, intervention that repeatedly unsettles existing viewpoints on everything fromeconomic globalization to war, cinema, and perception. Furthermore, Virilio himself iswell used to having his work described as that of a confused postmodern philosophicalfantasist (see, for example, Sokal and Bricmont, 1998, pp. 159-166). As far back as theearly 1980s, for instance, Virilio was not only writing War and Cinema but was also anactive participant in the French non-violent anti-war movement, where, for the firsttime, his friends told him that his claims concerning military logistics and perceptionneither made any sense nor were anywhere near militant enough. Virilio replied that“while it was true that one can march through the streets with placards demandingthat we ‘Ban the Bomb!’ or ‘Rid the World of Poison Gas!’ one cannot easily march

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through the streets shouting ‘Down with flight simulators!’, ‘Down with cameras!’, or‘Down with the internet!’” (Virilio and Armitage, 2001a, p. 181). In short, it has takenover twenty years for the questions raised by Virilio in War and Cinema and numerousother books regarding the militarization of human perception and so forth to berecognized as significant by other cultural theorists. Nevertheless, the issue in our dayis how long will it be before the questions introduced by Virilian cultural theoryconcerning international business are acknowledged as important by criticalmanagement theorists?

ConclusionThe intention of this article has been to contemplate whether Virilio can be portrayedas a critic of international business. Obviously, from my point-of-view, an affirmativeresponse to this question is the correct one. But, in reaching this conclusion, I have alsopresented and discussed concepts such as dromoeconomics, hypermodernorganization, and hypermodernity, ideas that I consider crucial to the expansion of aVirilian perspective on international business. Significantly, though, I have insisted onthe necessity of shifting into the beyond, that is, into new Virilian, critical, abstract, andexperiential territories centered on the establishment and growth of unorthodoxnotions and understandings of “the international”, of “business”, of “the modern”, andof “organization”. For such concepts and interpretations are the cornerstones of anypotential Virilian standpoint on the fate of international business.

To facilitate such ideas and explanations, however, it was essential to begin with asuccinct account of Virilio’s life history and work for those unfamiliar with his culturaltheory. But readers would be mistaken if they were to assume that Virilio’s writingsare widely renowned as noteworthy in France or elsewhere. His work is, of course,increasingly valued in Europe, North America, Australia, and South East Asia.Nevertheless, the fact remains that, as Virilio (Virilio and Armitage, 2001b, p. 16)himself has said, he is “essentially a marginal figure” whose writings are influencedprimarily by his boyhood encounter with the Second World War; that is to say, withmilitary strategy, spatial planning, and the onset of the Nazi’s blitzkrieg on France.Then again, as I hope readers of critical perspectives on international business are nowaware, Virilio’s cultural and philosophical activities have manifestly improved ourknowledge of war and augmented our grasp of architecture and the city, speed, politics,information, militarization, ecology, terror, aesthetics, and technology. His work iscertainly sporadically oblique and composed at an elevated level of theoreticalabstraction. But, for those prepared to take the time and make the effort, there is noreason to suppose that Virilio’s writings cannot be developed productively within thefield of critical international business studies.

Simultaneously, by way of an introduction to and a discussion of the concepts ofdromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity, I focused attentionon the Virilian inflected work of Armitage and Graham (2001), and Roberts andArmitage (2006). As noted, the significance of these writings is that they have all beeninfluenced by Virilio’s work and, therefore, represent a development of it incombination with the writings of, for example, Foucault (1980), Deleuze and Guattari(1994), and Marx (1973), 1976). In the present period, then, it is a matter ofconcentrating on the core themes of Virilio’s work whilst concurrently seeking out

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different subjects and additional theorists whose writings share similar concerns tothose of Virilio; such as Baudrillard, Kroker, and Kellner. Evidently, for the purposes ofthis article, I decided to focus on the Virilian topics of dromology and politicaleconomy, hypermodernity, and organization, issues that were signalled by mydiscussion of dromoeconomics and the political economy of speed, and the acceleratedappearance and disappearance of Enron.

Yet I also argued for the importance of Virilio’s and Virilian work in terms of theircapacity to transport researchers into new spheres of investigation, inclusive of thecritique of international business. To be sure, I proposed the rearrangement and,crucially, the activation of Virilian cultural theory with an eye to moving beyonddromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity and on to anexploration of the influence of international business from the viewpoint of what mightbe called “post-Virilian” cultural and social theory. However, whilst the concepts ofdromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity must be uppermostin any analysis of post-Virilian contributions to the critique of international business, itis essential to restate that such offerings should not merely be criticized for their flawsbut also celebrated for their achievements. All the same, from now on, it is the task ofmanagement theorists to adopt and to adapt post-Virilian cultural theory with the aimof shaping a truly critical perspective on international business.

References

Armitage, J. (Ed.) (2000), Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, Sage,London.

Armitage, J. (2001), “Project(ile)s of hypermodern(organ)ization”, Ephemera: Critical Dialogues onOrganization, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 131-48.

Armitage, J. and Graham, P. (2001), “Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed”,Parallax, Vol. 18, January-March, pp. 111-23.

Armitage, J. and Roberts, J. (2002), “Chronotopia”, in Armitage, J. and Roberts, J. (Eds), Livingwith Cyberspace: Technology and Society in the 21st Century, Continuum, London.

Armitage, J. and Roberts, J. (2003), “From the hypermodern city to the grey zone of totalmobilization in the Philippines”, in Bishop, R. (Ed.), Postcolonial Urbanism: South EastAsian Cities and Global Processes, Routledge, New York, NY.

Baudrillard, J. (2005), The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), New York, NY.

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Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy?, Verso, London.

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Graham, P. (2005), Hypercapitalism: New Media, Language, and Social Perceptions of Value,Peter Lang, New York, NY.

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Heidegger, M. (1971a), Building Dwelling Thinking, in his Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language,Thought, Harper & Row, New York, NY.

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Klein, N. (2001), No Logo, Flamingo, London.

Kroker, A. (2004), The Will to Technology & The Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche &Marx, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Kroker, A. and Cook, D. (1986), The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture andHyper-Aesthetics, St Martin’s Press, New York, NY.

Kroker, A., Kroker, M. and Cook, D. (1990), “Panic USA: hypermodernism as America’spostmodernism”, Social Problems, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 443-59.

Lipovetsky, G. (2005), Hypermodern Times, Polity Press, Cambridge.

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Roberts, J. and Armitage, J. (2006), “From organization to hypermodern organization: on theaccelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron”, Journal of Organizational ChangeManagement, Vol. 19 No. 5.

Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. (1998), Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse ofScience, Profile Books, London.

Thrift, N. (2005), “Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the esthetic of disaster”, Cultural Politics, Vol. 1No. 3, pp. 353-64.

Virilio, P. (1986), Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, Semiotext(e), New York, NY.

Virilio, P. (1990), Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, Semiotext(e), New York, NY.

Virilio, P. (1991a), The Lost Dimension, Semiotext(e), New York, NY.

Virilio, P. (1991b), The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), New York, NY.

Virilio, P. (1994a), Bunker Archeology, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, NJ.

Virilio, P. (1994b), The Vision Machine, British Film Institute, London.

Virilio, P. (1995), The Art of the Motor, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, MN.

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Virilio, P. (2000a), The Information Bomb, Verso, London.

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Virilio, P. (2000b), Strategy of Deception, Verso, London.

Virilio, P. (2002a), Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, Continuum, London.

Virilio, P. (2002b), Ground Zero, Verso, London.

Virilio, P. (2003a), Unknown Quantity, Thames and Hudson, London.

Virilio, P. (2003b), Art and Fear, Continuum, London.

Virilio, P. (2005a), City of Panic, Berg, Oxford.

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Further reading

Virilio, P. and Armitage, J. (2001a), “The Kosovo W@r did take place”, in Armitage, J. (Ed.),Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, Sage, London.

Virilio, P. and Armitage, J. (2001b), “From modernism to hypermodernism and beyond”, inArmitage, J. (Ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, Sage, London.

Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. (1997), Pure War, Semiotext(e), New York, NY.

About the authorJohn Armitage teaches in the Division of Media & Communication at Northumbria University,UK. He is co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Douglas Kellner, of the Berg Journal, Cultural Politics.He can be contacted at: j.armitage@unn.ac.uk

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