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Paul Virilio: a critic of international business?

From dromoeconomics to hypermodern organization and beyond
John Armitage
Division 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 for critics of international business. Design/methodology/approach The article employs Virilios and others writings on dromoeconomics or the political economy of speed and hypermodern forms of organization with the aim of expounding a Virilian approach to the critique of international business. This standpoint necessitates a discussion of dromoeconomics in addition to deliberations on hypermodern organization. Two jointly authored articles by the author are introduced and explored as examples of a Virilian perspective on international business. Findings The author argues that whilst a Virilian point-of-view regarding the eld of international business might initially appear as inappropriate to orthodox critics, a deeper examination reveals its usefulness. Originality/value The article considers Virilios groundbreaking cultural theory in view of contemporary debates over international business, dromoeconomics, and hypermodern modes of organization. Keywords International business, Cultural studies, Organizational culture Paper type Viewpoint

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Introduction At rst sight, the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio is an unlikely nominee as inspiration for an article appearing in an academic journal titled critical perspectives on international business. After all, Virilios career has been one of an artist in stained glass, of a critical concern with cultural questions relating to urban and military space from the perspective of a dedicated Christian and political activist rather than as a scholar of international business. With the architect Claude Parent, for example, Virilio founded the Architecture Principe group and review of the same name in 1963, although Virilios active political militancy during the evenements of May 1968 led to an irretrievable break with Parent. In 1969 Virilio was nominated Professor at the Ecole Speciale dArchitecture in Paris, before becoming its Director in 1975 and its President in 1990. He retired in 1997. Virilios research interests, then, can hardly be said to have been focused on the globalization of production and consumption. Rather, they have been centered on the organization of exhibitions on the themes of war and urbanism,
The author would like to thank Joanne Roberts for her valuable comments on a previous version of this article.

critical perspectives on international business Vol. 2 No. 4, 2006 pp. 339-353 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1742-2043 DOI 10.1108/17422040610706659

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media, democracy and terrorism (e.g. Virilio, 2003a) in addition to editing and contributing to a variety of inuential periodicals, including Liberation and Les Temps Modernes. Virilios critical and award winning writings and activities are not therefore concentrated on socio-economic change but on the politics of architecture, the power of speed, the organization of war, and the political and environmental affects of new information and communications technologies such as the internet. Thus, the cultural signicance of Virilios work does not ow from any contributions he has made to the development of, for instance, the emerging discipline of critical management studies. Instead, it springs from what might be termed his left-Heideggerianism. For Virilio is a theorist who is interested in Heideggers work as the basis for radical or progressive philosophical and socio-institutional critique (see, for example, Kellner, 2000, p. 118). It was, for example, Virilios left-Heideggerianism that inspired his initial architectural and photographic inquiries, documented in Bunker Archeology (Virilio, 1994a), into the Atlantic Wall, the 15,000 German bunkers constructed during the Second World War along the coastline of France to prevent Allied invasion. The Atlantic Wall also stimulated Virilio to develop his war model of urban space and speed, power, military force and disappearance. 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 oblique function, which, while founded on uneven planes and bodily disorientation, nevertheless resulted in the construction of the Church of Saint-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers in 1966. Virilios later Foucauldian and Deleuzian inuenced writings on the overexposed city, improbable architecture and critical space are contained in his The Lost Dimension (Virilio, 1991a), and, most recently, City of Panic (Virilio, 2005a). Likewise, in Speed & Politics (Virilio, 1986), an essay on dromology (the compulsive logic of speed), as in his The Information Bomb (Virilio, 2000a) and Negative Horizon (Virilio, 2005b), Virilio is largely unconcerned with, for instance, an international appraisal of management activities. Rather, his motivation stems from his own suggestion that successive technological revolutions imply both the disappearance of geographical space and a new cultural politics of real time. Pure War (Virilio, 1997), by contrast, is a book-length interview with Virilio by Sylvere Lotringer. Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (Virilio, 1990), Strategy of Deception (Virilio, 2000b), Desert Screen (Virilio, 2002a), and Ground Zero (Virilio, 2002b) on the other hand, discuss the use, primarily by the US military-industrial complex, of pure power (the enforcement of surrender without engagement) and the case for revolutionary resistance to war and terror. In recent works, like The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Virilio, 1991b), The Vision 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 (Virilio and Lotringer, 2005), Virilio argues that the present historical, social, and cultural period is characterized by a new aesthetics of disappearance. Moreover, and much like Arthur Kroker (2004) and Jean Baudrillard (2005), Virilio claims that the aesthetics of disappearance is the source of the current crisis of cinematic images, a crisis that is presently obliterating the distinction between our mental images and the virtual images generated by the new technologies of perception, such as surveillance cameras, virtual reality, and cyberspace.

Hence, on the face of it, Virilios writings are cultural critique articulated at the highest level of theoretical abstraction. Certainly, his work develops a left-Heideggerian yet ultimately transdisciplinary conception of power that encourages a reexive and critical consideration of questions of subjectivity and the importance of numerous architectural and dromological, political, military and technological forces relevant to contemporary society. Furthermore, Virilios writings oppose positivist perspectives on representation and the management of power, solely based on his own biographical, religious, and intellectual experiences. At the same time, Virilio routinely challenges congurations of control, the state and the political from a standpoint that appears ignorant of, or, worse, indifferent to, other either mainstream or critical cultural, let alone managerial, theorists. He is, for instance, apparently oblivious of the many and varied cultural challenges to political and organizational orthodoxy in train today, such as the spectacular rise and power of oppositional politics and organized internet activism (Kahn and Kellner, 2005, pp. 75-100). Nor are those of his philosophically inclined and radically discursive writings which do touch on the nature and dialectic of globalization and international business (e.g. Virilio, 1997, pp. 69-86) particularly academically rigorous or based on careful empirical study. More to the point, to incorporate Virilios work into ones own is difcult as it is only recently that it has come to be recognized by other cultural theorists as unique and also because it repeatedly challenges its own prior suppositions. Virilios writings, which he labels the archeology of the future, are, then, almost without exception, highly speculative interventions, as opposed to writings that are academically exact or engaged with the countless and increasingly public voices of those involved in formulating a critique of international business around the globe such as Naomi Klein (2001). Thus far, then, I have presented a short description of Virilios life history and various reasons as to why the major driving force of his theoretical efforts to advance our insights into contemporary culture might not be appreciated by readers of critical perspectives on international business. In the following sections, however, and for obvious reasons of manageability and space, I shall not attempt to convey all the central themes of Virilios work alluded to above. Alternatively, I will focus on how, alongside other analysts of international business such as Phil Graham (Armitage and Graham, 2001, pp. 111-123) and Joanne Roberts (Roberts and Armitage, 2006), I have paid critical attention to the themes of dromoeconomics (the political economy of speed) and hypermodern forms of organization within the discipline of critical international 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 advanced information and consumer-driven societies of Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan (Mattelart, 2003; Lipovetsky, 2005). The exact dating of this era is not a particular issue of debate. Borgmann (1992, pp. 78-109), Kroker and Cook (1986) and Kroker et al. (1990, pp. 443-459) all locate its beginnings in the 1980s. But, unlike Kroker and Cook, for instance, I do not consider the current transition purely as a radical rupture with modernity. Instead, I regard hypermodernity as a heightened level of modern intensication, as a tremendous force whereby acceleration above all is used as 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 than previously. It is to speed up or bring about something sooner than expected or to increase the velocity of the territorial, the human, and the social body together with their reactions. Virilio (1986), for example, has spoken of the contemporary signicance of approaching the history of the world not merely from the perspective of the political economy of wealth, of money and capital, but also from the standpoint of the political economy of speed. For today as economic globalization unfolds it appears that what we are witnessing is an escalation in the velocity of new information and communications technologies, in the social divisions between those who have access to speed and those who do not, and, most of all, in the elimination of real space by real time, a condition wherein new information and communications technologies put the speed of light to work 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 the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!. In other words, a phenomenon such as economic globalization is simply unthinkable without the exploitation of the speed of light, or, to put it another way, without the complete spatial and temporal transformation of our world. Hence, to appreciate the prex 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 condition having a greater than usual quantity of a given constituent, for instance, the excesses of the political economy of speed. Nevertheless, in broad terms, hypermodernity signies the multiple transformations that have taken global capitalism to a new stage that is both radically different from yet continuous with the preceding regimes of national and international capitalism. Phil Graham and I (Armitage and Graham, 2001, p. 114) have described this contemporary dromoeconomic order of the political economy of speed as hypercapitalism as a form of accelerated capitalism founded on processes of circulation and self-valorisation and on increasingly ephemeral or symbolic commodities associated with new information and communications technologies. McKenna (2004, p. 17) has usefully and more recently dened hypercapitalism as:
[. . .] the operationalization and inculcation of knowledges as social practices. Another characteristic is that surplus value is increasingly being built on self-valorizing things, or phenomenological capital, what Bauman (1998, p. 44) refers to as the illusion of wealth. Other important features of hypercapitalism are its technocratic hegemony . . . and its operation as a knowledge economy (hypermediated compilation, storage and application of data; increasingly technologized modalities of social interaction; the dominance of the culture industry, with its attendant simulacra over traditional industries).

Having now dened the concepts of the hypermodern and hypermodernity, I want to turn to an explanation of the importance of this article, which is that it is an examination of the value of Virilian cultural theory and a demonstration of the utility of the concepts of dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization for critics of international business. Yet I shall argue that it is just as vital to move beyond the concepts of dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization, even if these ideas are crucial to my understanding of Virilios and Virilian contributions to the critique of international business as well as to the analysis of theoretical work in this eld and the assessment of its impact.

Consequently, in the second section, below, I will consider dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization in relation to two recent and pertinent articles with the intention of presenting them as illustrations of a Virilian viewpoint on the critique of international business. However, in the third section, I shall endeavour to signify the importance of going into the beyond. Here, I will examine the signicance of Virilian cultural theory for critics of international business before briey discussing the importance not merely of reorienting and mobilizing Virilios and Virilian-inspired writings but also of the need to develop new concepts, such as dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization, with a view to presenting an alternative set of concerns, interpretations, and contributions. Nevertheless, prior to the conclusion, in the fourth section, I shall offer a short critical appraisal of Virilian contributions to hypermodern cultural theory and critique, whilst reviewing their possibilities and likely future inuence within the context of a critical perspective on international business. From dromoeconomics to hypermodern organization In what ways, then, can critics of international business read Virilios cultural theory productively? In this section, I will concentrate on Armitage and Grahams (2001, pp. 111-123) Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed and Roberts and Armitages (2006) From organization to hypermodern organization: on the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron. My principal objective is to offer a critical or hypermodern account of contemporary international business in the advanced societies. However, the signicance of this section emanates from the fact that it is rstly an investigation into the efcacy of Virilian cultural theory and secondly, that it is an instance of the value of ideas such as dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization for present-day commentators on international business. However, let us begin with a consideration of dromoeconomics and the search for a political economy of speed before embarking on the question of hypermodern organization. Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed Published in the British cultural studies, critical theory, and philosophy journal, parallax 18 (Volume 7, Number 1, January-March 2001), Armitage and Grahams (2001) Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed offered an unconventional theoretical viewpoint on hypermodern cultural, political, and economic practices. Deploying a mixture of tools supplied by Marx (1973, 1976), we proposed a provisional conceptualization of dromoeconomics, or, a political economy of speed. It is vital to document that our broader line of reasoning about excess speed deviated signicantly from postmodern ideas of political economy in addition to that of customary Marxist frameworks. In their place, our fusion evolved from our separate contributions to the concepts of hypermodernism (Armitage, 2000) and hypercapitalism (Graham, 2005). Certainly, we argued that the two opposing energies of war and international trade drove the obligation to conceive of dromoeconomics. For such seemingly adversative but 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 an abbreviation 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 present reaches into nearly all aspects of human existence. Consequently, research into dromoeconomics had become essential since war had become industrialized whilst international trade had turned into absolute war. In the present period, in other words, war and international trade are identical in their hypermodern managerialist stress on the necessity for a political economy of speed. By means of the concepts of excess speed and overproduction, alongside others such as war, international trade, suspension, hypermodern managerialism, and the political economy of speed, we concluded that the introduction of the idea of dromoeconomics was recognition of the fact that hypercapitalist societies are dromocratic by nature. They are societies that are extremely energetic, continually moving and ruled by prevailing (in)sensitivities to the politico-economic rationale that their international trade and militarized technologies require. Dromocratic societies, as a result, linger in perilous instability whilst feverishly disregarding the destruction being inicted by their own universal and violent (ir)rationalities. Progressing to an authentic knowledge of dromoeconomics in the era of hypermodernity consequently involves an appreciation of the political economy of speed. However, it also demands an appreciation that Virilios highlighting of dromology and Marxs examination of overproduction offer opportunities for considering hypermodern accounts of war and international trade that diverge radically from those presented by either postmodern or long-established Marxian political economists (e.g. Mandel, 1975). Our initial program for 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 or comprehensive. We merely wished to identify what we deemed were notable yet under theorized facets of hypermodern managerialism and the need for speed, namely, the manifestation of these in the arena and (ir)rationalities of contemporary international trade and war. To underscore hypermodern managerialism, we argued, was essential since war is a key component of international trade. Hence, hypermodern trade and war are the present-day underpinning of the globalization of dromoeconomics. Moving ahead to an appreciation of dromoeconomics, notwithstanding its conceptual complexities was, we maintained, for these reasons no longer a choice but an obligation. In concluding, therefore, we suggested that our idea of dromoeconomics was important, not because it was yet one more neologism but because of the essential question it introduced, the question of the political economy of speed. From organization to hypermodern organization: on the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron Available in the international business and management journal, Journal of Organizational Change Management (Volume 19, Number 5, September, 2006), Roberts and Armitages (2006) From organization to hypermodern organization: on the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron is a contemplation on the concept of organization in addition to an introduction and expansion upon the idea of the hypermodern organization. In this article, Joanne Roberts and I described the hypermodern organization as an institution primarily rooted in a close to obsessive level of modern intensication and speed up. Thus, we aimed to contribute a hypermodern conception of organization to the literature on organizational change

management. Indeed, we argued that existing perspectives on organizational change management have failed to acknowledge either the emergence of hypermodernity or the hypermodern organization. To exemplify the hypermodern organization we investigated the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron, the American, Houston-based, energy company established in 1985, and which rose to prominence and ultimately disgrace after its stunning disintegration in 2001. Certainly, there had already been a great deal of discussion about the uctuations of Enron in the literature on change management (e.g. Fox, 2003). However, our intention was not to restate the ebb and ow of the Enron scandal but to relate another narrative wherein its accelerated appearance and disappearance was characterized as a paradigm of the hypermodern organization. Accordingly, through an investigation of Enron, we aimed to reveal the signicance of the hypermodern organization over and above the accelerated managerial repercussions of appearance and disappearance for other contemporary organizations. Drawing on existing and original notions of organization and speed, appearance, hypermodernity, and a unique case study of Enrons accelerated disappearance as a hypermodern organization, we concluded that the concept of organization, indeed the very idea of organizational form itself, is presently undergoing a transformation as hypermodern organizational forms appear in societies set apart by the onset of hypermodernity. Additionally, in trying to look further than the archetypal organizational form (i.e. pre-modern, modern, and postmodern organizations), we wanted to delve into the specic aspects of the hypermodern organization. Through a concentration on the importance of speed to the hypermodern organization, therefore, we were able not only to address a signicant oversight in current debates over the management of organizational change, but also, to take up the organizational change literature by means of the establishment of the hypermodern organization and our scrutiny of Enron as a prototype of this form of organization. Thus, in presenting a full explanation of the accelerated appearance and disappearance of the hypermodern organization of Enron, we argued that such developments were, in large, part an unavoidable result of its hypermodern character. Moreover, whilst other studies of the downfall of Enron concentrated on the malfunctioning of its corporate governance, we preferred to focus on a previously ignored facet of Enrons disappearance, namely, this particular hypermodern organizations addiction to speed. As may be anticipated, numerous repercussions for the management of organizational change arose from our model of the hypermodern organization. First, we revealed that the current socio-political and economic milieu is triggering the growth of increasingly hypermodern and, crucially, transitory organizations. As a result, it is more and more an obligation on hypermodern organizations to develop ahead 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 the landscape of hypercapitalism. In brief, and notwithstanding the immediate benets to be gained from the acceleration of an organizations performance, the extreme speed of the hypermodern organization is not an enduring but a transitory condition. Managers must be, for these reasons, attentive to this aspect of the hypermodern organization to be able to work out survival strategies for themselves, for their colleagues, their workers, and their shareholders. One potential strategy is to segregate hypermodern

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activities from postmodern and modern activities. Hence, before the entire organization takes on hypermodern characteristics, it may seek to arrange itself around provisional hypermodern ventures combined with less ephemeral modern or postmodern projects. What we tried to do in this article, consequently, was to tackle a basic aw in contemporary organizational theory by way of a presentation and embellishment of the idea of the hypermodern organization. Further hypermodern theoretical and empirical investigations into other organizations are necessary to corroborate and enlarge upon our work in this regard. But the overall direction of future research is clear. It is a matter of concentrating on issues relating to accelerated rates of corporate growth, to the acquisition strategies of corporations other than Enron, and, especially, to those international businesses that are, or become dependent on, a move away from strategies anchored in industrialized or heavy assets, to those founded on nancial or light assets driven by the quest for speed. It is critical to understand that the appearance of the hypermodern organization is derived from the pivotal importance of acceleration, from dromoeconomics or the political economy of speed. For without such an understanding, managers will neither be in a position to recognize looming accelerated organizational change nor be able to halt it before it devours the entire organization. Any effort to expand our knowledge of the transient hypermodern organization must, then, be based on additional research into the myriad features of hypercapitalism within the context of a hypermodernity that currently governs the contemporary socio-economic terrain. Thus, the signicance of this section resides in the fact that it has sought to appraise the benets of Virilios cultural theory and lay bare the effectiveness of the Virilian-inspired concepts of dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization, by way of a discussion of two contemporary and relevant articles, offered as examples of a Virilian perspective on the critique of international business. Into the beyond Even so, in this section, I maintain that it is equally important to go beyond ideas such as dromoeconomics and hypermodern organization. For, regardless of how essential these concepts are to an interpretation of Virilios and Virilian contributions to the critical, 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 to consider the importance of Virilios cultural theory for critics of international business through a discussion of the signicance of redirecting and activating his and other Virilian writings, in addition to the requirement to make available new concepts that elucidate different interests, analyses, and offerings. Clearly, the rst point to make is that it is possible to characterize Virilio as a critic of international business. Despite the fact that Virilio is a cultural rather than a social or economic theorist, therefore, his writings are of signicance to those researchers who take a critical view of international business. However, what I also want to stress is that critical researchers into international business must be prepared to venture into the arts, and into cultural issues involving, for example, the meaning and importance of the global corporatization and militarization of urban space, in addition to the political behavior of international businesses. To be a critic of international business, consequently, does not preclude a critique of architecture any more than it precludes

the study of political activism and economic events. In other words, an analysis of international business that incorporates the work of a radical architect like Virilio does not prevent a critique of global production systems and consumption patterns, or, for instance, the role of international business in the organization of the so-called War on Terror and their combined inuence on the city, the mass media, and democracy. These latter and associated themes, I suggest, should be included in any truly critical perspective on international business. Moreover, as I have tried to show, Virilios and Virilian writings represent merely one alternative approach through which such an action plan can be implemented regarding the critique of global political economy, the impact and pace of international business, the commercialization of warfare and the role of the corporation in the worldwide development of new information and communications technologies. An equally noteworthy further point is concerned with the cultural signicance of Virilian writings for those working in critical management studies. For Virilian left-Heideggerianism is a theoretical standpoint that is just as applicable to progressive philosophical and socio-legal analyses of the organizations and environments constructed by international business. There is, for example, no reason why Virilian left-Heideggerianism must be limited to the critique of architecture, photography, and war. In fact, Virilios war model of urban dromology is already being utilized to discern the logics of economic and military power, the forces of globalization, and the disappearance of the social and society by 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 of crucial importance today, however, is the attempt to reorient, re-evaluate, and re-theorize Virilios urbanism from fresh perspectives. Virilian inspired critical management theorists, for instance, might wish to concentrate on the bewildering spatial effects of international business on human corporeality and its cognitive separation from the increasingly simultaneous destruction of public or social space and the construction of private or corporate space in the hypermodern city (Armitage and Roberts, 2003, pp. 87-104). Also of signicance is the question of linking Virilios urbanism to the spatialized history of Foucault (1980, pp. 63-77) or to the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1994, pp. 96-97), where the role of unforeseen urban events is highlighted in conjunction with an emphasis on ambient architectural settings. Here, the critique of space, inclusive of the space of international 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 Virilios work thus far, of going beyond Speed & Politics and dromology, in the name of innovative Foucauldian and Deleuze-Guattari inected projects centered on introducing movement into reections on information, war, perception, and geopolitics. Setting Virilios metaphysics of speed (Winchester, 1999, pp. 159-166) in motion is not, then, beyond the ability of critical management theorists engaged with the character and impact of international business. Yet this last is also a question of initiating Virilios metaphysics of speed with particular reference to the continuing revolution of technoscience, to the slow disappearance of the representation 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 (Armitage and Roberts, 2002, pp. 43-54). For the contemporary representation of war, in particular, is increasingly disappearing into a beyond that is eradicating all traces of its previously mediated appearance. Consequently, regarding Virilios writings on war and security, environmentalism, liberation struggles, strategy, misinformation, violence, the military-industrial complex, power and resistance to power, it is a matter of unearthing from his work a movement that can interconnect with the methods presently adopted by critical management theorists in such a fashion that it reworks their previous understandings. One way of making Virilios work on aesthetics and disappearance, on perception, technoscience, terror and catastrophe, move, of contemplating his writings whilst concurrently interjecting and developing new concepts, is, of course, by introducing ideas such as hypermodernity, dromoeconomics, and hypermodern organization. Nevertheless, it is not a matter of, say, substituting hypermodernity for postmodernity for no reason. Rather, it is a question of focusing on another set of contemporary historical subjects, social modulations, and cultural ows. 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 of hypercapitalism and the aesthetics of disappearance, but also, the emergence of hypermodern organizations such as Enron. Much like Krokers (2004) and Baudrillards (2005), then, a Virilian aesthetic twists conventional critical management methodologies and whirls through a range of cultural crises whilst gravitating towards the cinematic, to a passionate engagement with cognitive and cybernetic imagery, and to the contemporary leap into the new technologies of perception which, increasingly, map the human body and virtualize the mind. Hence, in this section, I have highlighted and argued for the importance of communicating and galvanizing Virilios writings, and for the signicance of the concepts of dromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity. However, I have done so with the intention of opening up innovative Virilian-inspired ideas regarding unconventional theorizing, empirical investigations, and interpretive critiques of the global socio-economic and cultural effects of international business. Autocritique Naturally, before concluding, it is imperative to testify that there are numerous difculties with both Virilios and Virilian cultural theory. Consequently, in this section, I shall present a concise critique of Virilian hypermodern cultural theoretical writings and an appraisal of their possible bearing on the discipline of critical international business studies. Clearly, as I have already indicated, I have no intention of implying that a Virilian-inspired cultural approach to the critique of international business is problem free. Far from it, given that Virilio himself utilizes sophisticated theoretical concepts at the speed of light and writes in sentences that frequently run to half a page or more. In addition, it is sometimes hard to separate in Virilios writings the left-Heideggerianism from the right-Heideggerianism in that, like right-Heideggerians, such as Robert Mugerauer (1995), Virilio is a theorist for whom Heidegger presents an interpretation

of, for example, subjectivity as a key factor in what might be labeled the Great Poem of Being. Occasionally, therefore, Virilio seems to be advocating a kind of homecoming from the inexorable hypermodern forces of architectural transformation and acceleration, from political authority, militarization, and technologization for the human spirit. Virilios work thus often supports an ethic of, for instance, representation or organization that is non-exploitative in its relation to the intellect and emotions of the individual human being and to the Earths own sensibilities. An outstanding illustration is Virilios dazzling adaptation and expansion of Heideggers (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 of distances and lengths of time that is degrading the expanse of our habitat (Virilio, 1997, p. 58; original emphasis). From Virilios perspective, then, the environmental and quasi-religious components of Heideggers writings are of identical intellectual interest to the forces of left-Heideggerian destruction as a foundation for a critique of power and a meaningful analysis of extant thought concerning, for example, the state and related political institutions like the military-industrial complex. However, as Nigel Thrift (2005, pp. 353-364) has observed, Virilios and Virilian work is apocalyptic in tenor and topic, decient in academic scrupulousness, and free of the sort of empirical evidence that is usually associated with social science research and which is readily available in the writings of other cultural theorists and practitioners, inclusive of those of critical management theorists. There are, as a result, various blind spots in Virilios work, with one of the most apparent being, as Kellner (2000, p. 120) has noted, Virilios replacement of a moralizing critique for social analysis and political action. Virilios own methodology, in particular, is in consequence inclined to disregard the effects of organized cyberactivism (McCaughey and Ayers, 2003) or the use of new information and communications technologies as tools for social transformation and the afrmative re-denition of various communal and individual identities. It follows that it is relatively easy to demonstrate how Virilios philosophical leanings and radically discursive works fall short of the acid test of social science, or how they can be portrayed as laments for an earlier, more complete world, before the onset of globalization, or even, as a darkly romantic protest against corporate capitalism. Undoubtedly, integrating Virilios writings into a critical perspective on international business will be no easy task. Nonetheless, Virilian critical cultural theory does represent an original, if at times oblique, intervention that repeatedly unsettles existing viewpoints on everything from economic globalization to war, cinema, and perception. Furthermore, Virilio himself is well used to having his work described as that of a confused postmodern philosophical fantasist (see, for example, Sokal and Bricmont, 1998, pp. 159-166). As far back as the early 1980s, for instance, Virilio was not only writing War and Cinema but was also an active participant in the French non-violent anti-war movement, where, for the rst time, his friends told him that his claims concerning military logistics and perception neither 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 demanding that 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 ight simulators!, Down with cameras!, or Down with the internet! (Virilio and Armitage, 2001a, p. 181). In short, it has taken over twenty years for the questions raised by Virilio in War and Cinema and numerous other books regarding the militarization of human perception and so forth to be recognized as signicant by other cultural theorists. Nevertheless, the issue in our day is how long will it be before the questions introduced by Virilian cultural theory concerning international business are acknowledged as important by critical management theorists? Conclusion The intention of this article has been to contemplate whether Virilio can be portrayed as a critic of international business. Obviously, from my point-of-view, an afrmative response to this question is the correct one. But, in reaching this conclusion, I have also presented and discussed concepts such as dromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity, ideas that I consider crucial to the expansion of a Virilian perspective on international business. Signicantly, though, I have insisted on the necessity of shifting into the beyond, that is, into new Virilian, critical, abstract, and experiential territories centered on the establishment and growth of unorthodox notions and understandings of the international, of business, of the modern, and of organization. For such concepts and interpretations are the cornerstones of any potential Virilian standpoint on the fate of international business. To facilitate such ideas and explanations, however, it was essential to begin with a succinct account of Virilios life history and work for those unfamiliar with his cultural theory. But readers would be mistaken if they were to assume that Virilios writings are 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 gure whose writings are inuenced primarily by his boyhood encounter with the Second World War; that is to say, with military strategy, spatial planning, and the onset of the Nazis blitzkrieg on France. Then again, as I hope readers of critical perspectives on international business are now aware, Virilios cultural and philosophical activities have manifestly improved our knowledge of war and augmented our grasp of architecture and the city, speed, politics, information, militarization, ecology, terror, aesthetics, and technology. His work is certainly sporadically oblique and composed at an elevated level of theoretical abstraction. But, for those prepared to take the time and make the effort, there is no reason to suppose that Virilios writings cannot be developed productively within the eld of critical international business studies. Simultaneously, by way of an introduction to and a discussion of the concepts of dromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity, I focused attention on the Virilian inected work of Armitage and Graham (2001), and Roberts and Armitage (2006). As noted, the signicance of these writings is that they have all been inuenced by Virilios work and, therefore, represent a development of it in combination 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 of concentrating on the core themes of Virilios work whilst concurrently seeking out

different subjects and additional theorists whose writings share similar concerns to those of Virilio; such as Baudrillard, Kroker, and Kellner. Evidently, for the purposes of this article, I decided to focus on the Virilian topics of dromology and political economy, hypermodernity, and organization, issues that were signalled by my discussion of dromoeconomics and the political economy of speed, and the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron. Yet I also argued for the importance of Virilios and Virilian work in terms of their capacity to transport researchers into new spheres of investigation, inclusive of the critique of international business. To be sure, I proposed the rearrangement and, crucially, the activation of Virilian cultural theory with an eye to moving beyond dromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity and on to an exploration of the inuence of international business from the viewpoint of what might be called post-Virilian cultural and social theory. However, whilst the concepts of dromoeconomics, hypermodern organization, and hypermodernity must be uppermost in any analysis of post-Virilian contributions to the critique of international business, it is essential to restate that such offerings should not merely be criticized for their aws but also celebrated for their achievements. All the same, from now on, it is the task of management theorists to adopt and to adapt post-Virilian cultural theory with the aim of 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 on Organization, 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), Living with 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 total mobilization in the Philippines, in Bishop, R. (Ed.), Postcolonial Urbanism: South East Asian Cities and Global Processes, Routledge, New York, NY. Baudrillard, J. (2005), The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), New York, NY. Bauman, Z. (1998), On glocalization: or globalization for some, localization for others, Thesis Eleven, Vol. 54, pp. 37-49. Bishop, R. and Phillips, J. (2004), The slow and the blind, Culture and Organization, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 61-75. Borgmann, A. (1992), Hypermodernism, in Borgmann, A. (Ed.), Crossing the Postmodern Divide, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy?, Verso, London. Foucault, M. (1980), Questions on geography, in Gordon, C. (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings 1972-1977, Harvester, London. Fox, L. (2003), Enron: The Rise and Fall, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 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. Heidegger, M. (1971b), The Thing, in His Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, New York, NY. Jeudy, H. (1994), Social Overload, Autonomedia, New York, NY. Kahn, R. and Kellner, D. (2005), Oppositional politics and the internet: a critical/reconstructive approach, Cultural Politics, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 75-100. Kellner, D. (2000), Virilio, war and technology: some critical reections, in Armitage, J. (Ed.), Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, Sage, London. 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 and Hyper-Aesthetics, St Martins Press, New York, NY. Kroker, A., Kroker, M. and Cook, D. (1990), Panic USA: hypermodernism as Americas postmodernism, Social Problems, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 443-59. Lipovetsky, G. (2005), Hypermodern Times, Polity Press, Cambridge. Mandel, E. (1975), Late Capitalism, New Left Books, London. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse, Penguin, London. Marx, K. (1976), Capital Volume I, Penguin, London. Mattelart, A. (2003), The Information Society: An Introduction, Sage Publications, London. McCaughey, M. and Ayers, M. (Eds.) (2003), Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, Routledge, New York, NY. McKenna, B. (2004), Critical discourse studies: where to from here?, Critical Discourse Studies, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 9-39. Mugerauer, R. (1995), Interpreting Environments: Tradition, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. Roberts, J. and Armitage, J. (2006), From organization to hypermodern organization: on the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 19 No. 5. Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. (1998), Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers Abuse of Science, Prole Books, London. Thrift, N. (2005), Panicsville: Paul Virilio and the esthetic of disaster, Cultural Politics, Vol. 1 No. 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. Virilio, P. (1997), Open Sky, Verso, London. Virilio, P. (2000a), The Information Bomb, Verso, London.

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. Virilio, P. (2005b), Negative Horizon, Continuum, London. Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. (2005), The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), New York, NY. Virilio, P. and Parent, C. (1996), The Function of the Oblique, Architectural Association, London. Winchester, N. (1999), Speed as metaphysics, History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 159-66. 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, in Armitage, J. (Ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, Sage, London. Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. (1997), Pure War, Semiotext(e), New York, NY. About the author John 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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