We have left behind the epoch of discipline to enter that of control. Gilles Deleuze described in a concise but effective way this passage from disciplinary societies to the societies of control (Deleuze 1990). He provided us with this historical reconstruction by setting out from the dynamics of difference and repetition, thereby generating new interpretations of the birth and development of capitalism. One of his most important theoretical innovations concerns the question of multiplicity: individuals and classes are nothing but the capture, integration and differentiation of multiplicity.

It is not only the phenomenological description of this evolution which interests me here, but the method employed. For Deleuze, the constitutive process of both capitalist institutions and multiplicity can be understood only by calling upon the concept of the virtual and its modalities of actualisation and effectuation. The passage from disciplinary societies to the societies of control cannot be understood by starting out from the transformations of capitalism. We must begin instead from the power of the multiplicity.

Marxists generally accept Foucault's description of disciplinary societies, provided that it is regarded merely as a complement to the Marxian analysis of the capitalist mode of production. But though Foucault acknowledged his debt to Marx (his theory of discipline was doubtless inspired by the Marxian description of the organisation of space and time in the factory), he understood the confinement of workers according to a very different logic.