ABSTRACT
Hyalosigns are “mirrors or seeds of time” (IT 358; 274) that make present direct images of time. They render visible “the hidden foundation of time, that is, its differentiation into two streams, that of presents that pass and that of pasts that conserve themselves” (IT 129; 98). In these crystalline signs, the actual present and virtual past enter into circuits of exchange between the actual and virtual, real and imaginary, seed and milieu, such that the pairs of terms become indiscernible. Chronosigns, too, render visible direct time-images that combine past and present, virtual and actual, but such that “what is in play is no longer the real and the imaginary, but the true and the false” (IT 359; 274). In chronosigns, past and present, virtual and actual, are not indiscernible but “undecidable or inextricable” (IT 359; 274). Deleuze distinguishes two kinds of chronosigns, those that concern the order of time and those that concern time as series (IT 359; 274-5), and in both kinds, the true and the false are rendered undecidable or inextricable, in the one case through a coexistence or simultaneity of different times, in the other through “a becoming as potentialization, as series of powers [ puissances]” (IT 360; 275). The task before us is to make sense of this complex of distinctions and see what bearing it might have on the classification and analysis of specific films.
