"In some images, claims Deleuze, we see the point of indiscernibility itself - in what he calls time crystals, whosr corresponding signs are halyosigns (from Greek hyalos, glass). Bergson once again provides Deleuze with much of the scaffolding for his analysis. Bergson examines the uncanny phenomenon of déjà-vu and concludes that this uneasy and vague sense of having already experienced a present event stems from the fundamental nature of time, perception and memory. Bergson...argues that memories and perceptions must be qualitatively different from each other. He asks, When is a memory formed? And his conclusion is such that such an event must take place in the present - in the future makes no sense, and if at some juncture in the past, there would be a memoryless "dead zone" between the present and the whatever point in the past one should choose as the initial memory formation. There must then, be a "memory of the present",a virtual-image that co-exists with each perception-image in the present, a virtual double that is like a reflection in a mirror.
Deleuze insists, that Bergson's virtual domain, though mental and reflective, is noot that of personal subjectivity. In his first book, Bergson does conceive of memory in terms of an individual consciousness, but in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, he argues that the past preserves itself by and in itself, that the past exists as a single domain and hence as a kind of gigantic memory. The ocean of memory is the virtual past, which gushes forth at each present moment in a perpetual foundation of time.
In Bergson's schema of attentive recollection, the smallest circuit is labeled AO, and the absence of an A' is explained by the fact that perception, when seized in this marrowest instant if the present, allows no clear separation of A from O. The present is immediately double, an actual present perception and a virtual memory of the present, a mobile mirror that is the ongoing splitting and coexistence or actual and virtual, physical and mental, present and past. Though expressed as two terms, AO is a two-in-one, a point of indiscernibility. Like a mirror image that joins actual object and virtual reflection, the point of indiscernibility is an "objective illusion", not something simply "in our heads"; it is a real doubling in which virtual and actual are distinct but unassignable, in a relation of "mutual presupposition" or "reversibility"".
Ronald Bogue, Deleuze On Cinema, pp. 117 - 118, Routledge 2003 (abridged)
Fig. 1: www.arch.columbia.edu/file/52657/
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