Becoming a Lyrebird
Lyrebirds are among Australia's most famous native species, owing largely to an ability to mimic the natural and synthetic sounds of their habitat. Equipped with the most complexly muscled syrinx of any passerine, or songbird, the lyrebird's call commonly includes the individual songs of other birds, along with less familiar sounds, like chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters, barking dogs and the human voice. What awes us about the bird is not simply mimicry, however, but the process by which it sheds its metaphorical plumage to become something foreign, concurrently rendering and recasting the surrounding soundscape with such fidelity that most animals sharing space with it are fooled. In this way, the lyrebird points toward the potential of rhizometry to undermine the essentialized origins and destinations of identity, unveiling becoming as the real identity, rather than the fixed conceptual assemblages through which the processes of becoming travel.
Consider, then, the implications of the lyrebird for an ecopolitics reduced to a struggle against ecclesiasticized capitalist modernity, as is currently evinced by the debate over hot topics like cap-and-trade or ethanol subsidies. Rather than extol secular deconstruction over theological thought, the lyrebird croons about the relational expansion of privilege into possibility when one becomes the other. As Deleuze and Guattari instruct:
For the example cited above, a politics of becoming would carry environmental debates—from global climate change to the entrapment of nature-cultures within systems of biopolitical exploitation—into interstitial domains, where an intersubjective negotiation of identity can, like the fluid acoustic narrative of the lyrebird, enfranchise the coeval, but competing claims of communities (one thinks of the competing claims of those communities impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, many of which have been silenced by economic compromises via tax incentivization) whose historical deprivation and values may be antagonistic.A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between...a zone of proximity and indiscernability, a no-man's land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other—and border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and distance (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1987).
Posted by Kris Coffield at 6/11/2011 1:13 AM 
Categories: Sensory Indulgence
Tags: lyrebird deleuze becoming oil spill
Categories: Sensory Indulgence
Tags: lyrebird deleuze becoming oil spill
Amazing video, but it also speaks to the infringement of human spaces upon animal places that you mentioned in your interview with Karl Steel. I think this qualifies as a form of species cyborgization as much as anything going on with computers and nanotechnology.
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