POSTCOLONIAL AND POSTSTRUCTURAL ENTWINE

Chaining together the tidbits of parallels in Wole Soyinka's ideas from his novel Isara, with ideas from Felix Guittari’s The Machinic Unconscious the collage of ideas breaks a resembling effect of how power structures have hegemonically controlled language, information, and thought.

Wole Soyinka stated, "The first duty of the Teacher is to replace the 'Educated mind' - which was the same as the 'Colonial mind' - with a 'Cultivated mind'." He begins his novel Isara, with a chapter loaded with metaphor and symbolism, where African nations were dragged into World War II because of Europe’s grab for power and resources to fuel the fighting.

Colonial control remained at a front in the nations south of the Mediterranean Sea. Being educated was still a form of mind control, due to who controlled the education being conditioned onto the local community; this was a specialized indoctrination.   

Adding in, Felix Guittari refreshes that, "There is no language in Itself. Language is everywhere, but it does not have any domain of its own. There are no linguistic universals. … Every signifying statement crystalizes a mute dance of intensities..."

Just as Guittari believes that language is a form of political power control, post-colonialist like Ngugi wa Thiongo, believe that people need to ‘Decolonize the Mind’, while though the British physically left Nigeria, Kenya, and other young nations, by using English as the main communication link, it still is a form of controlling how African groups think and interact. 

In a broader cultural context of human thought in Western Capital social systems, Felix Guittari, follows that we ourselves are "abstract machines, which can always be complexified; but can never be decomposed without losing our mutational specificity." If we can deterritorialize our interactions, we can lead towards a more relative coefficient existence. 

Can we cultivate the mind and decolonize it, without losing our means of cross-cultural understanding and breaking barriers? In an open discussion with Slavoj Zizek and Julian Assange produced by Democracy Now, Assange questions: "Why do they (the power holders) want to whitewash history?” And he goes on to answer his own question, “due to fear and the rattle of how political instability is quite evident."

Zizek adds in: "We are all terrorists only in the sense that Gandhi was a terrorist. He stood up and interrupted the accepted function of hegemony." Once the information is shared and opened to a broader public, there is potential to use public pressure to challenge the hegemony.

Guittari: "Time goes on toward better days or plunges blindly toward unimaginable catastrophes, unless it simply starts to vegetate indefinitely."

Soyinka: “You can take an Isaraman out of Isara, but you cannot take the Isara out of the Isaraman.”