Extrasensory and Endosensory Cooking

Marshall McLuhan declared that modern electronic-based technology relocated our nervous system outside our bodies. We feel through technologies, our physical being is encased in electrical wires, images, codes. Any private operator, he warned, could now own and control this extrasensory nervous system, influencing--even owning--our decision-making process. Decision making is outsourced to extrasensory operators. Decisions become recipes, behavior becomes the cooking of decision-making recipes, and Martha Stewart, Rupert Murdoch, Disney, Microsoft, Google, and every variety of media become recipe makers. Mass media offers variation on only one cookbook shaped through the collusion of the entertainment industry with military, government, and transnational corporations.

Remedy to this extrasensory ownership, endosensory cookbooks invite interdependence, community, democracy. Endosensory cookbooks entail centering recipes on the body, a material edifice not reducible to abstract concepts alone. The body connects, forges links, and becomes a part of other bodies, blurring the distance between self and other. Culture, as a space of cultivation that organizes relationships among various actors, plays a critical role in drawing together material bodies, making them coherent, and putting them through a process of individuation. This deterritorialized cookbook, applying as much to food as to U.S. policy towards Palestine, affords actors a means to reconfigure their capacities as ethical subjects. Ethics breaks against the shores of what inhibits and what stimulates our capacities to transform our material-cultural positions. Endosensory cookbooks become the ethical instruments of our era.