The Art of Thinking in Other People’s Heads
The complaint that technology and media have distorted our culture, politics, our very understanding of reality is by now well-worn.

A ruthless critic who regularly excoriated the press in his magazine The Torch, Kraus blamed German newspapers for the outbreak of World War I. He reserved a special hatred for the feuilleton section of the paper, which included, along with art, literature, and reviews, short impressionistic pieces about city life and culture.

Baudelaire’s poems, forebear of an evasive genre scholar Andreas Huyssen has termed the “Modernist miniature,” were somewhat out of place in the feuilleton section, like stumbling on an art film while channel surfing.

Whereas Baudelaire’s feuilletons tried to capture in language the experience of flânerie, the popular feuilleton transformed flânerie into a saleable commodity in its own right.

In a note from the Arcades Project, which contains Benjamin’s unfinished notes on late nineteenth-century Paris, he writes of the three main ingredients of the French newspaper: “On information, advertising, and the feuilleton: the idler must be furnished with sensations, the merchant with customers, and the man in the street with a worldview.” Thus was born a style of writing one might call, repurposing a phrase of Bertolt Brecht’s, “The art of thinking in other people’s heads.”
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['Culture', 'Thinking', 'Experience', 'Technology', 'Philosophy']