Mediation and metaphor: Adorno and the sociology of art

In a famous exchange of letters the Frankfurt School philosopher, aesthetician, and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) once elaborated a critique of the operations of mediation between disparate social realms used by his colleague Walter Benjamin in an unfinished work on Baudelaire. Adorno’s letters are of interest not only for the accuracy with which they penetrate Benjamin’s methodological weaknesses but also for the light they throw on the very similar problems caused by inadequate models of social correlation and of historical teleology in his own work