Dissonance and Harmony

Dissonance is typically conceived as a negative phenomenon, often as equivalent to Pain or Ugliness.  One apparent exception is Adorno's analysis, according to which Dissonance and Harmony converge--"Dissonance is the truth about harmony.  Harmony is unattainable", for there is "friction in harmony itself" (Aesthetic Theory, 'Harmony and Dissonance').  However, according to his Dialectical method, the convergence of opposites is the rule, not the exception, so he implicitly agrees that Dissonance is fundamentally negative.  Still, that brief moment of convergence that he does recognize exposes the flaw in his concept of the opposition of Dissonance and Harmony--an unexamined presupposed definition of the latter as a positive moment.  In contrast, Harmony and Dissonance can each be defined as a combination of Attraction and Repulsion, with what is typically denoted by 'harmony' as involving less Repulsion than what is typically denoted by 'dissonance'.  On that basis, their distinction is evinced as one of degree in a range between absolute Unity and absolute Dissociation, as are the Beauty-Dissonance and the Pleasure-Dissonance distinctions.  Accordingly, the similarity between Harmony and Dissonance that Adorno discovers is that each entails both Unity and Multiplicity, e. g. it is the Multiplicity entailed in Harmony that constitutes its "friction".