Consensus is usually praised as the sign of a healthy field, and dissent is treated as noise to be minimised on the way toward it. The historical record suggests something closer to the opposite: most of the categories a field now takes for granted were forged in a period of open conflict, when competing camps needed sharper distinctions to argue against each other, and only later smoothed into the settled vocabulary that consensus prefers. Suppress the conflict too early and you suppress the category-formation that depended on it. DissensusAcceptance names the deliberate choice to let disagreement run long enough to do this generative work rather than resolving it prematurely for the sake of institutional comfort — accepting dissensus not as a stage to be survived but as the mechanism by which a field actually gets its sharpest tools. A discipline that prizes harmony above all else usually turns out, on inspection, to be running on categories inherited from an earlier, less harmonious generation.
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