In the grid aesthetic, law is pictured as a two-dimensional area divided into contiguous, well-bounded legal spaces. These spaces are divided into doctrines, rules, and the like. Those doctrines, rules, and the like are further divided into elements, and so on and so forth. The subjects, doctrines, elements, and the like are cast as "object-forms." They exhibit the characteristic features of objects: boundedness, fixity, and substantiality. They have insides and outsides that are separated by well-marked boundaries. The resulting structure--the grid--feels solid, sound, determinate. Law is etched in stone. The grid aesthetic is the aesthetic of bright-line rules, absolutist approaches, and categorical definitions.

In the energy aesthetic, law is cast in the image of energy. Conflicting forces of principle, policy, value, and politics collide and combine in sundry ways. Precedents expand or contract in accordance with the push and pull of policy and principle. Legal rules, principles, policies, and values have magnitudes that must be quantified, measured, and compared. Movement and flux are the orders of the day.

In the perspectivist aesthetic, the identities of law and laws mutate in relation to point of view. As the frame, context, perspective, or position of the actor or observer shifts, both fact and law come to have different identities. Accordingly, the social or political identity of the legal actor or observer becomes the crucial situs of law and legal inquiry.

In the dissociative aesthetic, identities collapse into each other. Nothing is what it is, but is always already something else. Any attempt to refer to X is frustrated, as even the most minimal inquiry reveals that X is an unstable glomming-on of many other things that cannot be subsumed or stabilized within any one thing. The crucial contributions of the prior aesthetics--the grid (and its fixed indenties), energy (and it quantifiable magnitudes), and perspectivism (and its identifiable relations)--have all collapsed. No determinable identities, relations, or perspectives survive.