ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a range of theoretical constraints and their place in legal theory. It then focuses on some of the general narratives that have shaped Western engagement with the world into an intelligible theoretical space and the contestations that have disrupted its certainty. The chapter addresses the crisis of subjectivity, the dynamism of conceptualisation, the 'new' materialism, and prefigurative approaches to theory. The preference for theoretical coherence is especially evident in what is known as the mainstream of legal theory – formalism and positivism (including its many variants). The aesthetics of order have, therefore, strongly inclined past theory toward singularity and coherence, but as a result of the theoretical upheavals of the twentieth century (post-Nietzsche and post-James, among others) Western theorists now seem much more comfortable with incommensurability, as well as empirical and conceptual disorder in various forms. Theory is therefore in many ways a response to pre-existing conditions, and it is also consolidated through reiteration.
