Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 Taylor looks like a bit more like a croupier than an icon-smashing thinker. He is trim and wiry and has a close-cropped mustache, and his silver-gray hair runs straight back from a widow's peak in a splendid, glossy mane. He does not, however, talk like a croupier. There is a distinctly postmodern element of collage to Taylor's conversation, which is peppered with improbable juxtapositions and words that whirl around one another in patterns of likeness -- figure, disfigure, figuration. He riffs, and these dizzying monologues can often be recognized, when they finally hit home, as digressive spirals. I asked a question, and Taylor began talking about Hegel and Kierkegaard and Derrida and Mahayana Buddhism, and he told me that when he had met President Clinton on Martha's Vineyard this past summer, he said, "I'm probably the only person who has spent the last 30 years thinking about what the meaning of 'is' is." (Hillary laughed; Bill blinked.) V I had no idea where Taylor was going until he finally got to his point, which was that the radically undermining impulse of deconstruction had become, over time, a cliche. "The only word the critics know," he said, "is 'no.' "His own friends had reached the centers of power, and their identity politics, their critique of the canon, had become the new dogma. And so Taylor was in revolt against revolt. There was disillusionment, or boredom, with the old and its dubious claims of purity, but also an ardent wish to be part of the new. "Insofar as you want to engage in practice responsibly," Taylor said, "you have to play with the hand you're dealt. And the hand we're dealt seems to me to be one in which the market has certainly won out over other kinds of systems." Taylor said he started to become fascinated by markets after the 1987 crash; there must, he felt, be some connection between the postmodern moment and postindustrial capitalism. This new capitalism was intellectually interesting and culturally powerful in a way that industrial capitalism was not. The new technology was not about stamping out products but transmitting ideas and information. The metaphor of the assembly line, and even of the electric-power grid, was giving way to the Internet metaphor of the network -- of connectivity and instantaneousness. The mechanical was surrendering to the claims of the organic. You could understand financial markets by applying the biological theory of complex adaptive systems. The old polarities just didn't hold any more. "On the one hand," Taylor says, "avant-garde art is supposed to resist all that kind of market stuff; on the other hand, the ideological underpinnings of 'make it new' " -- the battle-cry of the avant-garde -- is precisely what capitalism means."