ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between postmodernism, postmodernist ideas and celebrity in two distinctive ways. It examines examples of commentators who have applied postmodern ideas to celebrity. The chapter also examines the ways in which particular examples of celebrities drawn from contemporary discourses reflect key postmodernist ideas, especially those in relation to identity, media and economic production. It illustrates the ways in which postmodern ideas retain a currency and validity in relation to the contours of twenty-first-century celebrity culture. While the tenets of postmodernism, in its diverse theoretical forms, articulate a wide spectrum of social, individual and epistemic features, factors such as economic and cultural configurations, identity, media technologies and media consumption are common constituents. Although, in the view of many commentators, postmodernism's 'heyday' as a pervasive mode of sociological and philosophical theory was the 1980s, its ethos and expression can be contemporaneously reflected within celebrity culture.
