The concept or phenomenon od performativity occurs in different forms or terms in many humanity studies, especially in the second half of the 20th century. It interferes with linguistics, philosophy of thought, narratology, gender and cultural studies and even with epistemology and ethics. The notion of performativity appeared in philosophy and linguistics for the first time along with J. L. Austin's speech and perfomative acts. The first one describes the situation, the second one generates the situation. J. Derrida pointed out that the realization of speech acts and communication are not so obvious and depend on performance that maintains their status and identity. J. Derrida furthermore shows that performance does not only appear in the literary field; the law is for example performative in the sense that it sets itself up by a speech act. M. Foucault was interested of the role of performativity within a socially organized body and subjectivity. The performance of language and discourse is also essential in J. Butler's work which follows M. Foucault or J. Derrida and describes mechanisms for establishing gender subjectivity and physicality. She claims that the body is created simultaneously by the linguistic naming which it decribes. Butler writes up the process of gender differentiaton as...

I bring together ethnographic interviews with deck officers, studies in actor-network theory, explicit and tacit knowledge theory, and performativity theory in this work. I prove that bridge technologies produce what are called mimeomorphic (repeatable with some variation) actions that contain no deck officer collective tacit knowledge. I argue that deck officer bridge watch situated actions are mostly polimorphic (actions can vary depending on social context), and these actions are in fact performatives (in an Austin sense) derived from a more oral than literate performance production process. These performatives constantly build the mariner's identity within the maritime deck officer community and their successful performatives give deck officers agency in the form of an oppositional view to deskilling. These same performative acts are the value of the mariner's experiential technological knowledge within the ship's bridge technology framework. / Ph. D.