Fuchs, Stephan. Theory after essentialism en: Against essentialism. A theory of culture and society, Pages 26-27.

Ence, since both vary from observer to observer, and over time. The common sense of a twelfth-

century monk differs from that of a twenty-first century Wall Street investment banker. What

remains more stable and continuous than content is the way in which common sense attributes causes and effects. An important attribution is to persons and their intentions, decisions, and

actions.

All forms of observation, including science, have their own common sense and natural attitude: that which they consider familiar, in no need of proof, and to be expected from any competent member

of the craft. The first level of observation is that which is taken for granted in observing, and that

which is naively attributed to the world, not the observer. Accordingly, that which some sciences common sense takes for granted might be problematic and counterintuitive in other cultures and other sciences and vice versa.

What is common about common sense is not a given and fixed set of actually shared beliefs,

opinions or attitudes. Rather, common sense is common in that no form of observation can proceed

without some basic certainties that cannot be questioned at the first level. They remain invisible

there and then, for the time being. But certainties and institutions vary from observer to observer, and over time.

Paradoxically, it takes a lot of uncommon and nonintuitive attention to reveal how common sense observes. When made explicit, the implicit becomes more and more improbable and strange.

Eventually, the observer falls into the bottomless pit that made the existentialists both worried and

giddy with freedom. Examples, includes Husserls monumental struggles to explicate immediate apperception, Schutzs reconstruction of everyday reciprocity, Garfinkels studies of mundane sense making, or Goffmans frame analyses. They all deal with common sense, but their writings are anything but commonsensical. Why should this be? Precisely because common sense is not an

observation, but a mode of observing, so that each explanation of a piece of common sense reveals yet more common sense, and infinitum.

The bodies of first-level observation feel pain not physiological malfunctions. While they are in pain, they cannot observe how their brains manufacture painful sensations from physical

information about damages to the body. How the brain does this can only be observed on a second

level, for example, scientifically. Neuroscience turns the hows of the first level into its own whats. That is first level modes of observing and experience turn into second level themes or topics. But this second level cannot do without its own hows, that which it takes for granted when it observes what it observes. These hows remain invisible and taken for granted at this level as well; they are its own common sense. To observe how the second level observes, we need to switch to a third level, say a sociology of neuro (science), which also comes with its own modes of

operation invisible within this level.

On the second level, the how of the first level observation becomes visible. On this level the second observer does not attribute the observations of the first observer to the things and states that

make up the referents in his world, but to this first observer, who is of course also located in this

world. For example, the unproblematic facticity of the world in common sense can now be seen not as the way the world really is, but as an improbable and selective accomplishment of ethno-

methods. The next switch to a higher observational level would reveal ethnomethodology itself as

the social construct of an observer. At higher levels, the puzzle is not what the observer observes,

but how he manages to do so, and how or why his mode of observation differs from that of other

observers.

But keep in mind that each level has its own hows and certainties invisible, while it does its own observing. These hows might become the what of the next level. This is where sociology of culture and science are located. Observing how other observers observe, what they can and cannot see, and what they bring to an observation is just what sociology of cultures does. The sociology of

culture is a comparative sociology of observers. The attribution of observations is to the observer,

not the world or the things in it to which the observations refer. Of course the sociological observer

assumes, naively as it were, that these observers actually exist, and that his own sociological observations correspond to how theses observer actually observe.

Therefore, the characteristic mode of operation in sociology of culture is to reveal the selectivity and contingency of first-level observation (Berger 1995: 34-36). This often irritates the first level

observers, since they trust that their observations correspond to reality. The sub-