Our video explores rhetorical contexts to call into question the authority of scientific texts like the DSM. We will use a series of sketches to illustrate how this seemingly authoritative text actually only represents one voice out of a rich debate. We’re drawing on Bradley Lewis’s Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry, which contains extensive analysis of the politics surrounding the creation of the DSM. Lewis quotes Bruno Latour, who wrote that to study supposedly objective science, we should “start with a textbook sentence which is devoid of any trace of fabrication, construction or ownership; we then put it in quotation marks, surround it with a bubble, place it in the mouth of someone who speaks; then we place them all in a specific situation, somewhere in time and space, surrounded by equipment, machines, colleagues” (qtd. in Lewis, 110). Lewis then uses a line from the introduction of the DSM-III (the same line with which our video begins) and shows the complicated history of this medical document. Such a strategy helps combat what we often assume is the unassailable authority of scientific discourse. More broadly, it helps remind us that knowledge creation and written texts originate with imperfect, opinionated people. Although we’re simplifying the situation, the goal of our video is to help viewers recognize that the language of a text like the DSM arises from and creates a particular kind of rhetorical situation. Our video will, through light-hearted doodles, move from the authoritative text of the DSM to an understanding of science as culturally situated. We will extract a sentence from the text of the DSM and transplant it into a dialogue sketched on the white board. Our hope is that this exercise will illuminate the ways in which all situations and discourses are inherently shaped by rhetoric, even when they seem impersonal or neutral
