Critical Discourse Analysis - Activist
Critical Discourse Analysis: The Interventionist Approach - SPICY​
This approach gets deeper into the research around Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The prompts have been tweaked to look at a text and to expose and clarify underlying social meanings through a form of critique. Its core purpose is to experiment with system instructions that challenge how meanings and identities, which are inherently constructed and subject to change, become accepted as natural through discourse.
What this framework does​
This framework examines how linguistic choices construct social reality, distribute agency, and naturalize ideologies. However, unlike the forensic approach, this framework is overtly interventionist. It combines standard linguistic analysis with Critical Theory and ditches description of texts for their dismantling. This is certainly a wild card idea when working with a probabilistic text generator especially when the prompt behind these outputs is overtly interventionist in approach and builds on the basic methodological foundation of the “soft” prompt but adds Critical Theory riffs and internal scaffolding strategies using the work of the likes of Adorno, Lukács and Marcuse and psychoanalytic Marxism (Jacoby).
I’ve learned that if am, for example, instructing the LLM to do things like specifically identify how a text “aims” to manage the underlying social cognitions (knowledge, attitudes, ideologies) or to analyze the use of nominalization and passive voice that might obscure the Actor/Agent roles, well, then it really does need lots of examples! Even then, there’s no guarantee since LLMs can’t really think at all and actually “know” nothing about our world.
Nonetheless, this prompting version includes everything from the softer prompt plus a broader CDA inspired analytical lens:
- Task 2: Ideology & Naturalization
- Task 3: Positioning & Solidarity
- Task 4: Structural Relations & Dialectics
- Task 5: Synthesis & Counter-Discourse
The outputs are transformative and interventionist and the prompt requires a counter-discourse, explicit naming of beneficiaries, and a recovery of suppressed histories. The tone is primarily confrontational, the stance activist. Endpoint: Dismantling mystification to enable organizing and structural change which is an explicit aim of CDA.
The theoretical difference​
The Interventionist prompt aims to operationalize the insight that "the private interest is already a socially determined interest" (Critical Theory). It treats the boundary between individual and society as ideologically constructed rather than natural.
This isn't "adding politics" to linguistics rather it is operating from a tradition that recognizes that all discourse analysis already embeds political commitments. The question is whether those commitments remain tacit or are made explicit and accountable.
The primary objective is an internally scaffolded prompt that aims to expose how a text manufactures consent by:
- Obscuring agency and evading accountability (passive voice, nominalization, agentless constructions—those who cause harm disappear)
- Normalizing ideologies as "common sense" (presupposition, lexical choices that present contested claims as natural facts)
- Creating in-groups and out-groups (pronoun use, participant categorization—"Us" appears legitimate, "Them" appears Other)
- Reifying social relations (representing power structures as neutral, inevitable realities beyond challenge)
- Erasing historical alternatives (excluding or misrepresenting counter-discourses and suppressed possibilities)
- Individualizing structural problems (attributing systemic effects—unemployment, precarity, suffering—to individual failings rather than to capitalism or structural inequality)
The stakes​
Can structured prompts produce meaningfully different analyses based on persona and constraints? Who knows? Some of the outputs are good reads. The "same" text analyzed through different frameworks yields different truths. There’s some recognition that all frameworks are partial, and the question is whose interests does this partiality serve?
The Interventionist prompt makes its commitments explicit: it centers those harmed by mystification, recovers suppressed histories, and demands imagination of alternatives. It treats neutrality as a stance that, by default, reproduces existing power. The Softer prompt maintains scholarly distance which is also a political choice, just one less willing to say so. Both aim to at least perform some rigor and both are honest about their methods and explore whether analysis should stop at understanding or continue toward transformation.
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