Texts vested with institutional authority generate the reality they claim only to describe

Evidence

A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 263

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise articulation of what makes a text into a Foucaultian discourse: institutional authority plus the capacity to create rather than merely describe reality.
• XREF: Said explicitly invokes Foucault’s discourse here — the bridge concept readers will carry into Islamophobia theory where discourse analysis is central.
• SEED: The ‘texts create the reality they appear to describe’ mechanism is directly portable to analyzing how Islamophobia reports/databases produce the threat they quantify.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 263