Fabricated intellectual genealogies carry consequences as dense as real facts.

Evidence

Fabrications, of course, have their own uses and consequences, quite as dense as those of facts. The Aristotle-to-Eliot tradition of literary criticism, for example, is an utter fabrication but one with consequences which every student of English literature knows, painfully, by heart. My point here is that Said takes a fantastic, and rather late, fabrication for a real genealogical history, hence disabling himself as regards the history of fabrication qua fabrication and settling down, instead, to reading modern history back into Antiquity, as is the wont of humanist scholars. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 717

Categorization

• APHORISMS: A genuinely wise observation: even fabricated traditions have real, binding consequences — worth returning to when thinking about canon, genealogy, and inherited narratives.
• XREF: Speaks to the same theme as Bernal’s fabricated Greece — fabricated origins that nonetheless shape real institutions and practices. — connects to: Media act as a genetic code mutating the real into the hyperreal. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 112