Knowledge becomes idées reçues when it detaches from reality and circulates anonymously between texts.

Evidence

Bouvard and Pécuchet have learned that it is better not to traffic in ideas and in reality together. The novel’s conclusion is a picture of the two of them now perfectly content to copy their favorite ideas faithfully from book onto paper. Knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another. Ideas are propagated and disseminated anonymously, they are repeated without attribution; they have literally become idées reçues: what matters is that they are there, to be repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 321

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines idées reçues as received ideas propagated uncritically and without attribution — a key mechanism for how Orientalist dogma perpetuates itself.
• XREF: This anticipates Said’s broader thesis that Orientalism is a self-referential textual tradition; connects to Foucault’s discourse and the intertextual circulation of knowledge the reader will meet in later Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Postmodern citation replaces the uncanny with a knowingness that kills it. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 310; A reality system collapses when private knowledge outstrips what the big Other credibly allows — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1941
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 321