Every year, the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature, based in New Zealand, holds an international Bad Writing Contest. Its aim? To ridicule the worst excesses of academic writing. Entries must be real examples from academic books and journals. The judges recently announced their prizes for 1998. And the results are as funny as they are lamentable.
The winner was Judith Butler, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, whose [sic!] been described as "one of the 10 smartest people on the planet." Here's her "prize-winning" sentence, from an article published in the scholarly journal Diacritics:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relationships in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Which means, I guess, that class systems are based, not just on money, but on differences in political power and social status. Since I'm not one of the 10 smartest people on the planet, I'm not sure.
Thank God they did not find some of my stuff
10:10:46 PM 
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