Here is a link to an interesting article concerning obtuse writing in academia. At the start of my freshman year at Carleton, the welcome speech to the freshmen was given by a philosophy prof, as he usually did, and he was famous for his impenetrable speeches. I could tell he was speaking English, as I heard words like "the" and "that" now and then. But the rest of it was a complete black cloud. I looked around thinking boy, if this is what the rest of Carleton is like, I'm dead.

Oh, here was Judith Butler's 1999 winning entry in the Bad Writing award, mentioned in that link. If you have a clue about what it says, let me know.

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations 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."

And here was Homi Bhabha's runner-up entry.

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

Sigh. And we wonder why Johnny can't read. Well, who can blame Johnny!