A few years ago, the journal Philosophy and Literature sponsored the Bad Writing Contest, its aim to celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years.”
The first-place prize in 1998—the fourth and final year of the contest—went to Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. The following sentence (yes, it’s one sentence) appeared in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article published in the scholarly journal Diacritics:
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.
I was reminded of Ms. Butler’s steaming pile of prose when I came across an observation by British essayist Walter Bagehot. “In the faculty of writing nonsense,” he wrote, “stupidity is no match for genius.”
