The Most Incomprehensible Sentence Ever!

[Eriny]

At the moment I'm doing a research project-thingy on Judith Butler and her writing is so annoyingly incomprehensible. Here is a sentence she wrote which won her an award for bad writing:

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.

What the fuck???
If there's a downside to Arts, it's trying to read this stuff.

[cara.mel]

I see a mere 6 words I don't know the meaning of at all, and quite a few more where I can recognise a word but have no idea what it means (eg totalities obviously comes from total, but I do not understand its meaning in this context)

Also, 80 word long sentence? I am too lazy to find word count but I'd guess about there

[*Roxxii*]

94 words

[squance]

Dude. I got lost when I read the first 10 words of that long sentence (I suck at English and anything to do with it...I have very limited vocabulary...even reading my sister's essays is a nightmare with all her complex language (and she's only in year 11..))

[ninwa]

.... what

[mark_alec]

I could read it, but don't know the meanings/context of enough of the terms to make sense of it.

[RD]

I'm clueless with half of those words.

[hard]

what the...?

[/0]

Lmao it has 'Look at how smart I am' written all over it.

[bubble sunglasses]

Lmao it has 'Look at how smart I am' written all over it.

      How can you say that without knowing the context?

[AppleXY]

Lol. Instant Headache, read two sentences in total daily.

WARNING: DO NOT OVERREAD. 3 SENTENCES WILL CAUSE INTENSE HEADACHES, 3+ WILL INDUCE A COMA.

[brendan]

If there's a downside to Arts, it's trying to read this stuff.

The more interesting question is: why? why do academics do this?

Robert Frank, an economics professor from Princeton provided an explanation for why this tends to happen in the humanities:
http://video.google.com.au/videosearch?q=robert+frank&hl=en&emb=0&aq=f#
(jump to 38:00)

[Eriny]

I can't really watch the video (I'm getting close to my usage limit), but I have asked why. I asked why to my supervisor. She said that Judith Butler needed a good editor and also, at the time of writing she was still working out a lot of her ideas for herself which always makes things less clear. Also, Butler writes about how the current linguistic structures we have in place kind of compromises descriptions of the human experience and so she's fighting against that. So, there are some good reasons for this kind of bullshit, although, as an undergrad, I can't imagine that I'd get a good mark for an essay that had a 94 word sentence (as well as several other sentences of similar length).

[xox.happy1.xox]

Hehe, It's almost as if every second word was just thesaurasised (now I'm doing it )

[bubble sunglasses]

  I've a friend, [doing 3rdyr BA majoring in Sociology] who, [even when inebriated] can explain everything about every key concept in cultural studies -structuralism, post structuralism, existentialism, postmodernism etc.