Well I dare say that has much to do with pressures to raise productivity: to write as many pages as possible as fast as you can. On the other hand, when you read Foucault, you never get an impression that he's trying to cash in on as many 50 cents words as he can in a hurry. Though American academics (unlike self-assured French ones) like to navel-gaze on their purported 'middle-class privilege,' as a matter of fact they seem to be expected to and do work much harder than their French counterparts. Can anyone give me some empirical figures on such cross-border comparisons?
In any case, not all postmodernists are bad writers. Foucault and Barthes, in fact, ought to be called good writers, even in translation. Butler isn't good, but still readable. I won't comment on the quality of pomo prose by those who have even less time than Butler.
Yoshie