[KB] Complexity vs. Power

[M. Karen Walker]

Perhaps you're thinking of an essay by George Cheney, Kathy Garvin-Doxas
and Kathleen Torrens, titled Kenneth Burke's Implicit Theory of Power. I
came across it in Brock's edited volume, Kenneth Burke and the 21st
Century. Their essay is on pages 133-150.

Here is the concluding para of their essay (p. 148):

Burke's implicit theory of power allows for the complexities that a good
theory of power must have. As Stewart Clegg explains, there has been a
tension, historically, between sovereign-centered theories of power that
invest power in persons or groups (a view he traces back to Hobbes) and
perspectives on power as a pervasive and often consciously strategic aspect
of human relations (a view that for Clegg originates with Machievelli).
Burke's implicit theory of power includes both "sides" because it is at
once social and individual, with language as the creative resource for
formulating those two levels and their interrelationships
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