English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Rhetors, please fill me in on this: Lanham makes it sound like rhetoric is always competitive and this is the ultimate source of creativity. He even claims, on page 36, “[Rockefeller] saw, as rhetorical educations has always seen, that the one could create the other [competition and creativity, order not explicit].” I’m confused. Is competition the primary orientation of rhetoric? I understand that dialectic is effective knowledge production, but it is only one of many techniques of invention, is it not?

I would have thought that rhetoric would buck at any attempt to impose oppositional binaries onto issues which it explores. He also established an antagonistic binary between philosophy and rhetoric which seems to me only productive in discourse about classical rhetoric. Is he just appealing to his primary audience of, presumably, businessfolk who are assumed to get their jollies from conquests over one another?