Janus and Dionysus, the fecal version

Right at the beginning of his book The Performer, Sennett writes under the subheading “Janus Presides”: “When someone is called ‘Janus-faced’ it usually means that they are dishonest; the face presented to the world is not who the person really is.” ‘Janus-faced’, as the word is understood here, is therefore a synonym for ‘mimetically untruthful’ in the Platonic sense. But according to Sennett, there is another way to look at it: “The Romans thought differently about Janus. He was a god of transitions, of passages, of possibilities”, hence the name “January” for the first month of the year. Sennett continues: “[T]his indeterminacy has its good side. Performing art made in the good spirit of Janus focuses on process rather than a finished and fixed product. [...] If Janussian art is open, it is not formless.”⁹⁵ ‘Performing’ with a focus not on the result, but on the open process that is also open to sudden reversals⁹⁶: what would that be if not a description of Trump? Haberman’s “He works things out in real time in front of all of us” is a definition of Trump’s “Janussian art”.

As I mentioned earlier, ambivalence undermines truth and factuality. This kind of ambivalence can be an aesthetic program, or a political program, or both, for example in drag performances, which Judith Butler described in Gender Trouble as a programmatic subversion of gender identity.

Steven Bannon also has an interest in using ambivalence to undermine truth and factuality. His notorious statement, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”,⁹⁷ calls for this (“the way to deal with them is ...”) and practices it in one breath (depicting the media—which actually serves as the checks and balances—as the opposition). In so doing, Bannon also takes part in an ancient tradition.

This reference takes us back to antiquity: Bannon vulgarly invokes the flow of “shit” in a way that recalls the function that wine once played among the ancient Dionysians. The followers of Dionysus indulged in wine to turn the prevailing order upside down through ambivalence—albeit only temporarily, unlike Bannon and his fellow travelers. “Dionysus,” says Eric Csapo, “‘operates as the principle that destroys differences[]’”. “He does so by temporarily merging opposites and rendering them paradoxical.”⁹⁸

Notes

1. ⁹⁵Sennett, The Performer, p. x.
2. ⁹⁶Cf. note 101.
3. ⁹⁷ https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources
   (6/6/2025); cf. on the “strategy: Flood the zone” Wolff, All or Nothing, p. 254.
4. ⁹⁸Csapo, Riding the Phallus for Dionysus, pp. 254f.