It was Mephistopheles, or Zizek, who showed how the Austrians unknowingly applied to the Nazis the same categories for repudiation that the Nazis had applied to the Jews. The anti-Nazi message of The Sound of Music (an authentic vehicle for Austrian identity) implies that the Nazis, from the perspective of true mountain aryans, exhibited every listed trait of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. The Austrian anti-Nazi, aloof and aristocratic, grounded his resistance in the discovey that the Nazis realised only an insufficiency.
The Austrian identity has itself come to stand for reactionary provincialism where provinciality signifies an inescapable tendency to make bad cultural choices. The epithet, 'provincial' designates both a world-historical fate for an irreducible fragment of the populace condemned to project its ressentiment towards embodiments of 'progressive' forces, and also a defensive but willing self-immersion within the forms of cultural literalism and kitsch.
But then, provinciality is a sneering imputation made by every elite seeking to demonstrate its own centrality. The opposition of centre to province rehearses the ordering of power where that which is near completion is opposed to the leftover part. The provincial life-world chooses to work with only part of the historical information that is available to it as it seeks to secure its own reproduction. On these terms, provinciality is perverse, it refuses to integrate with the logos of the universalising centre.
As Zizek found the essence of provinciality in The Sound of Music so Baudrillard found it in Thomas Bernhard: 'His hatred of Austria is also on a par with that country: it is provincial.' According to Baudrillard, Bernhard 'shamelessly shares all the characteristics of his age, including vulgar complicity with the object being denounced[...].'
Provincialism is a lived inversion of the cosmopolitan's hyperaesthetic response to it. Or rather, the province is where the repudiated object has acknowledged the historic validity of what repudiates it but still evades the expected sublation. And yet, if a dog could be revolted by the thought of a rotting crow and yet still feel compelled to roll in it, and yet is also delighted by the act of rolling, then that would approach the condition of the for-itself provincial (the confederate flag of a village biker gang, some character in a Chabrol film, or a writer like Bernhard).
Then, the revelation of traits resembles one of those fossils where a predator absorbed in the taking of a prey has also been attacked by a more knowing and thus greater predator, only for the entire farrago (prey, predator and predator') to be buried and mineralised beneath a rock fall. The grand demonstration, the act of finding and disclosing a 'vulgar complicity' with the denounced object is also always prey to being caught out.
Zizek spears Austrianism and Baudrillard spears Bernhard. Bernhard denounces the character of Austria and Baudrillard catches him out in this denunciation - Bernhard after all betrays the telling characteristics of the Austrian character. Baudrillard finds what Bernhard is and thinks this breaks Bernhard's raison d'être.
There can be no rationale for an anti-Austrian austrianist. Baudrillard suggests that the sheer face of the vertical locality from which Bernhard is attempting to base-jump, but to which, by surface tension, he cannot escape, is false. It is Lear on the cliff edge, but stripped of the pathos. It is a performance, an 'imposture'.
The strange recursion of alleged frauds here is difficult to track: Bernhard finds Austria false and yet he is Austrian. He is of what he repudiates. Is he then, also false? Baudrillard finds that he is, but is the event of disclosing falsity more false than the first falseness that is Austria? Bernhard finds against what he belongs to... Baudrillard finds against what he has no relation to.
Baudrillard's finding is grounded in the set, 'all Austrians find Austria to be false.' That would suggest a categorical consistency, a true falsity. It is in the rococo of a ritual unveiling that the disclosure of Austrian complicity with itself is exposed. The Austrian is impelled to uncover his untragic relation to that which he denies.
But Baudrillard also 'finds.' Is he then, also all too Austrian? Or, perhaps not yet Austrian enough. Shouldn't Baudrillard find against that which he is most implicated in, that from which he cannot extricate himself? Shouldn't he take one further step in his uncovering, and thus become provincial?
Baudrillard's approach in the fragment on Bernhard may proceed from an underlying assumption concerning the authentic relation of writers to the universal. Perhaps he argues from an initial denial of all localities in relation to the universalising centre... and thinks every site is fatally also always a mere province. Or perhaps, in this instance, he only denies Austria and the writers who cannot escape it - and he keeps an open mind on the possibility of a true locality (i.e. a non-provincial site of the written concrete, where writers inscribe the actualised world around them). Perhaps his method is after all, still one of 'rising from the abstract to the concrete'.
Of course Baudrillard is right about Bernhard. Of course he is. Above all else, Bernhard is provincial. His pean to working in a shop cellar is as repulsive as rolling ecstatically in a rotting corpse. His writing is the relentless pacing back and forth in heavy boots on the bare boards of the upper room of an alpine hostelry. He is waiting to get away, he is waiting for the snow storm to abate, for the funicular railway to run again, for the mountain pass to open. But he can never leave this state of waiting to leave.
Then, either Bernard's driven and compulsive method of bracketing his own austrianism demonstrates a higher form of provinciality (which in the end, must also seep back in its basest form), or he is condemned to ritually externalise what he belongs to and thus refuses to recognise that in the very act of repudiation he is also sealing the figure of his complicity. Whichever, the endeavour to write against all that you wish you weren't, a universal trait of writing, is also present in this passage on his grandfather, a failed writer:
'At three o'clock I would hea r him in his room as he resumed his fight against the impossible, against the utter hopelessness of the writer's task. Of course at that time I knew nothing of the cruel futility and hopelessness of such an undertaking [...] I had some inkling, through being constantly close to my grandfather, of the monstrous effort involved in literary endeavour [...] I admired my grandfather's toughness, tenacity, and tireless energy as he wrestled with all the thoughts he had written down and those he had not, because I admired everything about him; yet at the same time I was aware of the truly terrifying madness in which a man like my grandfather must have landed himself, and of the furious speed at which he was inevitably driving his life into a human and philosophical cul-de-sac. [...] His situation was utterly hopeless, but he went on fighting, even after forty years of total failure which would have made anyone else give up long before. He had not given up. The more obvious and unbearable his failure became, the more obsessed he became with the subject that had become his life's work.'
