Scottish Catholicism and Psychogeography

Stephen Watt urges us to re-imagine our public spaces as not merely neutral and functional, but places we can encounter God in and reclaiming them as Catholic yet in the spirit of the hospitable.

The term psychogeography can be understood in roughly two ways. The first, narrower understanding emphasizes its background in the intellectual and artistic movement of Situationism, and in particular its development by the French intellectual and activist Guy Debord. This comes with some rather prescriptive practices and a baggage of semi-technical terms. I’m not going to say much about this version and instead concentrate on the broader understanding of psychogeography expressed by Sonia Overall:

Psychogeography is the study of how place makes us feel and act…It’s a form of re-enchantment as well as resistance, a playful response to feeling for the unseen signals of place.

I’ll keep coming back to Overall’s version of psychogeography, particularly as it’s developed in conjunction with a pilgrimage she undertakes between Canterbury and Walsingham. But to start with, why might a Scottish Catholic be interested even in this broader version of psychogeography, except as a rather eccentric way of dressing up travel in pseudo-intellectual terms?

There’s a quote from Alistair Gray’s Lanark that stays with me:

‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’

‘Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.’

The general suggestion that, for a space to be inhabited well, it has to have been explored imaginatively, is one that is worth holding on to.  Let me suggest three specific failings for Catholics in what might described as Scottish modernity’s ‘imaginary’, its storehouse of ways of experiencing the world. First, there is the problem of travel as destination: experiencing movement through space only as the most efficient way of moving from one point to another. Second, there is the problem of secularisation: the way in which we are all trained to see public space as excluding specifically Catholic understandings because they cannot be shared by a public that is predominantly ‘of all faiths and none’. Finally, there is post-Protestantism (or Progressivism), a view of the world which files Catholicism away under the heading of the Past, something to be dismissed as superstitious or patriarchal or, in any case, just wrong and in need (at best) of reform.

Starting with seeing travel as simply movement between destinations, this is an aspect of the modern tendency to see everything as technology, the most efficient means to attain a given goal. One of the most familiar instances of this tendency is in driving: one picks a destination and finds the quickest route to it, probably on a motorway. In terms of imaginative engagement, anything between the starting point and the destination tends to drop away. Scotland as imagined becomes reduced to Glasgow and Edinburgh, with the occasional destination outside the Central Belt for a quick weekend break.

Psychogeography as a practice tries to thwart this reductionist tendency by a variety of techniques particularly by walking rather than driving, and by the dérive (drift) where the most efficient route is replaced by wandering and encountering the unexpected. Again, taking Sonia Overall’s psychogeographic pilgrimage as an example, her journey is made inefficient and considerably altered by the physical experience of her walking, most dramatically in an emergency hospital visit after her blisters become infected.  Even though none of this is simply Catholic, the resistance to a world where the experience of people and their places is reduced to usefulness is profoundly consonant with and supportive of Catholicism: our primary relationship to the world as Catholics is as a manifestation of God not as an opportunity for consumption.

Moving on to the second failing of Scottish modernity’s imaginary, that of secularising space, there is an often-articulated assumption that Scotland in particular is a secular society and that public spaces, literal or metaphorical, need to be cleansed of the particular perspectives of individuals and groups, especially where these perspectives are religious. Only those aspects of our society that are shared can be part of a public space, while those aspects (good or bad) that are peculiar to individuals or groups are to be confined to the home and private space. I think the deep reasoning behind this attitude is profoundly muddled. Instead I would offer the vision of the hospitable public space, where instead of the public space being kept free of any disturbing or particular perspective, it is accepted that there are a variety of perspectives which will be found in public spaces, and that these public perspectives should co-exist amicably. That might require, for example, restraint on both the part of the presenter of that perspective and of those viewing it. To give a concrete example, take Catholic processions such as those on Corpus Christi. In a secularised public space, such processions simply wouldn’t occur. In a hospitable public space, such processions would be welcome, but would require standards of civility and amicability on the part of the procession and also on the part of the audience. To pick another and more difficult example for the Catholic community in Scotland, Orange Walks would be welcome in a hospitable public space, but with greater thought given to how they may be imagined as positive celebrations of Protestantism rather than as an opportunity to attack Catholics.

Turning to the third and final failing of Scottish modernity, the removal of Catholicism from public spaces on the ground of some moral or social harm is a view that, though often disguised as the previous desire to secularise public space, is different since it depends on the claim that Catholicism is bad rather than just something which is to be kept private. Obviously, this approach challenges Catholic uses of space which are intended to be displayed and seen such as the Corpus Christi processions considered above, but it also challenges more private and less visible uses of space such as pilgrimage: although pilgrimage may involve public displays such as processions, it needn’t. But just as the practice of the dérive, although nearly invisible to a spectator, challenges the non-Catholic imaginary, so pilgrimage can challenge a modern understanding of space which excludes saints, relics, holy places and suffering as part of human life.

I’ve already mentioned Sonia Overall’s pilgrimage between Canterbury and Walsingham, and I’d heartily recommend it as an example of how a consciously modern psychogeographic perspective can interact fruitfully with the older practice of pilgrimage. But there is an important difference between Overall’s practice and traditional pilgrimage which is echoed in many other movements to restore pilgrimage to modernity:

Pilgrimage, according to Pope Benedict XVI, is the stepping away from oneself in order to encounter God. There is something in that. You do not expect to find God; you are an agnostic with animist tendencies.

Such pilgrimages whilst acknowledging the traditional Catholic roots of the practice fight shy of fully committing themselves to them. Catholics need to be aware of the dangers of this sort of agnosticism, and instead fully embrace traditional Catholic understandings: we primarily go to grow closer to God by venerating the physical remains of a saint. Whatever other goods emerge, they should usually be predicated on that central, traditional, Catholic understanding.

To sum up, I have done little more than scratch the surface of the ways in which Catholics might encounter space in a more Catholic way. My main message would simply be to think about how you might imaginatively create a more Catholic space, and try to put those into some sort of practical effect. I’ve touched on pilgrimage and processions, and both of these seem to be taking a more prominent place in the Scottish Church. The prime purpose of this article is to urge the need to re-imagine and re-encounter Scotland’s places and spaces as Catholic: it is, after all, where Scots until 1560 lived, and the disappearance of that imaginary is a loss both for the Scottish Church and for Scotland in general.

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Quotes in the article are taken from:

Gray, Alistair, 1981. Lanark. Edinburgh: Canongate Press.

Overall, Sonia, 2021. Heavy Time. London: Penned in the Margins.

The best place to start for an exploration of the theme of psychogeography is the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography. It does, however, concentrate mainly on the narrower definition of the approach rooted in the work of Guy Debord and Situationism.

By Stephen Watt

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