Enzo Mari Atlas

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NT Issue 2 correspondence: "Atlas According to Lenin": Social Map & Geographic Map, Enzo Mari, Francesco Leonetti, Eleonora Fiorani, 1976, p. 80-81 + "Cognitive Mapping" p. 64–65. 

FredJameson: In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples.

Disalienation in this traditional city, then, involved the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory...

There is...a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as "the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence...

Lynch's problematic remains locked within the limits of phenomenology. My use of the book will be emblematic, since the mental map of city space explored by Lynch can be extrapolated to that mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms.

Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole.

An aesthetic of cognitive mapping a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system-will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice.

This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of Postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object-the world space of multinational capital-at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.

The political form of Postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.

Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.

"Atlas According to Lenin" (Atlante Secondo Lenin):

A "picture" of Marxism born from the collaboration between Francesco Leonetti and Enzo Mari, published in 1976 by Edizioni L Erba Voglio.

A political work that aims to convey, with "a graphic and theoretical structure [...] a highlighting of the complex position of Marxism, or more precisely of historical-dialectical materialism: as a global conception alternative to existing reality, through its interpretation" (from the "Preface"), it is at the same time an artist's book in which the six color plates titled "historical map," "social map," "economic map," "geographical map," "political map," and "cultural map" created by the brilliant Novara-born designer, in harmony with Leonetti's explanatory texts, contribute to creating this "atlas according to Lenin." 

The Social Map

From the Preface: "What is attempted in this atlas, according to Lenin, is explicitly ambitious: to trace, through the modes of visual communication, the essential connections and correlations of today’s “militant” materialism, while fully preserving its rigor and incisiveness. Not, therefore, yet another work of popularization; but rather, through the utmost intellectual inventiveness, a basic tool for anyone who today, from whatever position, confronts the problems of revolutionary strategy and its communicability."

Atlante Secondo Lenin conveys Mari’s interest in the cognitive structures that shape awareness.

The 6 Maps in "Atlas According to Lenin" (Atlante Secondo Lenin) HI RES OF ALL HEREfrom the David Rumsey Map Collection: Atlante secondo Lenin. Published in Milan by Edizioni L’erba voglio, 1976. The atlas emerged from the highly charged intellectual and political climate of 1970s Italy, a period marked by intense social conflict and the proliferation of extra-parliamentary left movements. Conceived as both a theoretical and visual experiment, the work reflects an effort to rethink Marxist analysis through new forms of communication, combining diagrammatic design with critical text.

The Geographical Map:
The atlas is bound in green paper with a table of contents printed on an additional strip of paper that wraps around the covers. It includes a colophon, title page, index, preface, resources, notes on the research and a theoretical text explaining principles of Marxism, as well as a explanatory text entitled (in translation), "For a comprehensive reading of the maps." The six maps in the atlas employ whimsical data visualization to illustrate historical, social, economic, geographic, political and cultural dimensions of Marxism. Each map is accompanied by descriptive text.

The Political Map:
The atlas was a collaboration between designer Enzo Mari (1932–2020) and writer and intellectual Francesco Leonetti (1924–2017), with contributions by Eleonora Fiorani, a scholar of Marxist theory. Mari, one of the most influential figures in postwar Italian design, was deeply committed to the idea that visual form could serve an educational and emancipatory function. In this project, he translates complex political concepts into a series of large-format graphic “maps” intended to visualize relationships among historical, social, and ideological forces. Leonetti, associated with the Italian neo-avant-garde and leftist cultural circles, provides the accompanying theoretical framework, positioning the atlas as a tool for analyzing “line struggle” within Marxist thought.

Edizioni L’erba voglio was an extension of the Milan-based journal L’erba voglio (1971–1977), a key platform for radical critique linking Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and anti-authoritarian pedagogy. The publishing initiative sought to experiment with both content and form, producing works that challenged conventional modes of political discourse and knowledge transmission. Within this context, the atlas can be understood as part of a broader attempt to create new intellectual instruments for collective analysis and political practice.

Rather than a conventional atlas, the work belongs to the tradition of the artist’s book, in which visual structure and graphic language are integral to meaning. Its hybrid form—at once analytical, pedagogical, and experimental—positions it as a significant document of Italian radical print culture and of the broader 1970s search for alternative modes of representing and understanding social reality. 

Unoffical Eng Translation:

Enzo Mari elsewhere:
Even if design only touches small productive sectors, the word 'design' commonly translates to a quality project. But in almost all cases there is no quality. It is pure mannerism to encrust objects. Goods must die quickly to allow for the production of other goods. The only possible project is for young people to begin to understand, and to work on deconditioning people from the 'god' of merchandise.
The design that is waste, that of today, in future memory is nothing more than the dump of ignorance and horror.