Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice

This article reflects on the future of comics in an interconnected globalized world where, it is argued, digital technologies both accelerate change in partly-uncharted territories, and redefine the contemporary disenchantment with information flows. As a case study, the author uses their project Peanuts minus Schulz and discusses the ethos of post-digital conceptual comics and how distributed digital labor is used as an opaque, material and possibly disruptive compositional practice.


Introduction
My earliest recollection as a child of an encounter with a counterfeit product, was when my father returning from a business trip to Vietnam, brought with him three large lacquer reproductions of Tintin book covers. These heavy boards were drawn, lettered and painted manually and their format was twice as big and much heavier than the book. Their price was closer to the price of a Casterman Tintin retail edition than to any original artwork.
Artistic practice as an embodied skill is intimately involved with conceptualization. This practice-based research paper takes as a starting point the concept of distance, described in the above example certainly as a formal one: Casterman Tintin covers, themselves distanced from the original Hergé artworks, are repeatedly doubled-over through largely manual, non-automated reproduction methods.
This distance is also defined as geopolitical: miles away from the Franco-Belgian Moulinsart epicenter in Brussels, a class of networked, globalized and precarious art workers operate and nurture a secondary, unregulated market of derivatives, that, suffice to say, naturally appeals to Western tourists. However, the distance I am more interested in, is epistemological and one that largely defines the specificity of the interdisciplinary practical turn in research.
The praxeology I am following deflects any disciplinary identity and establishes distance as a sine qua non condition for knowledge. According to Franco Moretti, distant reading (in contrast to the prevailing, text-centric literary analysis of close reading) establishes the text as a middle ground and focuses instead on the text's micro-level specifics (such as in the field of textual forensics) or macro-level ensembles (such as in the study of the book industry's distribution systems) (Moretti 2000). Distant reading evades a direct confrontation with the text and can materialize ' as a synthetic activity that takes as its raw material the "readings" of others' (Hayles 2012: 28).
It's the 'readings of others' that I am proposing to explore here, in regards to the book project Peanuts minus Schulz. PmS 1 is a doubling-over Charles Schulz's work. It is a massive appropriation of the Peanuts comics strip series, commissioned through digital labor services and outsourced to more than a thousand artists in twenty countries. Through a long, ongoing process, PmS is an experiment with the digital ramifications of distributed labor as a compositional practice. Moretti's textual tools and scope are materialized in this book through the manifold ways Schulz's work has been interpreted, annotated, performed, improvised and rearranged ad libitum, towards different or conflicting goals from those intended by its author. I will use PmS as a way to comment the expansion of the possible ways to produce content and organize labor in comics and will define what I understand as a post-digital and conceptual practice in the publishing industry of comics (Figure 1).

Comics Is a Networked Activity
According to Michael Bhaskar, the understanding of publishing as abstracted from its technological affordance is a rhetorical, ahistorical simplification (Bhaskar 2013).
Publishing can be described as a hybrid object-human networked activity that develops around compound technologies of inscription and activates an entanglement 1 PmS will come out in spring 2020 by the French publisher Jean Boîte.

Manouach: Peanuts minus Schulz
Art. 16, page 3 of 21 of legal, institutional, economic, political and personal bodies. Through a series of industrial innovations and various modes of production routine optimizations, that have also benefited other segments of the creative industry, the publishing world has always been in the vanguard of capitalism. Through the book market, it has contributed in the shaping of intellectual property regimes, helped foreshadow the significance of cognitive labor (and its demise) and has been an active and often disruptive force in regards to government censorship, labor and union organizations, as well as the copyright establishment and the application of copyright and patent laws (Vaidhyanathan 2001). While pioneering markets and professions, from web retail to tracking, monitoring and archiving technologies, the publishing industry has been  Obviously digital technologies will not destroy comics as we know them, but they may change their underlying decorum. In reality, these changes have continuously shaped the lives of the industry's amateurs and semi-professionals, who have to organize their time around a bricolage of fragmented schedules and poorly paid work (Woo 2015): from daily feeding a Patreon account while filling a scanlation request, to selling a print in Deviantart while reviewing the latest Doujinshi on a not-so-free-of-ads-blog are some of the patchwork tasks of the comics networked precariat in the age of semio-capitalism.
Comics, for the most part, is an industrial form of art that counts on the orchestrated work of different professionals hired on a freelance basis. Its manufacturing processes depend on divisions of labor, where fragmentation, repeatability, homogeneity, and domination are essential features of any sequential industrial process. The production belt of mainstream comics often involves dozens of people handling specialized roles, making the comic book business 'a shoddy, ephemeral diversion, a form of anonymous, relatively diluted, and industrialised pabulum' (Hatfield 2005): pencillers, inkers, colorists, letterers, editors but also printers, binders, advertisers and marketing specialists, all the way to distribution services, newsstand vendors, retailers, journalists, etc. R.C. Harvey, states that Garfield creator, Jim Davis, employed a staff of forty to produce the strip and merchandise the character (mercilessly-through some four hundred licensees that produce the paunchy feline's face and form on everything from lunchboxes to Christmas tree ornaments) (Harvey 1994).
The sites of the comics industry have been variably labeled 'shops' (Harvey 1994), 'sweatshops' (Goulart 2003: 71-81) or whose studio system is 'nearly an assembly line affair' (Hatfield 2005: 9). The workflow, designed to improve economic efficiency and labor productivity is generally based on rationality, effectiveness and elimination of waste. The large scale of these operations accounts for a market that is structured by a standardization of best practices for the transformation of craft production into mass production. Comics, therefore, are by default a multimodal text construction, that does not fit the narrow auteurist vision of humanities and literary scholarship (Brienza 2013  mentises, beyond any sociological or demographical considerations, the reader's space (Barthes 1975).

Comics in the Age of Playbor
A few prominent net evangelists such as Yochai Benkler or Clay Shirky will argue that the game changer of digital and internet-enabled technologies is that they allow people to connect and collaborate in novel ways by fostering projects of unprec- workers (called turks) can be fulfilled at home without any direct management. These tasks can be developing databases, filtering images, subscribing to YouTube channels or writing 'honest' reviews for Aliexpress.
Instead of receiving a salary, or an hourly wage and the benefits and protections their work entails, turks are paid for every small, atomized task they complete.
In exchange, companies (but also individual researchers, universities and institutes) enjoy, through platform mediation, absolute circumvention of applicable minimum wage laws; they benefit of all the perks for an unregulated assembly line of cognitive workers with minimal transactional frictions. According to a survey, the main selection criteria for turks in picking HITs is the task's complexity, the maximal duration of completion, the remuneration and, according to some self-reports, how fun these tasks can be (Irani, Silberman, Zaldivar, Tomlinson 2010). If such self-reports should The fragmentation of professional activities is also increasingly the status quo for persons in the cultural industries and the arts (Sholette 2010). Most of these individuals engage in a patchwork of different forms of immaterial labor defined as the activity that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity (Lazzarato 1996). In regards to the cultural economy in advanced capitalist societies, it is exactly the excessive deployment of the activities of an overqualified, underpaid cognitive workforce that makes, from the perspective of any digital contractor 'the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium' (Terranova 2004). The precariat, or, better, the information economy version of an insecure, underpaid, self-employed and zero-hour contract mobile workforce, the unnecessariat (Amnesia 2016), is construed here, from the perspective of the venture capitalist as a potentially large-scale, connected, computing infrastructure waiting for its networked value to be extracted.
The flip side of Jeff Bezos's human-as-service ethos 3 is the reality of the human-aswasted-resource: a sense of unfulfilled potential with the pathos of an empty apartment in an overcrowded city, or a set of golf-clubs gathering dust in the closet.
The notion of free labor, and its uneasy declination of playbor, is based on the gradual dissolving of modalities that have conventionally defined most of the professional activities, and separated them from the rest: the slippages between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between work and free time, and between author and audience have been, according to Lazzarato, 'simultaneously transcended within the 'labor process' and reimposed as political command within the process of valorization'. Not only labor activity is increasingly harder to define,

Peanuts
From 2016, I have been working on PmS involving the re-make of Peanuts, possibly the most popular and influential comic strip of all times. Published on an almost daily basis from 1950 to 2000, Charles Schulz produced a total of 17,897 Peanuts comic strips which, at their peak of popularity, were translated into 21 languages, syndicated to 2,600 newspapers and reached an audience of 355 million readers in 75 countries. Through its ubiquitous popularity and continuous run, the longest in the history of dailies, Peanuts outdid any business considerations that were the given industrial standards. While Peanuts was not the first strip that was heavily marketed, pervasive licensing and blank corporate marketing that quickly mushroomed around Schulz's work forced comics into capitalist media expansion and market saturation (Beaty 2012: 93).
Led into uncharted territory, Schulz reinvented his craft and profession. He released the pressure of the punchline, dug deeper and expanded his storytelling palette. He increasingly dealt with existential themes and moods such as inactivity, lethargy, emptiness and vanity. They were eloquently materialized through the storyline's suspended actions, empty spaces, minute changes and unavoidable recurrences. Apart from the wu-wei, the principle of inaction, Peanuts has a zen-like quality that is characterized by its less-is-more aesthetics. The series consistently explores themes such as the appreciation of time passing, the felicity in the discovery of wisdom, the manifestation of concrete suchness of everyday life and nature's and compassion's mishaps, among others. But most of all, Peanuts deals with the conundrum of transcending ego-consciousness in an experiential dimension, exemplified through the presence of one of the main characters, Snoopy. The dog, a favorite animal in various zen koans, constitutes the series' displaced center and personifies its opaque nothingness: a meditational state in which the no-ego is posited as the passive agent in constituting things of experience.
Peanuts is certainly a masterpiece of style in its ability to engage and sustain its readership. Its readers experience and embody fictional events and create emotional ties by sharing the human condition with the story's characters. Through the multiple forms that move beyond the pages of the newspaper and the book, Peanuts characters are immaterial energy storehouses built on an ever-growing capital of emotional and affective investment. Just think of Snoopy and the pervasive instantiations in retail merchandising such as T-shirts, stickers, coffee-mugs, but also video games, themed music albums, TV shows, theatrical productions, amusement parks and other market derivatives. Peanuts is an industry on its own, where publishers and licensing specialists compete across the entire spectrum of media production. In an interview, Charles Schulz is at pains to stress and defend the role of craftsmanship in the corporate empire built around Snoopy and emphasizes the predominance of the comics strip over all auxiliary products, activities and satellite businesses blossoming ' outside' his own work. He says, 'We have covered the world with licensed products -everything from sweatshirts to lunchboxes to toothbrushes -and have been criticized many times for this, although for reasons that I cannot accept. My best answer to such critics is always that the feature itself has not suffered because of our extracurricular activities. I have drawn every one of the 10,000 strips that have appeared and I have thought of every idea. Not once did I ever let our other activities interfere with our main product -the comic strip' (Schulz 1975: 181).
Is the comics strip really the main product and all the rest 'extracurricular activities'? And what is the value of a statement that buys into the fiction of the economically disinterested artist stuck to his drawing table, unfettered by mercantile calculations?

Peanuts Minus Schulz
PmS is a conceptual comic book project that consists in the reproduction of Schulz's work by commissioned artists, using digital tools and mediated by a digital labor management platform. 5 The percolation of the comic strip units through the reader 5 The scarcity of information related to the fabrication of the book is not only symptomatic of platform mediation. Certainly, a digital labor platform operates like a black box, in many respects. The choice to preserve the project's procedural opacity comes as a conscious decision for the non-disclosure of sensitive information that might collide with some academic standards. where the image is broadly occupied by its description). The digital, aggregated micro-actions such as the poorly filtered spam, the algorithmic bot non-sense or the responses to the variously misread instructions that I had to moderate and filter throughout this process, resist the smooth integration and style uniformization conventionally required in the industry of comics: the collected material constantly fails to fulfill the seamless, unbroken metabolization that leads to a totalizing system. The selection process doesn't have the goal to level or neutralize the differences in the work provided by amateurs, fans or non-artists, neither to enforce any apprenticeship model nor exclude unqualified, or marginalize temperamental and idiosyncratic approaches to the interpretation of Schulz's work.
Rather the opposite: these submissions radically reconfigure the assumptions made about the individual role different agents can have in a production chain.
They underline the very nature of comics as an eternal score subjected to vagaries and contextual instantiations.

Manouach: Peanuts minus Schulz
Art. 16, page 17 of 21 PmS cannot remain solely a book project. Instead it needs to reflect on the different modes of spatialization (through exhibition formats) or temporalization (through reading performances) of the comics medium, in order to fulfill its industrial ordeal.
Printing and framing hundreds of collected submissions would be equal to folding back the project's concept on the content predominance. Instead, a direct confrontation with Schulz's statement about the high-ground of the comics strip in the comics industry and the glorification of the artist's creative genius invites me to invest a larger spectrum of the brand name through the various Snoopy derivatives and merchandising. What would be the effect of a multitude of subjectivities, styles and expertise investing a series of merchandising-only shows made and designed in the digital factory such as t-shirts, hoodies, hats, lunchboxes, figurines, etc. (Figures 5 and 6)?
These various unsolicited and unauthorized declinations of corporate products make comics' dynamics between art and industry painfully(?) transparent.