Affective (non)sense-making: Digital nonsense, precarity, and the affective rhetoric of “Crazy Literature”

This study investigates “Crazy Literature” (Fāfēng Wénxué 发疯文学) as a form of digital nonsense through which young people engage in affective sense-making about work-related precarity in China. Emerging from earlier E’gao spoof culture and subaltern tropes such as Diaosi and Sang Culture, Crazy Literature marks a shift from ironic self-deprecation of marginalized youth toward an active nihilism of an emerging precariat class often known as Dagongren (wage laborer) or Niuma (cow and horse) in the workplace. Drawing on affective rhetoric, this study tracks the circulation of work-related Crazy Literature across popular online platforms, showing how absurd language, schematic figures, and routinized performances materialize precarity and stabilize an ambient “craziness” that renders precarity an affective mode of self-making for youth in the workplace. Through circulation and commercial recuperation, “Crazy Literature” transforms venting into everyday affective resilience, turning “nonsense” into participatory and routinized forms of livability under precarity.