Here’s the short version: Berlant shows how crisis becomes the ambient atmosphere of everyday life, not an exceptional rupture. Lorey shows how that very atmosphere becomes a political technology: governments rule by keeping people in a managed state of insecurity. Together, they explain why crisis feels normal and why that “normal” is politically useful.

Below is a deeper, structured explanation that ties both thinkers directly into the conceptual architecture you’re already building.

Lauren Berlant — “Crisis Ordinariness”

Berlant’s concept appears across her work on affect and the lived experience of late capitalism. The core idea is this:

1. Crisis is no longer episodic; it is the atmosphere of the present.

Instead of a discrete event with a beginning and end, crisis becomes ongoing, low-grade, and structural. People live inside it as a condition, not an interruption.

2. Ordinary life becomes saturated with slow-moving emergencies.

This includes:

• economic precarity

• eroding social infrastructures

• chronic stress

• bureaucratic obstacles

• shrinking futures

These are not “headline crises,” but they accumulate into a permanent state of adjustment.

3. People develop survival habits rather than transformative politics.

Berlant calls this “cruel optimism”: attachments to things that no longer work but remain necessary to endure.

4. Crisis ordinariness depoliticizes suffering.

Because crisis is normalized, it becomes harder to name, contest, or imagine alternatives. The extraordinary becomes mundane.

Why this matters for your argument:

You’re already describing how crisis frames accelerate governance and obscure slow violence. Berlant gives you the affective and experiential dimension: how people come to live inside crisis as if it were weather.

Isabell Lorey — “Precariousness as a Mode of Governance”

Lorey’s argument in State of Insecurity is that precarity is not just a social condition—it is a political strategy.

1. She distinguishes three forms:

• Precariousness: the shared vulnerability of all living beings

• Precarity: socially distributed inequality and insecurity

• Precarization: the active political production of insecurity through policy and governance

2. Neoliberal governance uses insecurity to shape behaviour.

This includes:

• flexible labour markets

• welfare conditionality

• self-responsibilization

• constant competition

• fear of falling

People govern themselves through anxiety.

3. Precarity becomes a disciplinary tool.

Instead of direct repression, governments cultivate:

• uncertainty

• instability

• fear of exclusion

This produces compliant subjects who internalize the need to adapt, hustle, and self-optimize.

4. But Lorey also sees political potential.

She argues that shared precarity can become a basis for collective mobilization, not just control.

Why this matters for your argument:

You’re already discussing manufactured crises and the selling of security. Lorey gives you the theoretical mechanism: insecurity is not a failure of governance but a technique of governance.

How Berlant + Lorey reinforce your synthesis

Together they show:

• Berlant: crisis becomes the texture of everyday life

• Lorey: that texture is politically engineered and exploited

This dovetails perfectly with your argument about:

• artificial scarcity

• moral frugality

• managerial acceleration

• manufactured insecurity

• crisis as a governing frame