ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the question how the social- and linguistic-driven explanations provided by security so far relate to the materiality of energy systems. It theorizes the relationship between the knowledge people have over energy systems and the materiality of these energy systems to understand the durability, spatiality and eventfulness that spring from these systems. The chapter subsequently shows that the material/knowledge duality is a post hoc explanation that never completely fits the real world but is needed academically and socially to understand the world we live in. It then argues that we should study the political processes through which matter comes to matter, and that subsequently we need to study the knowledge practices through which we attach meaning and get to know matter. More specifically, this chapter ends with the idea that observation, by humans, objects or a mix of both, is based on the creation of distinctions between that what is and what is not observed. As in the case of security, such distinctions are ethical as each observation assembles (or folds) a specific set of material discursive relations together. In short, this chapter describes the ontology of the politics of energy security, where an unknown event is observed and subsequently acted upon with and through energy security.
