Worlding with Objects: Making Them Less Ordinary

Donna Haraway has recently stressed the importance of “making kin.” She says: “Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with, become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound.”¹ I sense that “making kin” is an integral animating force in what Jeffrey Cohen refers to as engendering a “lithic ecomateriality” where “mutuality” and narratives of “companionship and concurrency” are always possible and, I would argue, increasingly necessary and deeply desirable. With slowness, dithering, and intensity, this essay offers a poetic cartography of making with extra/ordinary objects on a Cornish beach.