At the Goldsmiths event yesterday Graham mentioned that he wished he could find a better name for the term ‘withdrawal’ in OOO – because it always-already has loaded connotations from Heideggerian human tool-use, despite Harman’s reading. Bizarrely enough Tim Morton wrote a similar passage identifying the precariousness of the term.

“I like to think that withdrawal means total uniqueness. Things withdraw from access, remember, which doesn’t mean that they become vague haphazard blobs of whateverness. Withdrawal means “unspeakable,” because unique. Withdraw doesn’t mean lose definition, but be so definite that all modes of access fail in some sense.”

As a replacement, I’d suggest one of Graham’s original terms which he used for Tool-Being, Execution.

Primarily Graham used it as a straight translation from what Heidegger called Vollzug. In German Vollzug means a few things but for the benefit of possibly replacing the withdrawal of objects, it means ‘execution’ with an element of performance (but it also has an element of completion and carrying out, as per Heidegger, but we can drop the ‘in-order-to’ part). Obviously I’m biased here, because I talk about undecidable algorithmic behaviour and computational aesthetics – but I think the term has equal application for all real units. Units/Objects/Algorithms/ execute whether you like it or not, and furthermore your mind is not capable of making them fully explicit, you can only observe, input more inputs etc.