Think of little units or bits, discrete but stacking up or clustering together; tiny, noncomplex particulars from which we could build ever more facile aggregates. From these lego-like bits we cobble together some immensely intricate complex taking additivity, or stackability, as the single property of the unit. Let's say, though, that standing between the whole and the bit is an intervening level at which the bits chain together to form significant terms given some basic grammar determining the "well-formedness" of any term. We can imagine that the whole stands to the terms as the sentence stands to the words making it up, i.e. each term is definable through the role it plays toward determining some whole. Terms composed of the same bits in the same order are everywhere substitutable for each other without changing the whole. Thus, wholes formed of intersubstitutable terms are equivalent. Similarly, if the substitution of a term by a distinct term doesn't change the whole in which it's substituted, then the terms are equivalent. In self-consciously fancy words the terms are syncategorematically defined and the whole system is extensional. The terms are what I'll call modules and the wholes are compositions.
Cellularity. One could draw a sketchy but evocative analogy between our modules and cells. As suggested above, the term/module, like the cell, may contribute differentially to the whole depending on just how or where it's embedded in the larger complex. In other words, the context in which the term occurs and the term itself are not strictly separate, rather they codetermine the whole. Consider again simple example of the relation of the sentence to the word, but now think of each sentence as stating a proposition, a "what's asserted" by the bare syntactic entity. The same word may be used in an infinite number of sentences, each determining some distinct proposition. For example, consider "Georgia ran away" and "Georgia ran to her embrace". "Ran" contributes to both, yet each determines a distinct proposition corresponding to distinct acts, i.e. Georgia fled and Georgia flew to her, respectively. The grammar-given contribution of the predicate helps determine a distinct proposition relative to the structure in which it's embedded, i.e. the rest of the sentence. However, the cell's ability for context-variant function is even greater... the module is somewhere between the two. Basically, what I'm trying to suggest is that, although the term/module, like the word and the cell, may have some determinate "meaning", or rule-given contribution, what's contributed is at least partially a function of the embedding structure. Like the single cell's ability to contribute differentially relative to the organ or system in which it's embedded (consider grafting), so the module's contribution, though constant, assists the determination of the composition relative to the structure of the composition itself. Leaving the word and sentence behind, if we allow some simple rule for copying, the module, like the cell, equipped with a finite set of algorithms, reproduces, functions differentially and ultimately differentiates from some relatively simple base of units. In this "zygotic" way, from a small set of algorithms and units one may derive complexity and differentiation among modules capable of reproduction, etc.
There's a line of utopian thought that takes modularity form discrete constructive units as its foundation: design atoms posited either in analogy to a "universal basic" (Buckminster Fuller?) or possibly as a metaphor in the service of some overarching ideology (Tatlin's Constructivism?). These little units form the modules from which we cobble together some immensely intricate complex. Structure from repetition, and there, from aggregate, we turn back to the unit, deriving complex notions like "balance" or "force" which address the bits as elements of the composition, engaging in relations built up from bare concatenation.
For example let's consider the various -gons and -hedrons of Bucky Fuller's spheres and structures. Woven of vertices forming little triangles they trace a web nearly as intricate as the dizzying epicycles of his tortured patchwork of neologisms. His structures, physical and cosmological, all seem to work toward the expression of the central notion sometimes expressed as "light life": supreme efficiency based on the principles of some sort of universal design, some basic tenets and elements from which one could derive structure while placing a premium on mobility, immediacy and the removal of "need". This "life at the speed of light" leads to a dissolution of notions like "place" and undercuts the rigidity of solid words like "structure" and "architecture" and even, to the dismay of stolid, humanistic utopianists like Goodman, "tradition". Fuller's domes and dymaxion frames are built algorithmically from modules, any module capable of replacing another or enhancing some completed structure. They are to disappear, his modules, their proper function being solely in terms of efficiency and mobility. Each shape, each repeated structural element, though, has its place and function both within the physical structure in which it's embedded and within the intellectual structure of Fuller's whirring, mechanized "metaesthetic". Each element functions differentially throughout both systems at varying levels of complexity.
As one would expect, though, there's a utopianist strain at odds with Fuller's metaesthetic of structural disappearance and radical efficiency. It's the odd, inexorable teleology of Clement Greenberg. I think we can view Greenberg's program as, if not outright utopian, at least part of, or informed by a broadly utopian, teleological ethos. His almost pathological damning of mimesis and championing of the process of artmaking as such, of the purity of the surface and the reality of the paint as paint, coupled with his infamous views of the absolute nature of artistic judgement, are the two factors that give his metaesthetic its utopianist teleological momentum. Art is a process caught in a greater process of self-realiztion and purification. Self-reference is isolated and elevated to the status of end; the means have become the end as in some weird artworld shadow play of the churning Hegelian Geist . The stuff -- the paint, the steel, the formal elements--become ultimately and absolutely (in all senses of the word) what art is to be judged by, the world of opinion and subjectivity is mute in the face of the absoluteness, the hermetic closure of art. This is purity to Greenberg and this is the standard and end to which all art has been progressing.
Positioned somewhere between these two strains of utopian thought the burgeoning digital aesthetic draws from them both. Like constructivism, with its emphasis on materiality and the "objectness" of art, much new digital art allows its nature to dictate its form and aesthetic. Part of its nature, its essence, though, is the bit, the algorithm and the subroutine. Stochastic music, Xenakis' dream of mechanized composition, is echoed in the very nature of purely digital music... it's at base, like Fuller's structures, a machinic, algorithmic, concatenation of bits, of modules cobbled together and, because purely extensional, infinitely reproducible. And what of reproduction in the sense of mimesis? Digital technology was once touted as the pinnacle of disappearance capable of capturing and reproducing perfectly in a virtual form, devoid of internal interference, every hum, thud or bang of the messy analog world. It was the epitome of reproduction. A slow drift has been occurring, though, perhaps heralded by gritty old samples, tinny and abrasive yet so damn digital. A movement toward the digital in itself... a technique sometimes called processing, by its nature an undoing of the mimetic, a distorting by self-consciously digital means of the rendered-bit source material. Processing is the digital means rendered end in fine Greenbergian style. It's the slow closing in of the digital on itself. Completing the cycle, the looping teleology of self-reference, we move inexorably to the wholly constructed sound built of bits concatenated into modules, each with its thin, rule-governed meaning defined by its place in some hermetic complex. Then the closure of the egg, the zygote maybe, yet fertile, very fertile...