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knowledge is postulated.» [5] Knowledge becomes mobile, extensible, re-combinable. The card index as a medium is a step towards computer-supported knowledge. It made its most impressive literary impact on the theory of knowledge in Walter Benjamin's major work, which remained a fragment, the «Passagen-Werk,» essentially intended as a reading of the 19th century. Benjamin's work was already able to take advantage of structuring by themes and headings, sorted through the alphabet alone, as the only ‹way out› of the hopeless abundance of material that no longer could and should be forced into any linear and coherent literary or theoretical narrative. [6] The card index fitted in with this theory and aesthetic of the fragment, at the same time also undermining what Michel Foucault later identified as the disciplining of knowledge, effective in every respect. But the card index's ability to be modulated and recombined still does not offer a pragmatic model for linking knowledge beyond individual concepts. Benjamin was already aware that under modern conditions knowledge could not be managed conceptually and with taxonomies alone. To understand social processes, and the

 

character of phenomena as goods, it was also necessary to work on the basis of interpreting images using an approach similar to Freud's dream analysis. His concept, related to Aby Warburg in this respect, was fundamentally rooted in a concept of visual constellation—and thus still provides a bridge to the media arts today. [7] Benjamin focused on avant-garde experiments in Russia, not on other contemporary artists like James Joyce with his linguistically and formally universalist text «Ulysses»or the filmmakers influenced by Dada and Surrealism, with their associative montage of moving images. Peter Greenaway reveals an interest in other systems when he writes in the synopsis of his film «The Falls» (1980): «Selection by alphabet is random enough, for what other system could put Heaven, Hell, Hitler, Houdini and Hampstead in one category?» Here a linguistic system meets cinematic narrative. Whatever medium Modernist artists used, they were operating with radical concepts of alterity and difference that have now found a form in keeping with our electronic age in the electronic media. So this essay will also address the

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