  Wigner's irreducible positive energy representations of the Poincare group
are often used to give additional justifications for the Lagrangian
quantization formalism of standard QFT. Here we study another more recent
aspect. We explain in this paper modular concepts by which we are able to
construct the local operator algebras for all standard positive energy
representations directly i.e. without going through field coordinatizations. In
this way the artificial emphasis on Lagrangian field coordinates is avoided
from the very beginning. These new concepts allow to treat also those cases of
``exceptional'' Wigner representations associated with anyons and the famous
Wigner ``spin tower''which have remained inaccessible to Lagrangian
quantization. Together with the d=1+1 factorizing models (whose modular
construction has been studied previously), they form an interesting family of
theories with a rich vacuum-polarization structure (but no on shell real
particle creation) to which the modular methods can be applied for their
explicit construction. We explain and illustrate the algebraic strategy of this
construction. We also comment on possibilities of formulating the Wigner theory
in a setting of a noncommutative spacetime substrate. This is potentially
interesting in connection with recent unitarity- and Lorentz invariance-
preserving results of the special nonlocality caused by this kind of
noncommutativity.
