ASIAN COLLECTING IN CHILE: THE CONDITION OF ITS OBJECT OF STUDY AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MUSEUM

This article focuses on the study of the terms “collecting” or “collection”— particularly of the Asian type—in Chile, through the lens of the following working thesis: the term “collecting”, which involves both an acquisition practice and a particular relationship with its elements, has been fundamentally studied as an extension of, or in dependence to, the domain of the museum. This cardinal tenet involves, on the one hand, the decidability adopted by the phenomenon of collecting that is determined by its power to be registered or interpreted based on the enunciative dynamics of the museum field; on the other hand, I shall argue that this stems from its failure to constitute itself as an object which can exist outside the museum’s jurisdiction. Regarding this dependence or analogy of Asian Collecting on the area of influence of the museum, this investigation will describe the rules of formation which inform said dependence. By rules of formation, I shall refer to the possibility of a “language”, or special enunciation, dominion of the Museum over its objects, articulations, and its reproducible and verifiable scope areas. Specifically, and the manner in which Asian Collecting is subsumed to and made visible by the concept. For this article, catalogues of Asian collections—once belonging to private Chilean collectors—available in Chile will be used. “Thus, sense is not something given that one needs only to receive, nor is it an event that occurs apart and away from power. Rather, it is a kind of booty”. Today, and for the first the presents its own collection of Japanese art in the exposition titled Floating World of the Edo Period . This project contemplates a long process of conservation and restauration; an investigation regarding its contents, iconography and meaning in its historical and cultural contexts, and it will also prepare a historic investigation regarding the origins of the collection.


INTRODUCTION
In Chile, the word "collecting" is usually understood in the sense of being a phenomenon in which different disciplines intermix. It is an event which is defined-and finds its value-through a network of relationships, the formation of thematic ensembles, sense insertions, descriptions of its objectives and comprehension of its continuity given by diverse areas of knowledge, which are themselves extremely heterogeneous: from historiographic work, Collection Management and Handling, Conservation and Restoration, to Museology.
As such, the term "collecting" in Chile would indicate an act of discovery of its own decidability: a discovery of everything which is possible to talk about in the realm of a specific acquisition practice (the deployment of a new object, which in itself carries a certain historic, identitary, collective or even patrimonial value) which has made possible the emergence of new exhibition spaces (museums and galleries), forms of experience (the shift from private to public, aesthetic contemplation and, from there, the removal of certain purposes, investments and registration areas from the works), and the distinctive authorial style which the collector develops (Salazar 2012;Burke 2015;León 2016). Briefly, Collecting is a social act related to the market and to art criticism... regarding the morphology of a collection, this one will obey not only the personality of the collector, but also its interaction with a specific historical context. The focus on an individual collector therefore helps to delineate the profile of a particular historical period (Garduño 2009: 15). 287 For Alonzo Fernández, "collecting" can adopt subjective functions and characteristics, and integrate teleological regulations, which in turn permeate a culture's representation and essence: Man's own subsistence, curiosity, and admiration (if not surprise) for the strange, the beautiful or the mysterious. The mysterious and the religious-especially the latter-have presided over the largest percentage of objects collected and preserved by man (2001: 37). However, this discovery of collecting, regarding the area which it analyses, does not correspond to the definition of a concept. It neither determines nor fixates the principle of formation and existence of what collecting is as an object of study, but rather exposes the points of theoretical choice, or location, of research. Collecting does not indicate a concept: it is not studied as a resistance, difficulty or overflow of its intelligibility; it does not "recognise in itself the density of a problem" 1 as it only makes discursive constellations visible. These constellations can be, for example, a set of statements on Social History, if collecting defines the praxis of a socialhistorical subject; the regime of Restoration and Conservation, if collecting is understood as a material system of objects that must be preserved through certain strategies of monitoring and attention; or, finally, to the Museum, if collecting obeys all of the above, in addition to being a system of representation of the museum's own practice.
As such, this article starts with the following questions: What should the term "collecting" mean if it is more than an act of pure discovery? What of the limits, correlations and elements dependent upon each other that are reflected upon it and make it seem like even less than a concept? To answer these questions, I propose a theoretical base upon which to think about the problem that collecting entails; moreover, the concept shall be framed as a place of enunciations.
If this concept were to be analysed through the writings of Michel Foucault, first, the emphasis must be that if it is to be studied in this territory of enunciations, collecting must not be thought of as an already codified object, 2 limited and unmoving, which is put through a series of different decidabilities-each of them carrying a specific truth-that allow its specificity and irreducibility to rise to the surface. Rather, the reflection shall be upon the concept from its own discontinuity, the dispersal which characterises its existence: collecting is an object which is constantly formed through its historic setting or relationship (Martínez 2019). This historic setting is made up by the object's characteristic interweaving of rules, arrangements, delimitations, and distributions that burst around it like a succession of statements: It would be the interplay of the rules that define the transformations of these different objects, their non-identity through time, the rupture that takes place in them, the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence. In a paradoxical manner, defining a set of enunciates though the individuality of its parts would consist of…formulating their own rule of partition. 3 Throughout its structure, the object "collecting" expresses a specific point of composition in time, a set of training standards, an identity through the chaining of their statements and the register in which they are presented. Otherwise, collecting must be seen as a historical persistence, as an appearance that can be accessed by a set of analyses, possibilities, and checks, but which neither exhausts its field of individualisation-its themes, scope, methodologies, categories, characteristics, attributes, specifications and requirements, etc.-nor serves as a basis for a definitive unit. This persistence must be studied as a backdrop inhabited by discursivity, a rationale which relates to "the set of relationships established between emergence, delimitation and specification instances". 4 The second aspect of this idea is intelligibility. Due to it being a territory of enunciations or statements, collecting "installs a method that allows it to be in relation to a domain of objects, to prescribe a defined position to every possible subject, to be situated among other verbal actions, to be endowed with a repeatable materiality". 5 This article will not touch upon what falls inside the scope of the phenomenon-the description of its explicit meaning, its substance. Instead, this article inquire about the instances of emergence, the principles of formation of the object that allow its successive statements, which in turn refers to that which is inside the dominion of collecting. This means the dimension of decidability of the object "collecting", its law of appearance in time, and the relationship it establishes through its possibilities of analysis (Calva González 2017).
In Chile, "collecting" has generally not been studied as a conjunction of rules which underlie its apparition as an object, i.e., its functioning, but as what can be said about it from a pre-critical disciplinary unit. It can be observed that its study has focused on the inside of those groups of enunciates already mentioned, which are given beforehand to be studied, coexist and be rationalised. It touches upon not on the laws that characterise 289 and demarcate the domain, the discourses or the alterations of collecting; rather, on the vectors-the contents-that offer the actuality of their event.
It is there that the History of Colonialism, the Art Market, Heritages, studies on the subject from the lens of Museology and Museography, biographic records of the collectors and owners, the documents related to the piece of art and so on, are found. All of this can be characterised as the "Museum's Discursivity".
Here, I shall produce the following working thesis: the notion of collecting in Chile, for the most part, constitutes an object of study visible only from the Museum's discursive norms. Therefore, the limits of its thought are defined by the practices of museum legibility. In Chile, "collecting" does not define a specific field of enunciation rules, or a distinctive discursive agglomeration. Rather, it touches upon the linkingthe place of a convergence-of borrowed domains. Those that are dependent on the museal positivity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words, on the taxonomizing of that which is real and the heterotrophy of space.
This article does not intend to make a general survey of Asian collections in Chile or to study their pieces. What this article proposes is to characterise the general state of thought on collecting in Chile, delimiting its case study to Asian Collecting. There are two parts in this article: the first one touches upon how the term "Asian Collecting" is informed nowadays, and the second one focuses on the different rules and laws which govern its enunciation possibilities.

ASIAN COLLECTING IN CHILE: ITS GENERAL INTERROGATION
Since the 1980s, there has been an increase in interest in Asian studies in Chile, which mainly focused on the problematisation-political, economic and, to a lesser extent, historical-of otherness. 6 This interest stems from within the field of the collective imagination, discourses and processes which make up the movements and articulations that Chile and the Asian Block have in common; all in the context of its heterogeneous unity (Said 2008). All these places form the centre-in terms of impact and desirability-and primordial discursive zones-whose objects of study possess a more privileged decidability, clearer rules, more traceable and autonomous moorings-of the so-called Asian Studies in Chile. In other words, the focus of the study is on the economy, international studies, and geopolitics, that is, the knowledge about Asia that is built up from Chile's political and economic history. In this case, the Humanities as a generality, and studies on art in particular, can be found on the periphery of the Asian Studies, a place blurred, discontinuous and not very demonstrable in its rules of formation and objects and which is forever in pilgrimage.
In the specific case of the areas of study which focus on Art and the Museum, two main investigative lines, or enunciative acts, regarding Asia can be repeatedly found. The first one, extends to the conditions of possibility (in terms of stimulations, interests, needs or contextualities) of the approach to the so-called "Orient" in Chilean society (which is today mainly understood as East Asia) and as such studies the phenomenon from the nineteenth century onwards. The second one involves the research, based on material, literary and artistic evidence, of this link with Asia. At its crossroads, a double-faceted objective has been attempted: Asian Collecting would be the same as Asian collections and collecting in national museums. At the same time, Asian Collecting is by no means the same as the Asian collections of a museum, not in terms of its composition, management, the meaning of these passages, of the belonging of their components, or the ways in which they are constituted as a place for a speech. And yet, Asian Collecting is situated as an extension or representation of the domain of the museum.
The reply and justification offered regarding this situation must not be understood as the creation of a handbook of what Asian Collecting encompasses and excludes, in terms of definition and historicity. No, the aim should be to try to locate and study the regimes, rules, and series that make it possible to inscribe and put forward the performativity of the Museum on this object.

ASIAN COLLECTING AND ITS LEGIBILITY THROUGH THE MUSEUM
Considering the contents of recent research on Asian Collecting in Chile, in particular, the way in which they come into being, it would appear that its legibility is mostly built from the reproduction of the museal order. First, by presupposing that Asian Collecting, seen from the perspective of being objects collected through the mediation of a historical subject, must be read in media-res of the social, political, and biographic circumstances of a specific epoch. This is done in such a way, that from a succession of historical facts it is possible to abstract, decipher, and define, the phenomenon of acquisition of Asian works and their placement in the collection. Thus, Asian Collecting would be standardised as a documental object (Nagel Vega 2008). Second, collecting-considering the previous statement-is capable of effectively consummating its need for representation-that is to say, for appearance and regularity as an objectfrom the discursive practices of the Museum, insofar as "a collection is the affirmation of a summarised biography". 7 But how does this impact its current decidability? Asian Collecting is erected from the laws of the object-collection, whose positivity (positivité) is in museality itself, an ontologisation of the "cultural role of objects" (Hernández, 2006: 199). As such: Objects represent concrete aspects of reality which are influenced by a series of social and cultural factors which gives them a special value [and] makes them be considered as a cultural reality capable of concentrating inside itself the collective memory of peoples. 8 The fundamental registration plane of museality is the catalogue. Thus, for example, in the catalogue of the Asian Collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), 9 the act of enunciability is permitted by the interplay of varied relationships which spring from the contextual power of the pieces (their origin and their history as a collectible object).
The power of context brings unity, verification and equivalence of statements (the way to approach research, namely as an exhibition of a museum collection and a case of collecting). Meanwhile, the catalogue identifies a material regime of mastery of the objects of study, which concerns the "order of the institution rather than its spatial-temporal location: it defines possibilities of re-registration and transcription (but also of thresholds and limits) rather than limited and perishable individualities". 10 In other words, the catalogue helps to define the scope of use of the statements in the object. It allows us to give a statute to museality, distinguishing the instruments for collecting information (how it was studied, from what disciplinary procedures, what the strategies of analysis of the collection were or where it belongs to collecting), the place of the subject inside the field's dominion, and last, but not least, the event of the object as a place accessible to thought: Today, and for the first time, the MNBA presents its own collection of Japanese art in the exposition titled Floating World of the Edo Period. This project contemplates a long process of conservation and restauration; an investigation regarding its contents, iconography and meaning in its historical and cultural contexts, and it will also prepare a historic investigation regarding the origins of the collection. 11 Another example can be found in the catalogue Chinese Collection of the Pedro del Río Zañartu Museum, 12 museality expresses an intentionality-a characteristic-which is required of the field of the Museum. The latter is the ultimate dominion of collecting, in which that which is not said, which is not known (the private collections of Asian pieces), acquires a mode of appearance, repetition and interpretation through the desire of the owner or the utility in which the collection is invested: The task of researching and disseminating the Asian art held by the Pedro del Río Zañartu Museum was carried out by a multidisciplinary group…This Chilean's [Pedro del Río Zañartu] conviction, in conjunction with his enormous solidarity, gave way into a museum thought and designed with affection for all of his compatriots…The Museum has managed to fulfil the collector's wish of sharing the experience and his collection to serve as a way of illustrating and entertaining the people. 13 Asian Collecting and Asian collections seem to be, then, an equivalence in museum research, the same type of object, an equal order of analysis and readability; an associated regime of formation of possible statements.
From the above, it is now possible to see some of the effects this causes. First, Asian Collecting is made visible in the application of the criteria acceptable to the field of the Museum, of the same range of shared enunciation. Second, in this connection between collecting and the objectcollection, that which is decidable in the investigation can be generally found in the attempt to restore historicity and accumulate data on its context. Third, both Asian Collecting and Asian collections are part of a positivity, the "practices tied to certain conditions, subject to certain rules, and susceptible to certain transformations". 14 However, the historical trace of this assembly is, in general, recent, considering the appearance of museum collections founded on the Chilean private collections. The prologue of the catalogue of the Collection of Classical Japanese Prints (ukiyo-e) in Universidad de Chile's Andrés Bello Central Archive states: 15 In Europe and the United States-and for some time now also in Japan and Hawaii-there exist stamp collections in both libraries and art museums…In our country, so closely linked to Japanese art, there was no series of them in a public repository. 16,17 Next, de Ávila Martel indicates that during the nineteenth century, Asian Collecting was more of a private activity, and in which no influence of the Museum can be seen in the practice of collecting or in its system of operation: Chile was one of the first South American countries to demonstrate an interest and a liking for Japanese art: Rubén Dario remembers that his first contact with these forms of expression…was in Santiago in 1886, in Pedro Balmaceda's cabinet. Then the hobby spread, moved mainly by two collectors...Mr. Javier Larraín Irarrázabal and Mrs. Luisa Lynch de Morla...These collections...would gradually go out into the market. 18 Other cases which reinforce this historic frame include: the Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD), founded in 1982, which acquired a collection of Asian pieces (among other things) donated by the collector Hernán Garcés Silva , 19 as stated in the certificate of delivery dated 31 July 1981 (MAD n.d.). The National Historical Museum (MHN), within its collection of weapons (swords and sabres), 20 has some Japanese pieces, such as a tachi (太刀). There is no certainty about the origin of the pieces and their entry into the museum, although it is likely that they belonged to a family of the Chilean aristocracy from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and were donated to the institution in those early decades (Barra and Godoy 2012). The Pablo Neruda Foundation, created by Matilde Urrutia, the author's widow, in 1986, also features some Buddhist busts and statuettes in its collection: these are objects which, at some point in time, belonged to the day-to-day lives of the couple during the second half of the twentieth century. In all these exhibitions, Asian Collecting is reflected not as a concrete object or authentic problem of dedication, but as something articulated, contiguous, on top of something else: the analysis of collection. The process of transformation is also described, that is, the displacement and migration of the collected-object to the object-collection: The forms of collecting dated before the eighteenth century are predecessors of the modern museum. Therefore, the term should always be used with caution prior to its foundation, being the word protomuseums a more correct term, as the proliferation and growth of such organisms has mainly occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 21 Following the quote, the object-collection will be consolidated (in Europe) according to three processes. First, the purchasing power of the merchantbourgeois class is consolidated; second, the encyclopaedic approachwhat shall be known as erudite collecting-(Cano de Gardoqui Garcia 2001) is established, and third, the state's intermediation (reflected in the creation of national collections), which was mostly reactive in nature. These processes cause two synchronic effects: on the one hand, the attention of artistic goods as a community value, and on the other, the creation of public museums (Poulot 2005).
In the Chilean case, when reflecting on Asian Collecting and removing it from its pedestal as a collection-object, an incompatibility is made visible. In other words, a dispersion of its conceptual delimitations appears, and it accentuates, at the same time, the force of museality as a predominant and persuasive discursive practice against the void, or the rarity of the act of collecting: There is an insistence on thinking of Asian Collecting only as an act-and an object-of museum collections. Outside of this area, approximation to the subject has been either tangential or negligent. I shall dare to say that it even disappears as an object of study.
Yet another example: On 21 April 1978, Alfredo García Burr, bibliophile and collector, donates to the University of Chile a set of ukiyo-e, the so-called Collection of Classic Japanese Prints. This small segment would join an exhibition held in 1980 to celebrate the jubilee of Emperor Hirohito. In fact, only a couple of negatives of the delivery of the donation and the already mentioned catalogue are kept. 23 The rest of the ukiyo-e collection, which was not donated, was auctioned to an unknown buyer and its whereabouts are unknown.
First statement: Asian Collecting and museal Asian collections possess a point of fixture as an object of study, which is museality's positivity. However, at the fringes of this threshold a non-museal Asian Collecting appears at intervals on the Social History (Subercaseaux 2011), specifically in the analysis of the nineteenth century's Chilean elite. In particular, studies of the religious crisis and separation of the powers of the state (Berríos et al. 2009), the transmission of Latin American Orientalism and, in a more restricted field, the study of travel chronicles on the East (Ramírez Errázuriz 2010, 2017). Thus, a new question arises: from which set of laws, relationships, adaptations, and anticipations, does museality organise a "jurisdiction" of enunciability, a "power over that which is decidable" on Asian Collecting and reduces it to the thought of a collection?

RULES OF FORMATION OF THE OBJECT-COLLECTION: FROM THE UNPRECEDENTED TO THE OBVIOUS
That Asian Collecting enters museum thought, becomes governed by museality, implies that this discursive formation has made an unprecedented event acquire the body of an object, which occurs in the obvious. By unprecedented I refer to what comes before the action of a form of rationality, that which is found outside enunciative sets. The rules of emergence and their capacity to become objective constitutes, then, that which is underscored by what is non-decidable. If the unprecedented corresponds to the exceptional fact of that which has yet to be discovered by museality, the obvious is the formation of a definable relationship between the appearance of objects and types of enunciation, functions, and museum domains. The obvious, then, is the conquest-the deciphering-of that which is unprecedented.
Museology, as the science of the Museum, has debated extensively on the experience of the modern museum, fundamentally, since the second half of the twentieth century (Lorente and Almazán 2003;Lorente 2012;León 2016). The Museum is a place where objects can be inscribed to prevent them from becoming unintelligible. In every Museum there is a lack of space for uncertainty or bewilderment, as it is taken up by the contemplation of order, explanation, the standard appearance, which is experience, in the terms set by Agamben: Experience is in fact primarily aimed at protecting from surprises and a shock always implies a failure in said experience. To gain experience of something means to deprive it of novelty, to neutralize its shock potential. 24 Asian Collecting is discovered by the Museum as a synonym of collection, in whose rationality museality exercises the following rules of formation.

Museality as a Heterotopia
To paraphrase Michel Foucault, the museality adopted by a museum is not expressed, nor should it be understood, as a flat, homogeneous, transversal notebook sheet. It is something that lies outside of quotidian life, somewhere else, but that nonetheless has a specific place. Museality constitutes a heterotopia in two possible forms: first, it describes a region of contextuality, in which historicity, epochs, the residual temporalities of works and collections are archived on themselves, as a suspension of becoming; second, because it places assembly as the law of construction of its own domain. Both understandings belong to only one principle: "heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in one real place, a multitude of spaces that are by themselves incompatible". 25 Michel Foucault managed to tie collecting, without a lot of forethought, with the apparition of the Museum, from the perspective of time management: Museums and libraries are the heterotopias which time keeps piling up and roosting on top of themselves. However, in the seventeenth century-until the end of the seventeenth century-museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. On the other hand, the idea of accumulating, of constituting a sort of general archive, the will to confine different times to a specific place, all epochs, all the forms and all the tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself timeless…all this belongs to our modernity. 26 However, to juxtapose is not the same as to make compatible. To juxtapose is to group, approximate, bring together elements without a rule of mediation or, what is the same, without reason of necessity. For example, a house usually juxtaposes its everyday elements according to the circumstances. There is a place to situate everything, each room has a certain organisational unit, but they do not imply an absolute law or determination that an object is exclusive to a certain corner of the home. There is no impediment for it not to circulate, get mixed up or lost in other places. That same home now turned into a Museum-house also preserves the juxtapositions of the belongings, the non-standard unit and the record of the circumstantial. And yet it involves an attachment, something that transcends the randomness of home life. The Modern Museum, understood as a post eighteenth century manifestation, not only juxtaposes but also elaborates the rules of compatibility of its objects, establishes the analysis, the set of relationships, the intention to repeat its statements-the knowledge-that makes them accessible within a discourse. Going back to our example, Pablo Neruda's museum-houses are now not only the home of the poet, but the configuration of a complex idea, because of his literary work and life. His houses, personal belongings converted into collections, are dependent on a major object of enunciation, a network of decidabilities and assemblies that overflow the historical subject of Neruda, namely that which is nerudian (Millares 2008).
Such a translation between juxtaposition and compatibility in museum heterotopia is given by the following rule: the collector's item must be visible, marked, and circumscribed, based on its capacity for insertion into a general history, a heterochrony if you like.
In reviewing the narratives in the catalogues, the ways of isolating but also of placing these collector's items in collections-the set of stories that map Asian Collecting in the Museum-it assails its constant interrogation as an object that participates in a time that governs it, an inscription in history that imprints a precise meaning on the piece and gives it a complicity with other bodies in exhibition: The displayed stamps [author's note: referring here to ukiyo-e] are permanently losing part of their colours; the ideal way to preserve them would be to put them in albums…It is the only way to actually appreciate them indefinitely as their first buyers-the people of Edodid [my emphasis]. 27 At the MAD, the statute of historicity defines the boundary between the unknown and the decidability of its objects. In this case, a geo-cultural and historical identification produces the certainty of the historical continuity of objects, regarding the history of the other collections (here, by recognising them in the Japanese tradition and inscribed in a precise century) and of that which is left unknown (pieces that are simply of Asian origin and unverifiable dating): Santiago's Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD)'s collection possesses a total of 68 objects with an Asian origin, of which about 30% come from Japan. This set of pieces evidence [sic] the diverse techniques, materials and artistic styles which were preeminent from the start of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the next one on the island. 28 Museality, then, offers Asian Collecting a place in the history of collections, a place inside temporal inscription regimes, and from there, discursive forms and analysis of the objects that can be moved, superimposed, or distributed among the different exhibition units or sections of the museum. As such, the collector who grouped it becomes irrelevant: Inside the multiplicity of articles which make up the Japanese patrimony of the MAD, three figures in a bundle representing three "avocations" of the Buddha stand out: Sakyamuni, Amida Nyorai y Dainichi Nyorai…The origin of each of these votive images is unknown, as they first belonged Hernán Garcés Silva, a Chilean lawyer and collector [my emphasis]. 29 In criticising the Museum and its consumption, art historian Roc Laseca deals with the problem of time, thinking of it as a type of strategic articulation that seeks to avoid the chronological, formal, and inherent lag of each object. Laseca would oscillate between trying to create a system of coexistence between heterogeneous elements and, at the same time, ceasing the plurality of times-of histories-existing inside the individual pieces contained within it.
The effort then lies in subordinating the uniqueness of the objects in the collection to a general and lax history of art…the image has been deactivated. The genuine would not fit with the distribution of expositive products to other destinations, rather than as an exotic quota capable of pointing to vernacular (usually orientalist) knowledge. 30 299 Furthermore: The literal form of giving finitude to the dimension of the image and place in its historical location would thus emerge…the real function of the museum would start on the outside of the building: its task is to give full meaning to the non-collectable. 31 Collecting and the Museum are therefore heterotopic formations, albeit with different dominant functions. Collecting is about the heterogeneity of its objects, through discursive forms that are not visibly subject to specific rules of verification, coherence and regularity. Its decidability is, in the end, made up of the secret, intimate unity that the collector has been able to constitute for himself and his work (Díaz Martin 2006, Peraza andIturbe 2015). The Museum, on the other hand, traces a specific function, a law that is expressed in a set of enunciative practices on the object-collection and that constitutes a verifiable unit: the museum's heterotopia, its museality, is a series which produces logic structures of classification, spatial continuity, and discursive compatibility between objects. It established a disciplinary regime for the heterogeneous. Museality, then, can be described as a threshold of formality. In other words: [that museality's discursiveness] can define the axioms that are necessary to it, the elements that it uses, the propositional structures which are legitimate for it and the transformations it accepts when it can thus unfold, from itself, the formal building that constitutes it. 32 The first rule of formation of museality which governs Asian Collecting within Chilean Museums can thus be verbalised: Objects collected and museum collections emerge as units with the possibility of enunciation, only insofar as their condition as unpublished, discontinuous or fragmentary is replaced by a structure of association, familiarity, and acceptable symmetries (the catalogue, the museum script, the curatorship). In other words, a heterotopia.

Museality as a Taxonomy
Museality-understood as the rationale which underlines the Museum and is reflected on the space and objects it holds-as an ontological principle of the museum object-collection and the hidden unity of the discourses of the museum space, does not produce contradiction in the gestation of its objects. It can be said that it processes the multiplicity of possible pieces, their communication codes, the visibility and delimitation of the field of the Museum (Guasch 2008;Arnaldo 2013;Recht 2014).
Museality is expressed in the physical space of the museum in two general ways. The first one I shall name "the volatility of the singularity of objects", and the second one, "the place of the Museum". Museality expresses itself as a general dimension of the grouping of its pieces and relationships, whose purpose is to annul and prohibit a dispersion, or singularity, of an entity, with respect to the history of its own production of meaning among the collections. Each piece exhibited in a museum is assigned by an opening a priori of the museum's location within the chronological time and temporality that collects and displays them.
This condition of museality can be seen, progressively, from the catalogue of the imperial collection of Vienna (1784) and the Louvre Museum (1790) onwards, where "the paintings were classified for the first time according to chronology and schools, thus becoming «a storehouse of the visible history of art»". 33 The "volatility of the singular" is not a vagueness into which the work is dragged, a lack of content of the object; it is, on the contrary, its inability to resist remaining unintelligible. The second conquest of museality is to enable a close framework of interaction and rules between the object given to the gaze and the experience that is obtained from it. I refer to the constitution of the "aesthetic contemplation" of the Museum. According to Carlos Fajardo, since the eighteenth century, "the idea of a receiving public, formulated by an enlightened European bourgeoisie in search of an autonomous subject, a cultured citizen with good taste, magnified the category of contemplation". 34 Nowadays, aesthetic contemplation is characterised as the set of discursive norms, strategies and practices that make it possible to place a curatorship from the point of view of the subject inside that relationship (Rico 1996).
Museality supports the formation of the experience of objects and the modality in which they are emphasised and distributed. This circumstance is not exclusively derived from its heterotopic principle. It is accompanied by a conceptual elaboration, a material network of meanings of the objects: how a sense of identity is made concrete from the plural. That is, from the variety of forms, artistic supports, techniques, and procedures of production of works. Suddenly, the multiple productions exhibited acquire a dominant subjection, a model of conceiving the exhibition object that expresses the "rapture" of the individual in the plural and vice versa.
Bearing in mind the Iconographic Collection of the Andrés Bello Central Archive, what logic of museality allows an assembly, accommodation, or adhesion, so that an ukiyo-e, an English engraving from the nineteenth century or a geographical illustration by Claudio Gay can be designated as a "set of engravings"? Or, as mentioned regarding the MNBA, depending on which model the ukiyo-e and sumi-e pieces can be grouped together under the name of Asian Collection? The same question applies for the Buddhist sculptures, the netsuke, the Imari style containers Famille Verte and Famille Rose, Japanese mirrors, in short, which are part of the Oriental Collection of the MAD, in Santiago.
What type of strategy does the museum adopt to dissolve the unity of a private collection and make it accessible to a general classification structure? In the following section I shall touch upon these questions by bearing the following quote in mind: Every detailed explanation of a work of art includes and implies an elaborate description of said work. The picture's explanation becomes then a part of a broader description, a way to define things that would otherwise be very difficult to describe. 35 The quote introduces a new rule of museality by virtue of the experience contained in a work of art is mediated by the possibilities it has as a description and the available explanations reached by the subject that experiments it, and also that its intelligibility is adjusted by the museum's signatural capacity: museality makes its object individual through the taxonomization of that which is real as something universal. Asian Collecting gains, through the museum, a continuity because the latter has the capacity of elaborating a model; an exemplary diversity of lookalikes that forms a common speech about its objects. Museality creates the analogy of collecting-collection by sorting the repertoire of possible signals of both phenomena, from a normative, semantic, and conscious domain which ties sensorial perception and the categories that refer to the object. That is, museal taxonomy, described as the chain of intrinsic connections (Bunge 2001) which crosses the museum's field and regulates the words, concepts, practices of an acceptable and serial speech about its pieces and sets in a universal manner. In other words, what concerns to the systematic production of belonging and identity of the signs which represent the Museum's reality (Carretero 2005;Navarrete 2020).
Throughout the sixteenth century, European Private Collecting underwent an internal change, a reorganisation of its discursive field regarding the manner in which the relationships between things are integrated and signed (Agamben 2009). A new project of thought regarding the world appears, as Foucault observes below: They secretly mine the language, because they can name diverse things. They break common names or twist them, because they've ruined the "syntaxes" beforehand, and not only the one which builds sentences: They also ruin the less evident ones, which make words and things stay together (side to side and front to front) [my emphasis]. 36 The property of similarity-understood as two things that are alike or look similar-between words and things does not only define the "prose of the world of the sixteenth century" as Foucault warns, but also the new field of representation of what is real, which would become more sophisticated and articulated over the following centuries. On top of collecting, the school of thought called humanist encyclopaedism was born, and from its ideas a new form of curating emerged, producing the Cabinet of Curiosities (or Marvels) and affecting these private collector's treasures in such a way they would no longer be considered a simple remnant of conquest or a social catalogue. These encyclopaedists manifested a "revolution" of visibility, by providing an internal sense which rules and disposes the similarity between pieces (Cano de Gardoqui Garcia 2001; Ocampo 2011). This transformationwhich the Museum has inherited-is the "rewriting of the sense of existence of the pieces" regarding a totalising model of dominion over the plural; in other words, taxonomy (Barbero 2015;Ramis Barceló 2018).
Traditionally, in texts by Aristotle, taxonomy adopted a heuristic character by profiling how things are described. In 1735, Systema Naturae by Carolus Linnaeus adopted a more constructive reformulation of taxonomy by supporting the scientificist system, the discovery, description, and cataloguing of natural phenomena. However, Systema Naturae did not originate this kind of taxonomy. That honour falls to Caspar Friedrich Neickel's Museographia oder Anleitun zum rechten Begriff und nüytzlicher Anlegung der Museorum (Museographia, or instructions on the right concept and useful layout of the Museorum, 1727). Through Neickel, the modern museum becomes systematically articulated through "the criteria followed in the elaboration of registers, inventories and catalogues". 37 The museal taxonomy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is produced through the concept of complicity, which frames two different taxonomic readings on things. Foucault postulates that complicity "belongs to the order of conjunction and adjustment" 38 and that the closeness complicity establishes "is not an exterior relationship of things, but the sign of a dark family bond". 39 It could be said that every museum is organised in such a manner that continuity of reality becomes possible, tying a plurality of objects and origins with one editorial line. Said line usually stems from complicity between objects. In the museum, meaning is that which is understood, formulated, and created as a virtual analogy between objects. A collection thus described would be defined by the rule of complicity between its objects, while the (hidden) properties of its pieces are brought to light, thanks to cataloguing and documental work (Ávila Meléndez 2015).
During the twentieth century, disciplines such as Museology and Museography reinforce the ontological transitivity of the object of museality since "it is the operation that tends to extract, physically and conceptually, something from its natural or cultural environment of origin to give it a museum status". 40 Certainly, the Museum today does not manipulate the word complicity in a tacit way, but it has maintained its functionality in the common name, which defines "the exact name that allows an object to be named and identified unequivocally. Furthermore, this term allows it to be linked to objects with similar characteristics". 41 The common name is a concept which entails the taxonomic operation of the museum in two synchronic manners: on the one hand, it allows the recording of those physical, measurable-and transferablefeatures of the pieces (patterns); on the other, it enables the elaboration of a shared narrative or "contextual framework" of the collections (taxa).
With respect to the first, the pattern is the perception of a sequence as a starting point to the intelligibility of the object or collection. This finding, in second instance, creates a categorical and relational image (García Blanco 1994; Clair 2011) of the piece or set (taxon). The key to the common name is its capacity to produce metaphors-decodifications-of that which is real, and are opposed to the singular, the strange and the unheard of in the object, since it "refers to the series, the multiple, the interchangeable [as opposed to] a proper name [which] designates a singular individual or entity. It distinguishes rather than mixes. It separates". 42 However, a common name is also based on qualitative criteria. Take, for example, the following case. The Iconographic Collection of the Andrés Bello Central Archive has an extremely versatile geo-cultural constitution. However, its taxon allows for an opening of contact and combination between its elements (the ukiyo-e, lithographs, watercolours, gouaches, and European engravings), replacing two singular characteristics with an artificial "formal continuity".
First, the taxon "iconographic collection" was organised on the basis of a technical appeal, that is, by homogenising the typological criteria of the objects in a single general analogue articulation (or shared image): these were "engravings", rather than works with disparate areas of origin, production and meaning. Second, the taxon incorporated-and emphasisedan aesthetic perception as an "investment" of classification: the set of objects helps bring forth an analytical reading that could be situated in the "figurative" or "illustrative" of a motif of reality in their compatibility with the representation, whether of a geographical, historical, or social fact. Hence, the symbol of the Iconographic Collection. As that which is part of the iconographic, as a symbol, representation, an orientation towards a meaning or motive outside the image or work. In fact, this representational sense is made explicit in the catalogue of the Classical Japanese Print Collection (ukiyo-e), by indicating that: [In its production context] A mode of existential vision arises in which the beautiful women of all classes, the successful actors of the Kabuki theatre, and the landscapes and places of worship are an aesthetic concern...The pictorial translation [my emphasis]...was the art called ukiyo-e. 43 However, a taxon also makes it possible to construct a "contextual framework" as a second operational mode. Museum taxonomy tends, as a matter of principle, to neutralise the particularity of objects and-insteadto offer a common plan of intellectualisation, understood as a field of coincidence or symbolisation. For example, a common name (taxon) signed as "painting", according to museum policy and usage, can be adapted and moved to "eighteenth century", "Imari style", "Famille Verte" or "Buddhist imagery". This helps to form groups and thus convey certain meanings between adjacent areas. The word "painting" is not a property that is present in all the previous categories but the place of their convergence, where they interweave into a story. In the press release for the exhibition of the Oriental Collection of the MAD, the strength of the "Oriental" taxon can be seen, which gives meaning to the curatorship, in the form of a claim to general geographical coincidence and identity of the multiple: The works presented in this exhibition reflect the traditional decorative repertoire shared [my emphasis] by both China and Japan during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They correspond to two periods of extraordinary artistic vitality, the Qing Dynasty  and the Tokugawa Dynasty . This exhibition provides an insight into the many meanings that fauna and flora can have in Eastern culture. 44 In this sense, a taxon, or common name, aims to bring out the contingency of the works, their contextual decoding as a "virtual analogy" or compatibility of the pieces, only in terms of the origin of their production or "native location." If these works were donated to the museum, even when incorporated from a private collection, and had other purposes or ways of being interpreted, the Museum does not care. The reflective occupation of the Museum is only to create its own taxon. For example: The exposition Floating World of the Edo Period…is an invitation to experience the diversity of objects coming mainly from the Japanese Edo period (1603-1868) from perceptuality, observation and feeling [author's note: "Edo period" turns out to be both the common name and the contingency of the works]. 45

CONCLUSION
In Chile, the term Asian Collecting, which refers both to a practice and a relation, is formulated as an object of study (that is, a place of multidisciplinary enunciation) only when its intelligibility is anchored to the space of the Museum. Only in this way is Asian Collecting articulated as an event and a description of an object of study.
From this argument, two points arise: 1) to show Asian Collecting as an absent territory, without its own decidability or, in the best of cases, on the periphery of other areas of knowledge, unless it is framed within the space of the Museum, and 2) as a result of the above, Asian Collecting only possesses one principle of enunciation-that is to say, an assumption of continuity, formation of discourses, strategies of analysis and, in general, a placement within a field of study-stemming from the laws of the Museum domain. That principle could be called its positivity, or in other words, museality.
The argument for this working thesis consists in making visible and describing the laws of museality and how they relate to the possible sets of enunciation of the Museum, either through their interweaving, succession, disposition, and their transcription to collecting. I have thus proposed two rules, without ruling out the existence, or interference, of others, heterotopia and the taxonomy of what is real. The research has characterised the impact of both rules of museality, from its predominant medium, the catalogue.
As a general conclusion on museality, and paraphrasing Jacques Rancière (2014), it is possible to indicate that its positivity serves as a base for a distribution of the sensitive on the unknown and its collections. There is no entity-object, collection, or exhibition site-in the field of the Museum that does not possess an index, even minimal, of signalling, position, and knowledge. There is no "speechless body" in the Museum, no element that is deprived of a discursive form.
This fact, which is the prohibition of the unpublished, constitutes a repressive effect, and at the same time, the organisation of a shared "speech" on the museum field. The distribution of the sensitive, "the system of sensitive evidence that allows us to see at the same time the common existence and the cuttings that define their respective places and parts" 46 describes, in this way, a general regime of distribution of the works on the exhibition space, the transcription and repetition of museographic logics in the works, about what is said and can be known about them (Rancière 2010).
From the perspective of heterotopia, Asian Collecting is set inside the object-collection of a museum, by making a shared temporality or history compatible. The singular emergence, the orders of Asian Collecting (which concern the irruption, the cutting of the discontinuity of the original use and place of the objects to become the property of a collector, and to submit to an intimate and unprecedented disposition) dissolve within the general story of the Museum's collections, as the consolidation of a kinship regime, where each work happens simultaneously and in a homogeneous, chained, and continuous way. It becomes, in a sense, documented.
Taxonomy, on the other hand, governs the law of classification, description, and availability of possible categories for the speech that defines the museum field. In this sense, taxonomy expresses the internal system of connivances and representations of a principle of continuity of the real in the Museum, that is, through the curatorial narrative, the images or the concepts that link the discursive practices on the pieces. I have thus referred to the common name as an element of coherence and empathy in the codification of a museum's collections. Asian Collecting, equivalent in effect to the preliminary rule, is affiliated with the same function-and speech patternsas any Museum object. The individuality of the pieces, the situationality of Asian Collecting, is removed by a "contextual framework" of the collections: a model of adjustment, neighbourhood, and proximity.