Closed Systems
Bachelor machines operate as sealed loops, producing energy that fuels their own operation indefinitely.
Theoretical Concept
Understanding Bachelor Machines
The bachelor machine is a closed, self-sufficient system that produces nothing but its own functioning. A key concept linking Duchamp's Large Glass to Elden Ring's cyclical world.
Updated
4/15/2026
Reading Time
2 min
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Frustrated Desire
The machine's purpose is perpetual striving without fulfillment - desire that generates but never consummates.
Artistic Expression
Bachelor machines appear throughout 20th century art, representing modernity's alienation and mechanical existence.
What is a Bachelor Machine?#
The term "bachelor machine" (machine celibataire) was coined by Marcel Duchamp to describe the lower half of The Large Glass - the realm of the Bachelors who endlessly grind and process their desire for the Bride above, never achieving union.
Michel Carrouges later expanded the concept in his 1954 book Les Machines Celibataires, identifying bachelor machines across literature and art: Kafka's penal colony apparatus, Raymond Roussel's impossible inventions, and Alfred Jarry's perpetual motion devices.
Characteristics of Bachelor Machines#
- Self-contained: They require no external input to function
- Perpetual: They operate indefinitely without degradation
- Purposeless: Their only product is their own functioning
- Desiring: They embody frustrated or impossible desire
- Mechanical: They reduce organic processes to mechanical operations
The Large Glass as Bachelor Machine#
In Duchamp's Large Glass, the Bachelor Apparatus consists of the Malic Molds (nine uniformed figures), the Chocolate Grinder, the Water Mill, and the Sieves. Together they process "illuminating gas" in an endless cycle of desire for the Bride who remains forever separated in the upper register.
The Bachelors grind themselves, producing nothing but the energy of their own frustrated desire. This is the essence of the bachelor machine: a system that perpetuates itself through its own incompleteness.
Elden Ring as Bachelor Machine#
Elden Ring is structured as a bachelor machine on multiple levels:
- The death/rebirth cycle: The Tarnished dies and returns endlessly, grinding through the same world, processing the same challenges
- The Lands Between: A closed system where souls circulate endlessly through the Erdtree, never truly leaving
- The Elden Ring itself: A mechanism for ordering reality that has shattered but continues to function in its broken state
- The player's experience: We grind, we die, we return - our desire to complete the game fuels endless repetition
The Artistic Significance#
By structuring Elden Ring as a bachelor machine, FromSoftware creates a game that is simultaneously about something and about nothing. The endless grinding, the repeated deaths, the cyclical nature of the world - these aren't just game mechanics. They are the substance of the artwork itself.
Just as Duchamp's Large Glass is "definitely unfinished," Elden Ring presents a world that can never be truly completed - only endlessly processed.