Bibliography & Resources

Marcel Duchamp#

Primary Texts#

• Michel Sanouillet & Elmer Peterson (eds.) - Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Da Capo Press, 1989.
• Octavio Paz - Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. Arcade Publishing, 2014.
• Marcel Duchamp - "The Creative Act." Talk delivered at the American Federation of Arts convention, Houston, Texas, April 1957. Published in Art News, Vol. 56, No. 4.
  • Elden Ring connection: "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world... and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." The player completes the game.

The Large Glass#

• The Green Box - Duchamp's notes on The Large Glass
• The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even - The Large Glass
• Linda Dalrymple Henderson - "The Large Glass Seen Anew: Reflections of Contemporary Science and Technology in Marcel Duchamp's 'Hilarious Picture.'" Leonardo, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1999), pp. 113-126. MIT Press. JSTOR
  • Henderson analyzes Duchamp's Large Glass through the lens of contemporary science and technology, particularly X-rays, radioactivity, and the fourth dimension.
  • Elden Ring connection: Duchamp embedded cutting edge scientific concepts (invisible rays, higher dimensions, atomic decay) into seemingly absurd imagery. FromSoftware embeds serious philosophical and art historical content into seemingly "just a video game."

Chess#

• Francis M. Naumann, Bradley Bailey & Jennifer Shahade - Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. Readymade Press, 2009.
  • Elden Ring connection: The Tarnished are bachelors (pawns) who can be promoted if they travel to the other side of the board—they can become a queen (consort). Pawn promotion = becoming Elden Lord. Bailey's essay "Passionate Pastimes" argues chess and art are "aesthetically and conceptually inseparable" in Duchamp, with "coded messages buried in his art that could be fully comprehended only by proficient players."

Scholarship & Criticism#

• La Chose en Soie - "The Thing in Silk." Analysis of Duchamp's ready-made philosophy. (Original source)

  • Elden Ring connection: The ready-made as "non-empty parts of glass with the glass removed" parallels FromSoftware's fragmentary lore system—meaning emerges from what surrounds the absence.

• Michel Leiris - "On Duchamp." OCTOBER 112, Spring 2005, pp. 45-50.

• Gerald Holton - "Henri Poincaré, Marcel Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art." Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2001).

• David Joselit - Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941. MIT Press.

• Dawn Ades, Neil Cox & David Hopkins - Marcel Duchamp (World of Art series). Thames & Hudson.

• Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp - Andrew Stafford.

Tout-Fait Journal Articles#

Core Research#

• Why the Hatrack Is and/or Is Not Readymade - Rhonda Roland Shearer, Vol. 1, Issue 2. 3D modeling and perspective analysis.

  • Elden Ring connection: Shearer's forensic approach to Duchamp's objects models how to investigate seemingly straightforward game elements for hidden structure.

• Boats and Deckchairs - Stephen Jay Gould & Rhonda Roland Shearer, Natural History (1999). Duchamp's four-dimensional perspective illusion.

  • Elden Ring connection: If Duchamp embedded 4-D illusions in 2-D media, the same could be done in 3-D game space.

• Marcel Duchamp: A Readymade Case for Collecting Objects of Our Cultural Heritage Along with Works of Art - Rhonda Roland Shearer (2000).

  • Argues that many of Duchamp's alleged mass-produced "readymades" cannot be located in historical catalogs or duplicate forms, suggesting far more artistic intervention than Duchamp publicly acknowledged.
  • Seven case studies: Fountain urinal (no matching Mott catalog model), Apolinère Enameled (extensive manipulation revealed), 50cc of Paris Air (atypical ampule form), etc.
  • Core insight: "By studying humble and ephemeral historical objects, scholars can gain important insights about the cultures and economies that surround the lives of artists."
  • Elden Ring connection: The "readymade" was itself a deception—the triviality was a mask for hidden craft. If Duchamp's snow shovels and urinals were carefully fabricated rather than casually selected, then the "found object" mythology collapses. The same principle applies: what appears to be "just a video game" may be a carefully constructed artwork disguised as mass entertainment.

Geometry & Perspective#

• Duchamp's Perspective: The Intersection of Art and Geometry - Craig Adcock (2003).

  • Duchamp rehabilitated perspective as rigorous mathematical system: "The Large Glass constitutes a rehabilitation of perspective, which had been completely ignored."
  • Projective geometry: Three-dimensional objects projecting into four-dimensional space. Glass as metaphor for higher-dimensional perspectives.
  • "Canned chance": The Three Standard Stoppages weren't literally dropped strings—Duchamp manipulated them to achieve desired curves, then applied mathematical templates. Control disguised as randomness.
  • "Stoppage": Echoes French textile repair terminology—invisible mending. The Large Glass's cracks became integral geometric elements; Duchamp called the broken work "a hundred times better."
  • Desargues' influence: The "arbor-type" terminology for the Bride comes from 17th-century mathematician Girard Desargues's organic vocabulary (tree, trunk, branches)—a geometrical axis around which elements organize.
  • Readymades as geometric statements: The Bottlerack displays prongs rotating around central axis; Pharmacy positions red/green dots at vanishing points on horizon line. Not arbitrary—deliberate geometry.
  • The fourth dimension: "A point in a three-dimensional space hides, conceals the fourth direction of the continuum." From 4-D perspective, the Stoppages recede perpendicular to normal space.
  • Elden Ring connection: The game's "apparent randomness" (fragmentary lore, scattered items, non-linear progression) may be as precisely controlled as Duchamp's "canned chance." The Lands Between as geometrical structure—projective, higher-dimensional, with elements organized around invisible axes. What looks like open-world chaos is actually rigorous spatial argument.

• The Bachelor Stripped Bare by Cabri Géomètre, Even - Roberto Giunti (2007). Geometric analysis of the Large Glass.

  • Elden Ring connection: The mathematical precision underlying apparent chaos—Duchamp's hidden geometries parallel FromSoftware's structured world design beneath fragmentary narrative.

• Complexity Art - Roberto Giunti, Vol. 2, Issue 5. Analysis of how Klee, Duchamp, and Escher independently expressed complexity science concepts decades before they were formalized.

  • Elden Ring connection: "Impossible" visual structures that nonetheless function—like the game's non-Euclidean spaces. Self-organization, feedback loops, and emergence as design principles.
  • Key vocabulary:
    • Complexity sciences - emergent properties from interconnected components
    • Self-organization - systems achieving order without external direction; "spontaneously reduces entropy"
    • Edge-of-chaos - operating state between rigid order and complete disorder
    • Deterministic chaos - unpredictable behavior from simple iterative procedures
    • Sensitive dependence on initial conditions - minute variations producing drastically different outcomes
    • Feedback loops - circular causal mechanisms (outputs influence inputs)
    • Morphogenesis - processes leading to form
    • Fractals - self-similar patterns repeating across scales
    • Tessellation - covering surfaces with repeated tiles without gaps
    • Topology - properties preserved under continuous deformation (Möbius strips, Klein bottles)
    • Impossible 3D objects - spatially inconsistent representations violating Euclidean geometry
    • Perpetuum mobile - perpetual motion; metaphor for entropy reversal
    • Infra-thin difference - Duchamp's concept of imperceptible distinction
    • Holism - "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"
    • Autopoetic - self-producing/self-maintaining systems

• The 1925 Chess Poster: Impossible Geometry - Rhonda Roland Shearer & Robert Slawinski.

  • Elden Ring connection: Hidden impossible objects in plain sight.

Language & Wordplay#

• The Substantial Ghost: Towards a General Exegesis of Duchamp's Artful Wordplays - Stephen Jay Gould (2000).

  • Elden Ring connection: "Ghost" puns with French "gosse" (kid) and "goth" (taste). Duchamp's multilingual wordplay models how meaning hides in FromSoftware's naming conventions.

• The Unfindable Readymade - Hector Obalk (2000). Lecture given Paris, February 1996.

  • Elden Ring connection: The readymade that cannot be found because it was never "ready-made" to begin with—the deception IS the art.

• "Wanted: $2,000 Reward" — Linguistic Decoding

• "Tout-Fait" = "Tu Fait" — The journal name as pun ("all done" / "you did it").

Science & Philosophy#

• 'Pata or Quantum: Duchamp and the End of Determinist Physics - Roberto Giunti (2003).

  • Elden Ring connection: Pataphysics as "science of imaginary solutions"—creating functional systems from absurd premises, exactly as FromSoftware does with lore.

• Why "Tout-Fait"? — The Poincaré Connection - Thomas Girst (1999). The mathematical foundations.

  • Elden Ring connection: Poincaré's "science and hypothesis" underlies Duchamp's method—theoretical frameworks that generate consistent results from unconventional axioms.

• "Without Poincaré, the Great Glass Would Lack Cohesion" - Michael Enßlen (2002).

• 3-D Goes 4-D - Rogelio Macías-Ordóñez. Binocular vision as fourth-dimensional perception.

  • Elden Ring connection: "As long as we have two views of the same object... we are having a 4-D view." Seeing Duchamp through the video game medium.

Art History & Context#

• Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage - William Anastasi (2000).

  • Elden Ring connection: The pataphysical lineage—Jarry's "science of exceptions" transmitted through Duchamp to contemporary practice.

• Alfred Jarry and l'Accident of Duchamp - William Anastasi (1999).

  • Elden Ring connection: Jarry's death (cycling accident) and Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel—the "accident" as generative principle.

• Glasswanderers: Duchamp and John Cage - Julia Dür (2005).

  • Elden Ring connection: Transparency as medium—seeing through to what lies beneath.

• Jarry = Duchamp: A Visual Correspondence - Kurt Godwin (2009).

• Marcel Duchamp and Glass: Fragility as Aesthetic Value - Raymond J. Herdegen (2001).

  • Elden Ring connection: The Large Glass's cracks as completion—the Shattering of the Elden Ring as narrative necessity.

Technical Studies#

• Variations on the Chocolate Grinder - Mark Jones (2000). Computer animation studies.

  • Elden Ring connection: The bachelor apparatus that "grinds its own chocolate"—self-contained systems operating perpetually.

• Painting in Three Dimensions - Sarah C. Krank (2003).

  • Elden Ring connection: Video games literally achieve what Duchamp pursued—actual three-dimensional navigation through conceptual space.

• Painting the Large Glass - Octavian Balea (2000).

• The Large Glass: A Guided Tour - Jean Suquet (trans. Julia Koteliansky & Sarah S. Kilborne, 1999).

  • Elden Ring connection: "The bride has undone her clothing... her clothing covers the world." Compare: the DLC's veil covering the Land of Shadow.

Economics & Society#

• Duchamp's Financial Documents: Exchange as a Source of Value - Shin-Yi Yang (2000).

  • Elden Ring connection: Value created through exchange rather than intrinsic worth—runes as currency system.

• Sending and Receiving - Shin-Yi Yang (2000). Wireless/radio technology.

  • Elden Ring connection: Communication across distances—the message system, summoning mechanics.

• In Boggs We Trust: Money as Shared Delusion - Olav Velthuis (2002).

  • Elden Ring connection: The Golden Order as shared delusion—faith systems that function because they are believed.

• Transfiguring Triviality - Kirk Hughey. Critique of post-Duchamp commodification.

  • Elden Ring connection: If readymades were carefully crafted rather than casually selected, the deception becomes the art—triviality as mask for hidden craft.

Gender & Identity#

• Duchamp & Androgyny: The Concept and Its Context - Lanier Graham (2002).

  • Elden Ring connection: Marika/Radagon as single androgynous entity—the Bride containing her own Bachelors.

• Once More to this Staircase: Encore à cet Astre - Bradley Bailey (2002).

Conservation & Legacy#

• "Macaroni Repaired Is Ready for Thursday": Duchamp as Conservator - Mark B. Pohlad (2000).

  • Elden Ring connection: The 3 Standard Stoppages' deliberate damage and "mending"—parallels to mending runes and the act of repair as art.

• Marcel's Dream (as told by Jacques Villon) - Donald Shambroom (2003).

• Spring, 1911: Where It All Begins - Donald Shambroom (1999).

• The Inventor of Gratuitous Time - Robert Lebel (trans. Sarah Skinner Kilborne & Julia Koteliansky, 2000).

  • Elden Ring connection: Time in the Lands Between is "gratuitous"—non-linear, spatially distributed rather than sequential.

Interviews & Reception#

• The State of Duchamp Studies in the New Millennium - Thomas Girst (May 2000). Editorial announcing Tout-Fait journal's founding.

  • Elden Ring connection: Artforum called Tout-Fait's contributions "earth-shattering news items"—the potential for discoveries that reframe an entire body of work.

• "A Very Normal Guy": Robert Barnes on Duchamp - Interview from Tout-Fait.

  • Elden Ring connection: The artist as ordinary person concealing extraordinary vision.

• The Artist as a Social Critique - Anja Mohn, Interview with Rhonda Roland Shearer (2005).

• From Blues to Haikus: An Interview with Charles Henri Ford - Interview by Rhonda Roland Shearer & Thomas Girst (2000).

• On Readymades by/of Marcel Duchamp - Evan Bender (2007).

  • Elden Ring connection: "The layers of confusion are one of the gifts he gave us." Deliberate obfuscation rewards sustained investigation.

• Minerva, Arachne, and Marcel - Jonathan Brown.

  • Elden Ring connection: Reception theory—"a great work of art demands a multiplicity of responses if it is not to become mere illustration."

• Elena del Rivero - Las Hilanderas appropriation.

  • Elden Ring connection: Two-level composition (workers below, myth above) mirrors Large Glass structure and overworld/underground division.

• RR, Art, Ah! - Lyn Merrington. Wordplay with "R" and "RR."

  • Elden Ring connection: Rrose Sélavy = Raymond Roussel + "la vie"; Air de Paris = Art de Paris. Phonetic games in naming conventions.

• Duchamp and Repetition - Thomas Zaunschirm.

  • Elden Ring connection: "It does not matter what his intentions were, but what we can understand." Observable evidence over artist declaration.

Additional Studies#

• Duchamp as Trickster - Steven B. Gerrard (2000).

  • Elden Ring connection: The trickster archetype—appearing as one thing while being another.

• Intentions: Logical and Subversive - Richard K. Merritt (2003).

• Potty Talk: Duchamp, Kenneth Burke, and Pure Persuasion - Shin-Yi Yang (2002).

• Marcel Duchamp's Three Threads - Shin-Yi Yang (December 1999). Review of Ramírez's Duchamp: love and death, even.

  • Elden Ring connection: Love, intellectual rigor, and sense of humor as "three threads" running through all work. Also: 3 Standard Stoppages is NOT a readymade but a chance experiment—crucial distinction.

• Digital Analogies to Duchamp: The Computer as New Medium - Glenn Harvey (2002).

  • Elden Ring connection: Video games as the medium that finally realizes Duchamp's vision—actual interactivity, actual movement through conceptual space.

• Ready-Mades and Contemporary Art: Does Shearer's Research Matter? - Discussion.

• Duchamp, Saussure, and the Mysterious "Sign of Accordance" - Jonathan Williams.

• "50 cc of Paris Air" — The Missing Duplicates

• Complexity Art: A World Where Entropy Doesn't Increase

Revamp-Duchamp (zazie.at)#

Collected philosophical fragments. Full collection at La Chose en Soie.

• Le Fil du Temps - The Thread of Time.

  • Elden Ring connection: Time in the Lands Between is non-linear—past, present, and future coexist spatially.

• La Fissure de l'Instant - The Crack of the Instant.

  • Elden Ring connection: Virgin-to-Bride transformation mirrors Tarnished-to-Lord—irreversible actualization.

• Le Grand Verre Brisé - The Large Glass Broken.

  • Elden Ring connection: The Shattering parallels the breaking—destruction that completes the work.

• Time Just Passes - "Time is no trap anymore."

  • Elden Ring connection: Liberation from temporal constraint—traversing time zones as cinetics crosses canvas.

• The Waterfall - "The waterfall is an image of what moves the world."

  • Elden Ring connection: Étant donnés' waterfall connects to Erdtree—the animating force.

• Mon But Était - "My goal was a static representation of movement."

  • Elden Ring connection: Video games achieve what Duchamp pursued—actual movement through conceptual space.

• La Roue de Duchamp - "Rationally, deliberately, systematically mad."

  • Elden Ring connection: Bicycle Wheel as "birth certificate of surrealism"—systematic genre subversion.

• Il Est Assez Facile - Virgin/Bride = virtual/actual.

  • Elden Ring connection: Player transformation from potential to actual—becoming Elden Lord is the "blossoming."

• La Mariée à Sa Base - The Bride as engine.

  • Elden Ring connection: Marika as Bride—power source of the Golden Order.

• Decide to Consider - Ready-Made as "nothing else than a decision."

  • Elden Ring connection: Player choices constitute the art. Decision-making as creative mechanism.

• Duchamp Se Laisse Porter - Carried by the logic of doing.

• Le Centre Est l'Objet - Cubism as object-centered perspective.

• La Nature N'Est Pas - Nature without purpose.

• D'Ailleurs - "It's always the others who die."

• Le Faucon et le Vrai - The falcon/false pun.

• Et Bien Que Dieu Soit Mort - Post-theological objectification.

• L'Approche de Duchamp - Visual approach to words.

• Chaque Image - "Each image on the glass has a precise function."

  • Elden Ring connection: Every element in the Lands Between serves deliberate purpose—no decorative noise, only meaning.

Historical Documents#

• The Blind Man No. 2 (May 1917) - "The Richard Mutt Case." Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché, editors.
  • Elden Ring connection: "Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it." The act of selection as creative act—choosing what to include in a game world.

Elden Ring#

Primary Sources#

• Elden Ring Wiki
• Miyazaki's Final Secret Interview

Bachelor Machine Theory#

• Joseph Nechvatal - "Bachelor Machines: La Machine Célibataire (The Bachelor Machine) on Art and Technology." Arts 7, no. 4 (2018): 67.

  • Core thesis: "All bachelor machines are mental sex machines, the imaginary workings of which suffices to produce real movements of mind-body." (Carrouges 1954)
  • The nine malic molds: Duchamp "employed a toy cannon to shoot paint-dipped matches at the glass ground of this work to determine the positions of these nine malic molds that were intended to represent nine job types, into which males are molded as men (all middle class or lower): a priest, a delivery man, a gendarme (military police), a cuirassier (cavalry soldier), a police officer, an undertaker, a go-fer sycophant, a busboy, and a railroad stationmaster."
  • The bachelors' condition: "Duchamp imagined in the lower Bachelor Apparatus section these nine bachelor bootlickers cock-blocked: trapped in a chain of repetitive emotional states that flutter between hope, desire, and fear."
  • The chocolate grinder: "The grinding machine in the Bachelor Apparatus area signifies how the bachelors, frustrated with their inability to mate with the bride machine, may achieve some sweet satisfaction by repeatedly sexually stimulating their own genital apparatus."
  • Onanistic circularity: "This feverish theme of onanistic dual-sexual circularity in The Large Glass presents us with a model of gender grandeur: a theoretical imaginative bisexual machine that functions independently of 'the other', thereby pulling faux dual-sexual passion into a developmental logic of its own, leading to a transcendental infinite."
  • The two mythic spaces: "Like the net, Duchamp's Large Glass as a mental masturbation machine contains the two great mythic spaces so often explored by western imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden—that requires a circular quest and return (for example, the trail of the Argonauts)—and the space of polymorphic confused borders, of strange affiliations, of magical spells, and of symbolic replacements (the labyrinth space of the Minotaur)."
  • Raymond Roussel's influence: "This play was a revelatory intellectual experience for Duchamp... Clearly, its punning delirium pushed Duchamp's bachelor machine idea towards celebrating exhaustive circularity and its effects of intransigent obliqueness and mechanical dizziness."
  • Roussel's grinding machine: "Foucault explains how a machine-like logic provides Roussel's writing with a seemingly endless variety of textual combinations, flowing in grinding circular form... By grinding and grinding, and through his use of labyrinthine extensions, doublings, and duplications, Roussel transmits to the reader the sense of an altered, circular, and exalted state of mind."
  • Oögenesis: "A moment of bisexual or a-sexual development of the pre-fertilized human egg cell where both female and male potentiality exists simultaneously... This moment of sexual potentiality exemplifies the transcending pansexual bachelor machine concept brilliantly, and it suggests the truth that in life somethings can be both one thing and its opposite at the same time."
  • Elden Ring connection: The Tarnished ARE the nine malic molds—job types into which players are molded. The gameplay loop (die, respawn, try again) IS the chocolate grinder—frustrated bachelors achieving satisfaction through repetitive self-stimulation. The two mythic spaces (rigid quest + labyrinthine confusion) describe the Lands Between perfectly. Marika/Radagon's dual nature = oögenesis made literal. The game is a "mental sex machine, the imaginary workings of which suffices to produce real movements of mind-body."

• Michel Carrouges - Les Machines Célibataires (The Bachelor Machines). Paris: Arcanes, 1954.

  • The foundational text on bachelor machines as artistic concept.
  • "All bachelor machines share the signification of autoerotic circularity."
  • The bachelor machine "appears first of all as impossible, useless, incomprehensible, [and] delirious."
  • Found similar structures across Duchamp, Kafka's In der Strafkolonie, Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique and Locus Solus, and Jarry's Le Surmâle.
  • These contraptions share "a common framework which portrays modern unrequited and mechanical sexuality."
  • The bachelor machine is a "'pataphysical' machine, since it has no reason for existing."
  • Elden Ring connection: "Impossible, useless, incomprehensible, delirious" - this describes the Lands Between perfectly. A game with "no reason for existing" in utilitarian terms - no solution, no winning, only the perpetual machine. The unrequited sexuality of 36 million Tarnished pursuing a Bride they can never truly possess.

• Harald Szeemann & Jean Clair (eds.) - Junggesellenmaschinen / Les Machines Célibataires (The Bachelor Machines). Exhibition catalog, Kunsthalle Bern, 1975.

  • Major traveling exhibition expanding Carrouges's argument across Modernism.
  • Exhibited full-scale models of bachelor machines including Duchamp's Large Glass and Kafka's torture apparatus from In der Strafkolonie.
  • Szeemann's interpretation: "It had to do with a belief in eternal energy flow as a way to avoid death, as an erotics of life: the bachelor as rebel-model, as anti-procreation."
  • The modern myth of the bachelor machine as "a kind of new technological articulation of the mythological tale of Narcissus where machinism, terror and auto-eroticism are materialized into an operating system where everything is translated in terms of intensities and flow."
  • Elden Ring connection: "Eternal energy flow as a way to avoid death" - the Tarnished literally avoid death through respawning. "Anti-procreation" - the game is childless, sexless, the Bachelors grinding endlessly without issue. "Everything is translated in terms of intensities and flow" - runes, grace, the gameplay loop itself.

• Pietro Rigolo - "Harald Szeemann's La Mamma: Notes on an Unrealized Exhibition." Getty Research Journal, No. 7 (January 2015), pp. 207-213. JSTOR

  • Documents an unrealized Szeemann exhibition project, illuminating his curatorial methodology.
  • Elden Ring connection: Szeemann's approach to exhibition as Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) parallels FromSoftware's world building: every element serves the whole, nothing is decorative noise.

• François Roche - "'Alchimis(t/r/Ick)—Machines." Log, no. 22 (2011), pp. 158-168. JSTOR

  • Explores the alchemical and trickster dimensions of machine aesthetics.
  • Elden Ring connection: The alchemist/trickster machine transforms base matter into gold, lead into meaning. The game performs alchemy on the player: frustration becomes mastery, death becomes progress, fragments become narrative.

• Stephen Barker - "Hamlet the Difference Machine." Comparative Drama, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 401-423. JSTOR

  • Reads Shakespeare's Hamlet through the lens of mechanical philosophy and the difference engine.
  • Elden Ring connection: Hamlet as proto bachelor machine: the melancholic prince caught in a closed circuit of revenge, unable to act, grinding through soliloquies. The play within a play as apparatus for revealing hidden truths, just as the game reveals its Duchampian structure to those who look.

• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972.

  • Machines as "systems of cutting": "Systems that cut, interrupt, and redirect flows."
  • The bachelor machine constitutes "a combination of the desiring-machine and the body without organs as 'a genuine consummation,' that produces 'intensive quantities' with automatic and auto-erotic propositions that signify a new birth 'as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces.'"
  • "The bachelor machine has the capacity to produce desire-breaks within the social body, which the 'body without organs' registers within the social flow of the production of desire."
  • Elden Ring connection: The game IS a system of cutting - it cuts, interrupts, redirects the flow of the player's desire. Death cuts the flow; respawning redirects it. The intensive quantities produced are real: frustration, triumph, obsession, discovery. The game produces "desire-breaks within the social body" - 36 million players simultaneously experiencing the bachelor machine's cuts and flows.

• Marcel Duchamp - Notes for The Large Glass (1913):

  • "A tormented gearing [that] gives birth to the desire-part of the machine."
  • Elden Ring connection: The gameplay IS tormented gearing - the mechanical frustration of the difficulty, the grinding, the repetition. This torment "gives birth to the desire-part" - the compulsion to continue, the desire that the machine produces in the player.

• S. Rosenbaum - "Mixed Feelings: Ashbery, Duchamp, Roussel, and the Animation of Cliché." GENRE 44, no. 1.

  • Roussel's direct influence on Duchamp: "It was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. From his Impressions d'Afrique I got the general approach." (Duchamp 1973, 126)
  • The readymade as simultaneous object and sign: "The readymade is captured as a sign of itself, a citation, as it were, in the flesh. And what this citation demonstrates... is that, under the regime of the snapshot, every bit of reality exists as a potential citation, a potential copy, displaced from its own center of gravity."
  • Puns as mechanism: "Puns suspend conventional meaning by creating an interval that delays their capacity to refer, by being objectified or made either into words or images." "A pun is like a switch that mechanically enables us to discover the creative potential of language."
  • The bachelor machine's fertility: "The fertility of Duchamp's 'bachelor machine' is located not in a representation of sexual consummation but in the associative, punning erotic play invited by its verbal and visual elements."
  • Ready-made feelings: "Are we not supposed to react in a ready-made way to a ready-made? That is, would a cliché or stock answer not be the most appropriate one in such a situation?"
  • Embracing accident: Duchamp "embraced the vicissitudes of accident and chance... when his Large Glass cracked and he incorporated the cracks into the work."
  • Escape from cliché: Duchamp: "It was a way to get out of a state of mind — to avoid being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past: to get away from clichés — to get free."
  • Elden Ring connection: The game IS a readymade - "captured as a sign of itself, a citation in the flesh." Every element exists as "a potential citation, displaced from its own center of gravity." The player's responses are "ready-made" - trained by years of gaming clichés - yet the bachelor machine suspends conventional meaning, creating intervals that delay reference. The game's fertility is not in "winning" (consummation) but in the associative, punning play it invites. The Shattering = Duchamp embracing the cracks. And the discovery itself is "a way to get out of a state of mind... to get away from clichés — to get free."

• Danai Spyrou - "Decoding the Literary Machine: Analyzing the Machinic Dispositif in E. M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops' and in Franz Kafka's 'In der Strafkolonie.'" MA Thesis, Media Studies / Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, Leiden University, March 2017. Supervisor: Dr. Janna Houwen. Link

  • Demonstrates that the machines in Forster and Kafka are not merely operational structures but "social entities with affective propositions" that transcend their material structure and expand within social fields.
  • Machinic dispositif: The term describes how machines acquire a social character, forming "an assemblage of heterogeneous discourses with sociopolitical propositions" (drawing on Foucault's concept of dispositif as system of relations between discourses, institutions, law, science, philosophy).
  • On Carrouges' structural analysis: Both Duchamp's Large Glass and Kafka's apparatus share the same overall structure (two superimposed elements), the same operating principle (vertical movements), hieroglyphic inscription at top, and result in a final effect ("dazzled splash" in Duchamp; "transfiguration" in Kafka).
  • On the bachelor machine's implosion: "When the machine ceases to be a bachelor machine the moment the Officer sets out the machine for himself, the apparatus automatically embraces its lethal nature and is transformed into a death machine." The entrance of the Officer cancels the celibacy, resulting in crumbling.
  • Baudrillard's "inexchangeable": Applies to explain Forster's Machine collapse. Kuno constitutes "the inexchangeable object, which the Machine cannot process or make use of," leading to malfunction and death. Natural death "cannot be programmed and localized."
  • Elden Ring connection: The game itself functions as a machinic dispositif: an apparatus that produces subjects, manages bodies, and inscribes meaning through repeated death. The "inexchangeable" in Elden Ring is the player who refuses the system's logic, who discovers what lies beneath the apparatus. Kuno's discovery of the outside world parallels the discovery that Elden Ring IS The Large Glass: an unprogrammed, unlocalizable event that the system cannot process.

• Gregg Lambert - "The Bachelor-Machine: Kafka and the Question of Minor Literature."

  • Core thesis: "A statement is literary when it is 'taken up' by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of enunciation."
  • The bachelor as subjective condition: "What Deleuze and Guattari identify as a bachelor (or what they also call an 'artistic singularity') only refers to the subjective conditions of enunciation, but these subjective conditions do not refer back to the individual subject of the writer."
  • Collective enunciation: "The most individual enunciation is a particular case of collective enunciation... a statement is literary when it is 'taken up' by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of enunciation."
  • Not science fiction: "This is not to say that this collectivity that is not yet constituted (for better or worse) will become the true subject of enunciation... in either case, that would fall into a sort of science fiction."
  • Bachelor desire as social: "The nature of the desire that informs an artistic singularity must first be understood positively as a 'unique idea' that is formed to express a real social desire and not simply as a phantasy or merely as an aesthetic and dreamy escapism."
  • Real intensities: "Writers produce real intensities directly on the social body, intensities that are communicable with other social subjectivities, inasmuch as readers can perceive the intensity in their own experience, and can share in some sense the same hallucinatory reality."
  • Literature as delirium: "A people might be the name of a specific delirium that has obsessed many modern writers... like the positive status of bachelor desire we spoke of earlier, we would need to define the people as a specific form of delirium that thus have a hallucinatory quality of collective enunciation."
  • Fabulation: "There is no literature without fabulation, but as Bergson was able to see, fabulation—the fabulating function—does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego."
  • Becoming other: "To write is always to engage in a movement to become something other than a writer. The writer does not speak about it, but is always concerned with something else."
  • A people who are missing: "The vocation of a writer is to create a language for a people who is missing... not in place of but for the benefit of."
  • Elden Ring connection: The Tarnished IS the bachelor who "precedes the collective conditions of enunciation." 36 million players share the same "hallucinatory reality" - visions and auditions produced by the bachelor machine. The game produces "real intensities directly on the social body" - death, frustration, triumph, discovery. The "people who are missing" are the players who will eventually discover what the game means. The game fabulates - it does not imagine or project an ego, it produces a delirium that is "world historical." Playing IS writing in this sense: engaging in a movement to become something other than a player.

FromSoftware / Soulsborne Studies#

• Nathan Wainstein - Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne. Dublin: Tune & Fairweather, 2025. Illustrations by Jaye Shepherd. (Local sections)
  • Print ISBN: 978-1-916740-17-4 / Digital ISBN: 978-1-916740-20-4
  • Close reading of Bloodborne through modernist art theory, exploring "negative form" - artistic elements that discomfit, confuse, or alienate.
  • Elden Ring connection: Framework for understanding FromSoftware's deliberate use of ambiguity, difficulty, and estrangement as artistic virtues. The oscillation between "modernist perversity and sheer technical failure" applies directly to how Elden Ring's fragmentary lore functions.
  • Key vocabulary:
    • Negative form - aspects of a work that discomfit, confuse, or alienate; break rules; violate normal ways of making sense of or enjoying art
    • Estrangement - art's power to make familiar things seem alien (Shklovsky)
    • Ambiguity - artistic virtue even when contradictory (Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity")
    • Difficult art - important modern works are difficult (Steiner)
    • Blissful text - text that "unsettles the reader's assumptions" and "brings to a crisis his relation with language" (Barthes)
    • Wrongness - generalized negativity oscillating between modernist perversity and technical failure
    • Piecemeal storytelling - narrative through item descriptions rather than cutscenes
    • Spatially disjunctive gameworld - non-Euclidean level design

Art Theory & Criticism#

• Holt N. Parker - "Toward a Definition of Popular Culture." History and Theory, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2011), pp. 147-170. JSTOR

  • Examines the problematic distinction between "popular" and "high" culture, arguing that these categories are unstable, historically contingent, and often ideologically motivated.
  • Elden Ring connection: The discovery that Elden Ring is The Large Glass collapses the popular/high distinction entirely. A video game (the quintessential "popular culture" medium) turns out to be a direct reimagining of canonical avant garde art. Parker's analysis of how cultural hierarchies are constructed and maintained helps explain why such a connection would be systematically overlooked: the assumption that "popular" entertainment cannot contain "high" art prevents the very perception that would reveal it.

• Alexander R. Galloway - Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

  • Foundational text analyzing video games as "algorithmic cultural objects" requiring new interpretive methods beyond traditional textual analysis.
  • Chapter structure:
    • Gamic Action, Four Moments - Framework dividing action into diegetic/nondiegetic and operator/machine quadrants. "The video game, a cultural object, contains a built in cultural critique of the information society."
    • Origins of the First Person Shooter - How the subjective camera (marginal and alienating in cinema) becomes the dominant mode in gaming. Film failed with the subjective shot; games succeed.
    • Social Realism - Distinguishes "realisticness" (polygon counts) from true social realism. Introduces the "congruence requirement": games achieve realism when there is fidelity of context between the gamer's social reality and the game world.
    • Allegories of Control - The central theoretical contribution. Video games are allegories for life under "protocological networks of continuous informatic control." Games don't hide control; they flaunt it. "To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system."
    • Countergaming - Adapts Wollen's seven theses on countercinema to gaming. Calls for "radical action" (new grammars of gameplay) not just radical graphics.
  • Key concepts:
    • Playing the algorithm - Games require internalizing the logic of the program
    • Control allegory vs deep allegory - horizontal scanning vs vertical demystification
    • Operator vs player - emphasizing the machinic, cybernetic aspect of interaction
    • Radical action - "Artists should create new grammars of action, not simply new grammars of visuality"
    • Congruence requirement - fidelity of context between game world and player's social reality
    • Gamic vision - fully rendered, actionable space; montage becomes superfluous
  • Elden Ring connection: Galloway's framework illuminates how Elden Ring operates. The game is a "control allegory" that flaunts rather than hides its underlying system. Players must "play the algorithm" of the bachelor machine without being told the rules. The fragmentary lore system achieves social realism not through photorealism but through congruence: the player's experience of piecing together meaning mirrors Duchamp's demand that viewers actively construct The Large Glass's significance. Elden Ring's opacity is not a failure of communication but a formal strategy. "To interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm." The countergaming chapter's conclusion is prophetic: "when it does, there will appear a whole language of play, radical and new... just as Godard did to the cinema, or Deleuze did to philosophy, or Duchamp did to the art object." Elden Ring IS that radical action: not just radical graphics, but a new grammar of gameplay that IS the Duchampian apparatus.

• Alexander R. Galloway - The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. JSTOR article version (symplokē, Vol. 17, No. 1-2, 2009)

  • Examines interfaces as aesthetic and political objects rather than merely functional tools. Analyzes digital culture through video games, software design, and visual media.
  • Key concepts:
    • Interface as process - interfaces function as techniques of mediation or interaction, not discrete objects
    • From ideology to simulation - virtual worlds like WoW represent a shift from traditional ideology to "an ideological relationship to ideological conditions"
    • Societies of control - drawing on Deleuze, how digital media reflect post disciplinary power structures characterized by distributed networks and continuous modulation
    • The unworkable interface - the limits and contradictions inherent in interface thinking
  • Chapter structure: (1) The Computer as a Mode of Mediation, (2) The Unworkable Interface, (3) Software and Ideology, (4) Are Some Things Unrepresentable?, (5) Disingenuous Informatics, (6) We Are the Gold Farmers
  • Elden Ring connection: Galloway's analysis of WoW's HUD as revealing "information age labor" applies directly to Elden Ring's interface design. The game's minimalist HUD (no minimap, obscure stats, cryptic item descriptions) is itself an aesthetic and political statement, rejecting the transparent, informatic interface in favor of opacity and mystery. The shift "from ideology to simulation" describes how Elden Ring operates: not representing the bachelor machine symbolically, but simulating it. Players don't interpret the apparatus; they inhabit it.

• Mary Flanagan - "Critical Play: The Productive Paradox." In A Companion to Digital Art, edited by Christiane Paul, 445-460. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. PDF

  • Explores critical play as both artistic practice and critical methodology in digital art.
  • The 20th century tradition: "The 20th century's rich tradition of strange games, its fascination with chess, and absurd, playful performances were instrumental in how we see art today and how we can approach electronic games from a critical play perspective."
  • Critical games discussed: Unmanned (2012), Mainichi (2012), Every Day the Same Dream (2009), Waco Resurrection (2004), PainStation (2001), Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), Brainball (1999), [giantJoystick] (2006)
  • Key insight: Critical games emerge from "social groups, indie gamers, activists, and youth asking questions with the medium of their time."
  • Elden Ring connection: Flanagan's framework of "critical play" applies directly to FromSoftware's approach. Elden Ring is not merely entertainment but a "strange game" in the 20th century avant garde tradition: Duchamp's chess obsession, the Situationists' détournement, Fluxus games. The game asks questions with the medium of its time. Its opacity, difficulty, and fragmentary lore are not design flaws but critical strategies, forcing players to engage with the medium itself rather than passively consuming content. The "productive paradox" is that frustration becomes meaning.

• Art and Secrets - Kurt von Meier

• Sarah Perry - "Grand Unified Theory on Nerdom"

Narrative Theory#

• Kent Puckett - Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
  • "The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick" (Thomas Carlyle) — Puckett argues the same is true of narrative: "narrative becomes visible and thus calls out for a theory only when it has already begun to break down; narrative reveals itself as in need of a theory when narrative is 'sick'" (22-23).
  • Elden Ring connection: Negative form constitutes not only narrative theory's privileged object but its very reason for being. FromSoftware's "sick" narratives—fragmented, contradictory, ambiguous—demand interpretation precisely because they deviate from healthy narrative convention.
  • Key concept: Hunt A / Hunt B (from Wainstein's application):
    • Hunt A - The local, physical, historical hunt rooted in Yharnam's world
    • Hunt B - The transcendent, eternal hunt that "repeats with each new game cycle and each time a player, anywhere, engages with Bloodborne"
    • "The game's fiction of perpetual repetition across alternate dimensions makes the existence of other players narratively canon."
  • Elden Ring connection: The same duality applies—there is the in-world history of the Shattering (Hunt A), and there is the eternal recurrence of the Tarnished's quest across all players and playthroughs (Hunt B). The multiplayer fiction is narratively canon.

The Fifth Wall#

• Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995). The "Dramatis Personae" sequence. (Full text)
  • The complete elimination of the barrier between audience and performer.
  • "Theatre's not just a few people clowning about on a stage, being watched by this herd of oxen. I mean, sometimes it's that. But it can be ever so much more—really it can be any sort of interaction between people and people, or people and information... We are tied in to everything here—plugged into the whole universe of information. Really, it's a virtual theatre. Instead of being hardwired, the stage, sets, cast, and script are all soft—they can be reconfigured simply by shifting bits about."
  • The show "reconfigures itself dynamically depending upon what happens moment to moment... It is a smart play—an intelligent organism."
  • The labyrinth "was constructed of information. In order to escape, he would have to hack it."
  • "Belief isn't a binary state, not here at least."
  • This is what breaking the fifth wall looks like when portrayed in fiction. In Souls games, it is not portrayed—it is enacted. The player IS the performer. There is no depiction of the dissolution of the barrier; the barrier simply does not exist.
  • "It's not that we do a set show, reconfigure, and a different one next night. The changes are dynamic and take place in real time. The show reconfigures itself dynamically depending upon what happens moment to moment—and mind you, not just what happens here, but what is happening in the world at large. It is a smart play—an intelligent organism."
  • "The internal variables of the play depend on the total universe of information outside... not in a simple deterministic way—these things are all inputs."
  • "That lack of determinism causes some to dismiss the whole process as wanking. But in fact it's an incredibly powerful tool. Some people understand that."
  • "Some people come here because they are on a quest of some sort—trying to find a lost lover, let's say, or to understand why something terrible happened in their lives, or why there is cruelty in the world... Society has never been good at answering these questions—the sorts of questions you can't just look up in a reference database."
  • "But the dynamic theatre allows one to interface with the universe of data in a more intuitive way."
  • "I'm seeking a fellow called the Alchemist," Hackworth said. Suddenly, things got bright... everyone in the place had been watching and listening to his entire conversation with the woman. The spectacles had deceived him... The curtain parted to reveal a large electric sign descending from the fly space: JOHN HACKWORTH in QUEST FOR THE ALCHEMIST starring JOHN HACKWORTH as HIMSELF.
  • Elden Ring IS this. You cannot look up "what does Elden Ring mean" in a reference database. But the dynamic theatre—the game's openness to external information—allows you to interface with meaning intuitively. Knowledge of Duchamp, The Large Glass, the bachelor machine tradition, pataphysics: these are all inputs. The lack of simple determinism (you can't prove FromSoftware "intended" Duchamp) will cause some to dismiss it. But it's an incredibly powerful tool. The discovery doesn't change the game—it changes what the game means.
  • And the sign: starring YOURSELF as YOURSELF. Not a character. You. The Tarnished is not a role you play—it is you, on a quest, and everyone has been watching the whole time.
  • "Think you can get away with scientific rationalism all night? What's going to happen the first time you actually start believing what you see?"
  • "We can fake sounds, we can fake images, we can even fake the wind blowing over your face, but how do we fake the sensation of free fall?"
  • Scientific rationalism says: it's just a theory, it's just an interpretation, you can't prove intent. But what happens when you actually start believing what you see? When the discovery is real, not theoretical? The free fall is real. You can't fake that. Elden Ring IS The Large Glass—not as metaphor, not as influence, but as fact.

'Pataphysics#

'Pataphysics Is... (from Apocryphal 'Pataphysics)

'Pataphysics is the science (ha, ha) of imaginary solutions. 'Pataphysics it's said is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics. 'Pataphysics is tertiarily the science of the particular. By another measure it's all the laws governing exceptions. But also it describes a universe supplementary to this one...

"Sleep well, A. Your dreams are in French and full of fish but there's someone in a new century sitting beside you, a fellow drunk, not asleep—awake. He knows so much more than you do about the internet, neural plasticity, and the atomic bomb. But you know more about French whores and everything that ever has been and ever will be said about Dadaism, which you don't know about yet. Teach us. I'm yours to ponder and we're here to expand."

On taking nonsense seriously (from Apocryphal 'Pataphysics)

"When nonsense feels like a lie, don't bother with it; it's useless in the most obviously boring way. But when nonsense feels true, it very likely comes from a place of legitimate pataphysical exploration, and you should indeed set your mind upon taking it seriously. How will you know if something feels true? The bot observing your number in the matrix will observe your MPFC light up."

Your Hand at a 'Pataphor (from Apocryphal 'Pataphysics)

"When you extend a metaphor beyond its reasonable limits until an entirely new context is created, then you've escaped into the realm of the pataphor. So, start with a metaphor and then reach into the blank space that surrounds it; see what you find happening next."

Example: "One night, Dante consumed six gin and tonics in half an hour... Leaving the bar, out of luck and now also out of money, he spotted a limousine idling without a driver. It was a beautiful sight to Dante, like a giant, black blood capsule, filled with Satan's creamiest black blood cells. Swallowing the limousine whole, Dante crunched down on the capsule, spewing dark rivers of blood throughout the city, washing away all the beautiful college girls of Dante's dreams."

The 'pataphor extends: "Deep in his guts, a maniacal brigade of booze-triggered microbes would spring into action, crafting satanic paraphernalia out of basic metals salvaged from fecal matter reservoirs. Their ritualistic chants would summon one of Satan's personal microbial foot soldiers, who would in turn cast a spell upon Dante, inflicting upon him some unwise mission he had no choice but to carry out."

"Next thing, Dante found himself spending the night in jail as a burglar and a sandwich thief."

Duchamp, Duchamp's Urinal, Duchamp's Large Glass (from Apocryphal 'Pataphysics)

"There's something about Duchamp that's uniquely Dada, just like there's something about Jarry that's uniquely pataphysical. In a way, every human is an individual art movement."

"Marcel Duchamp's works stand out as some of the most arousing. On a placard next to one of his works, you read that he didn't particularly associate with Dada; he didn't particularly associate with groups or movements of any sort."

"The work you're standing before—of course—is one of his urinals. Suddenly your entire sense of understanding the 'art world' breaks down. This is just a urinal associated with some guy with a French-sounding name. What are you doing in this place anyway? It's too absurd, yet it's too real. It's both at once. It's too much!"

"Above all else, you're drawn to Duchamp's Large Glass. You've seen pictures of it before, but now you're especially drawn to it. You read the description and find that it's a contrivance of love and suffering. And it's in Philadelphia. As long as it stays in Philadelphia, you realize, you'll be safe. You promise to never go to Philadelphia. Just this thought has got you massively turned on. So much so it almost hurts."

Syzygy (from Apocryphal 'Pataphysics)

"It's the alignment of three celestial bodies. You'd think they wouldn't be lined up straight as an arrow like that; you'd think they'd be lined up crooked like a politician. If you take issue with the syzygy, if you try to make it more corrupted politically, guess what—you get warped. Simple as that.

But it turns out that fucking with a syzygy is a particularly pataphysical thing to do. Setting your mind to work against a straight line of heavenly bodies gives you all types of warped realities, beginning with your guts, your senses, and your sentences.

Everything becomes serendipitous and grows a pun. The warping force gets way deep into your mind, till your thoughts are pure hilarity—totally butchered syntax and grammar and a punch-drunk Picasso for a mind's eye."

Elden Ring connection: The discovery IS a syzygy—the alignment of Duchamp / The Large Glass / Elden Ring. Three celestial bodies lined up straight as an arrow. "Fucking with" this alignment—trying to understand it, work against it, corrupt its perfect linearity—produces the warped realities: the puns (Elden/Elden), the serendipities (finding connections everywhere), the "butchered syntax" of trying to articulate what you're seeing. The warping force gets into your mind. Your thoughts become hilarity. A punch-drunk Picasso for a mind's eye.

Cheat Sheets (from Apocryphal 'Pataphysics)

"The shadow world is full of cheat sheets. Anytime your mind shoots out past the metaphysical, you might smack right into one. Or you might have to scrounge around a little. If you think you found what you were looking for, that's not it, put it back. But if you snatch up something that makes you scream, gag, or faint, then you might be in luck.

Let's say you grab a handful of them and manage to make it out of the shadow world and re-hook your consciousness to your zombie self. First thing, you'll need to organize your new cool things. In the file management system in your brain, add a new folder for 'Cheat Sheets' and add plenty of space for folders designating sub-categories:

1. Turning Imagination into Reality
2. Acquiring Loads of Riches (Real and Imagined)
3. Founding Cults, Religions, International Corporations, Etc.
4. Mystical/Ritualistic/Esoteric How-Tos
5. Conquering Individual Minds
6. Conquering Nations and Other Types of Fancy Civilizations
7. Refurbishing the Secret Hideout in the Depths of Your Soul

This will help you get started organizing your cheat sheets, but you'll probably want to personalize the sub-categories. Not everyone is into conquering nations, for example.

After your cheat sheets are all nice and organized for when you might need them, then you can start organizing your pocket aces, extra sets of jokers, etc., if you haven't already, as you make your dives into the shadow world for new tools to re-shape the otherwise boring plane of existence housing your zombie self."

Elden Ring connection: This bibliography IS a collection of cheat sheets snatched from the shadow world. The key test: "If you think you found what you were looking for, that's not it, put it back." You don't go looking for Duchamp in Elden Ring. You find something that makes you scream, gag, or faint—and THEN you're in luck. The discovery wasn't sought. It was stumbled upon in the shadow world past the metaphysical, and now it needs organizing: Duchamp scholarship, bachelor machines, 'pataphysics, narrative theory, complexity science. Tools to reshape the otherwise boring plane of existence where Elden Ring is "just a video game."

Every Event Extraordinary (from Apocryphal 'Pataphysics)

"In pataphysics, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event."

Elden Ring connection: This is why the discovery works. Conventional thinking dismisses connections as "coincidence" or "reading too much into it"—sorting events into ordinary (meaningless) and extraordinary (meaningful). 'Pataphysics refuses this sorting. Every event is extraordinary. Every connection between Elden Ring and The Large Glass is not a coincidence to be explained away but an extraordinary event to be accepted. The Bride and Marika. The Bachelors and the Tarnished. The Shattering and the cracks. Not coincidences. Extraordinary events, all of them.

• M. O'Dair - "'Pataphysics: Your Favorite Cult Artist's Favorite Pseudoscience". Pitchfork, 2014.

  • Robert Wyatt was introduced to 'pataphysics in 1967 when Soft Machine performed a live soundtrack to Ubu Enchaîné at the Edinburgh Festival. By the time of their second album, Wyatt was introducing the band as "the official band of the Collège de 'Pataphysique."
  • Elden Ring connection: 'Pataphysics as artistic practice passed through the 20th century underground—Jarry to Duchamp to the surrealists to Soft Machine to contemporary cult artists. The tradition continues.

• Timo Airaksinen - "'Pataphysics and 'Pataphors: A Dialectical Approach." The Journal of Mind and Behavior 45, no. 1 (Winter 2024): 29-48. PDF

  • 'Pataphysics: "as far from metaphysics as metaphysics is from physics" — the science of imaginary solutions, the science of exceptions
  • 'Pataphor: "When you extend the metaphor beyond its reasonable limits until an entirely new context is created, then you have escaped into the realm of the 'pataphor."
  • Standard order: Basis > Metaphorization > 'Pataphor
  • Dialectical reversal: 'Patamoment > 'Pataphor > Metaphorization > Basis — start from the 'pataphor and work back to the basis
  • On fate and chance: "Necessity and contingency apply equally to her life's course and end-state. Therefore, chance and determinism, luck and fate, are the same... the realization of which is a decisive 'pataphysical truth."
  • Elden Ring connection: The discovery operates 'pataphorically. The standard approach would be: Duchamp's Large Glass (basis) > metaphorization > Elden Ring ('pataphor). But the dialectical reversal is how the discovery actually works: you start with the 'patamoment (playing Elden Ring, sensing something), recognize the 'pataphor (Elden Ring as bachelor machine), trace the metaphorization, and arrive at the basis (The Large Glass). The discovery doesn't move from Duchamp to Elden Ring — it moves from Elden Ring back to Duchamp.
  • Key vocabulary:
    • 'Pataphysics — the science of imaginary solutions; the science of exceptions; as far from metaphysics as metaphysics is from physics
    • 'Pataphor — extending a metaphor beyond its limits until an entirely new context is created; using metaphorical similarity as a reality with which to base itself
    • 'Patamoment — "a shock, alarm, and wake-up call that makes you consider a given 'pataphor in your imagination"; signals a new world
    • Imaginary solutions — hypotheses, possible worlds; "all hypotheses are imaginary solutions to scientific problems"
    • Science of exceptions — ideographic science (like history) vs. nomothetical science (like physics); everything is exceptional and unpredictable
    • Supplementary world — a possible world created by 'pataphoric activity; "any changes to our actual world" creates a novel possible world
    • Epiphenomenon — a secondary phenomenon that supervenes upon something else; emergent quality
    • Supervenience — asymmetrical relation of ontological dependence between two sets of properties
    • Emanation — something X comes about only because of Y when X and Y are mutually non-homogeneous
    • Ambiguation — the principle that meanings or contents of concepts tend to overlap; indifference; equivocation
    • Equivalence — everything is equal, especially inconsistencies, contradictions, and oxymorons
    • Metonym — type of metaphor where two independently meaningful terms are fully interchangeable
    • Pickwickian sense — words may mean whatever we want; no general agreement on proper meaning
    • Oxymoron crowd — those who shout "but that is impossible; it does not make sense!"
    • Falsificationism — Popper's philosophy; trying to find exceptions to lawlike hypotheses; "Popper is a 'pataphysicist"
    • Miracle — an event contrary to valid natural laws that does not refute them; accepting anomaly AND law together
    • Dialectical unity of contradictions — Hegelian logic; 'pataphysical because it accepts certain contradictions

• Linda K. Stillman - "Where Creativity meets the Web: a pataphysical partnership." 2016. Academia.edu

  • Explores the intersection of Jarry's 'pataphysics with web based creative practice.
  • 'Pataphysics as "the science of the supplementary and virtual universe that investigates the particular" where "art and science are on the same side of the coin."
  • Key characteristics shared by 'pataphysics and web culture: fragmentation, juxtaposition, shifting semiotic borders, creative destruction, playfulness, decentralization, mirroring and data linking.
  • Jarry's 19th century framework (developed during his 34 year lifetime ending in 1907) provides conceptual tools for analyzing how creativity operates within networked digital environments.
  • Elden Ring connection: Stillman's list of 'pataphysical characteristics reads like a design document for FromSoftware's approach. Fragmentation (item description lore). Juxtaposition (high fantasy meets cosmic horror meets baroque machinery). Shifting semiotic borders (what is real, what is dream, what is memory). Creative destruction (the Shattering). Playfulness (hidden walls, illusory floors, troll messages). Decentralization (no single authoritative narrative). Mirroring (Marika/Radagon, overworld/underground). Data linking (grace connections, the very structure of the discovery itself). The web is 'pataphysical; video games are 'pataphysical; Elden Ring is 'pataphysical.

• Andrew Hugill - 'Pataphysics: A Useless Guide. MIT Press, 2012.

  • The definitive English language study of 'pataphysics, tracing its history from Jarry through the Collège de 'Pataphysique to contemporary practice.
  • On the impossibility of definition: "To understand 'pataphysics is to fail to understand 'pataphysics. To define it is merely to indicate a possible meaning, which will always be the opposite of another equally possible meaning, which, when diurnally interpolated with the first meaning, will point towards a third meaning which will in turn elude definition because of the fourth element that is missing."
  • On evidence: "What we see of 'pataphysics in the so called real world is what has been created to provide the evidence of 'pataphysics."
  • On quantum parallels: "It seems to connect with the paradoxes and uncertainties of quantum mechanics, yet it does so through a very different kind of mathematics, a purely imaginary science."
  • On definitions themselves: "The very notion of a 'definition,' which is a cluster of words that gives the specific sense of a term that holds true in all (or as nearly all as makes no difference) situations, is itself un'pataphysical."
  • On liquid life: "'Pataphysics opens up a space for liquid life by enabling the impossible, invisible, imaginary, and contradictory qualities of the living realm to be acknowledged, not as truths but as paradoxes, and to hold spaces open for experiment that would otherwise be closed by logic and empiricism."
  • Elden Ring connection: Hugill's paradoxes apply directly to the discovery. To understand the connection between Elden Ring and The Large Glass is to fail to understand it. What we see of the bachelor machine in the game is what has been created to provide the evidence of the bachelor machine. The very notion of "proof" (that FromSoftware "intended" Duchamp) is un'pataphysical: the discovery holds true not by logical demonstration but by opening a space where the impossible, invisible, and contradictory can be acknowledged. The Lands Between IS liquid life: spaces held open for experiment that would otherwise be closed by the logic of "it's just a video game."

Insipid Criticism (Counter-Examples)#

• Wainstein on Duchamp (from Grant Us Eyes):

  • "Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) depicts multiple moments in time simultaneously. It also looks a bit like a video-game glitch."
  • Critique: This is the kind of shallow, superficial connection that passes for insight in games criticism—a visual resemblance ("looks a bit like") offered without depth, historical context, or understanding of what Duchamp was actually doing. Duchamp's work was a systematic dismantling of retinal art and an exploration of the fourth dimension; reducing it to "looks like a glitch" flattens a century of art history into a throwaway observation.

• Wainstein on sexuality in Souls games (from Grant Us Eyes, Ch. 10 "Fair Maidens"):

  • "Perhaps nothing is at once more central to Bloodborne's narrative and yet more dissonant with the work's overall tone, mood, and disposition than – in a word – fucking."
  • Claims Souls games are "authentically desexualized" with "no sexual code" — "nigh-universal celibacy" that lacks neurosis.
  • References "How to Pick Up Fair Maidens," a book in Gehrman's study.
  • Critique: Wainstein entirely misses the connection to Duchamp's Large Glass and the bachelor machine tradition. The Souls games are not "authentically desexualized" — they are bachelor machines. The Bride (Marika/Moon Presence/Gwynevere) presides over the Bachelors (Tarnished/Hunters/Chosen Undead) in a structure of perpetual, frustrated desire that never achieves consummation. Gehrman's "How to Pick Up Fair Maidens" is not "incongruous" — it's the key. The celibacy is the point: bachelor machines transform eros into mechanical repetition. Wainstein sees the surface (no explicit sex) without recognizing the deep structure (the entire game IS about sex, encoded in the Duchampian apparatus).