Conclusion

The potential value of the present text can possibly be considered by thinking forward to how the shopping environments of the future may change and be effectively constituted to meet the changing needs of society, as they seem to be in a state of dramatic change at the time of its compilation. The potential significance of the work herein can also be related to a backward glance at the statements expressed in the early twentieth century by Louis Aragon, who tried to elaborate upon his specific pleasures in the Parisian shopping arcades:

I shall never cease to be astonished by the degree of man’s disdainful indifference towards his pleasures, and his consequent failure to extend their domain … Even those people who appreciate the delights of chance make no apparent efforts to reproduce them. No system, no attempt at codifying pleasures. It is a miracle that they are still occasionally capable of giving way to what they so quaintly call vices … As far as I know the geography of pleasure has never been taught, although proficiency in this subject would constitute an effective weapon against life’s tediums. No one has assumed the responsibility of assigning its limits to the frisson, of drawing the boundaries of the caress, of charting the territories of ecstasy. All that man has exceeded in extracting so far from the individual experience is a series of vulgar localisations. One day, perhaps, scholars will divide the human body up among themselves in order to be able to study the meanderings of pleasure: certainly such a study is as worthy of absorbing a man’s activity as any other.