The violence was no doubt always implicit in the very conception of ownership as such when applied to land; it is a peculiarly ambivalent mystery that mortal beings, generations of dying organisms, should have imagined they could somehow own parts of the earth in the first place. [...]

The point is, however, that where the thematic opposition of heterogeneity and homogeneity is invoked, it can only be this brutal process that is the ultimate referent: the effects that result from the power of commerce and then capitalism proper – which is to say, sheer number as such, number now shorn and divested of its own magical heterogeneities and reduced to equivalencies – to seize upon a landscape and flatten it out, reorganize it into a grid of identical parcels, and expose it to the dynamic of a market that now reorganizes space in terms of and identical value. The development of capitalism then distributes that value most unevenly indeed, until at length, in its postmodern moment, sheer speculation, as something like the triumph of spirit over matter, the liberation of value from any of its former concrete or earthly content, now reigns supreme and devastates the very cities and countrysides it created in the process of its own earlier development. But all such later forms of abstract violence and homogeneity derive from the initial parcelization, which translates the money form and the logic of commodity production for a market back onto space itself.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 24-25