These are proofs of the final version available at Routledge and published in: Maesse, Jens (2020): The Euro crisis dispositif: Heterogeneous positioning strategies in polycentric fields, in: Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg and Stefan Bernhard (eds.): Charting transnational fields. Methodology for a political sociology of knowledge: London: Routledge, 219-239. 1 The Euro Crisis Dispositif: Heterogeneous positioning strategies in polycentric fields Jens Maesse, University of Giessen, jens.maesse@sowi.uni-giessen.de Abstract This contribution seeks to analyze transnational fields as complex and heterogeneous discursive positioning games, taking economic expert discourses on the Euro crisis as an illustration. Whereas conventional approaches reduce the Euro crisis discourse to a one- dimensional conflict, I want to show how various different but interrelated conflict arenas merge and interact. The conflict over economic policy will be taken as an empirical illustration. In order to grasp the complexity and heterogeneity of European political economy positioning games, a dispositif analytical approach will be applied bringing together field analysis and discourse studies. It is an analytical response to the irreconcilable hybridity of the current historical situation in Europe and elsewhere in the collective imaginary of the former Western world. Dispositif analysis is a discourse- analytically reformulated approach to transnational fields; it helps to capture the closure and social fixation (sedimentation), as well as the discursive visibility and controversies (symbolization, imagination), in trans-epistemic positioning arenas. Such a discourse perspective opens up the political economy for analyzing the full complexities of social power games that take place behind the actor’s backs, producing both social hierarchies and biopolitical arenas for the production of social life. 1. Introduction The idea of transnational field analysis aims to understand the complex openings and trans-local re-articulations of the social order beyond national autonomy and without fixed borders (Go & Krause, 2016). Transnational fields are much more transformative, dynamic and open to ongoing conflicts over meaning and institution building (Bernhard & Schmidt-Wellenburg, 2014). My paper will show why two aspects are central for understanding knowledge production in transnational fields: first, the trans-epistemic interconnectedness of different fields, which are open to each other as gradually fixed social structures (Bigo, 2011); and, second, the complexity and multiplicity of meaning that derives from discursive practices taking place in trans-epistemic fields. In order to develop this idea, my paper draws on a discourse analytical reformulation of the field concept, which cumulates in a dispositif analytical approach. Discourse analysts have criticized economic and institutional approaches in the social sciences for paying too little attention to interpretation processes, negotiations, conflicts and controversies in the economy (Wullweber, 2015). Yet, many discourse approaches tend to reduce all aspects of the political economy to the semiotic level, thereby underestimating social hierarchies, routines, processes and structures beyond the level of linguistic visibility (Diaz-Bone, 2017). In contrast, political-economic