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.
