Shifting Exercises. How to Reclaim an Echo-Medial Senseablerie

This article pays homage to the tactic of infiltrating dissident political critique into self-help rhetoric, and vice versa. Offering glimpses into the genealogy of distractibility’s pathologisation, it reclaims this disposition as a relational, affective and perceptual capacity, rather than a cognitive failure. The neologism senseablerie – a collision between the mocked sensiblerie and HER: She Loves Data’s senseability – acts as an ambiguous form of resistance, threading together hysteria, psychotechnics, neurotech devices, and quantified attention economies. Drawing from mediartivist, feminist, and rhythmanalytic approaches, the paper assembles a repertoire of shifting exercises – from surrealist somnambulism to Data Meditations, attentional dérives, and psycho-somatic rituals – that activate minor modes of hyper-sensing. Within this framework, distraction and getting distracted represent echo-medial thresholds for dispersed, re-attuned, and potentially reenchanted sensibility. Reclaiming these cognitive styles means tuning into fugitive practices where perception shifts and wanders – with others, across haunted lineages, and against valorisation capture.