This paper reviews two mainstream interpretive approaches in affect studies—the "basic states" perspective from psychology/neuroscience and the "intensive forces" perspective from philosophy/humanities, noting that Spinoza's integrative perspective has been revived in atmosphere theory. The author explicitly adopts the affect theory approach, distinguishes between the terms "emotion" and "affect," and uses "emotion" in a broad sense. By citing Anderson and Ash, the paper clarifies how the concept of emotional atmosphere provides new insights for understanding the diffuseness and collectivity of affective life; combining Anderson's pre-subjective definition with Fox's collective definition, it reveals that emotional atmosphere possesses dual dimensions of both "pre-individual affect" and "shared emotion." Finally, it proposes examining the discursive generative logic of emotional atmosphere from three levels: affective arousal, emotional circulation, and political efficacy.

The Arousal of Pre-Individual Affect: The Bodily Dynamics of Emotional Atmosphere

This section explores how emotional atmosphere arouses pre-individual affect through bodily dynamics. First, it traces the theoretical lineage from Baumgarten through Böhme to contemporary atmosphere aesthetics, noting that atmosphere aesthetics takes bodily presence as its foundation, activating pre-conceptual, pre-symbolic bodily sensations through the concept of "felt body" rather than physical body, so that perceivers are drawn into emotional tones before forming definite emotions. Second, it analyzes the bodily dynamic mechanism proposed by Schmitz, namely how the competitive relationship between two forces—constriction and expansion—directly generates emotional atmospheres such as anxiety or excitement, and points out the resonance between this theory and the Spinoza-Delezza-Massumi affect tradition, which together emphasize the dynamic connection between affective states and bodily intensities. Third, it introduces Simondon's theory of individuation and Deleuze's concept of intensity, clarifying that pre-individual affect as a liminal state preceding reflective self-consciousness possesses temporal latency and chromatic ambiguity; it also compares the divergence between Schmitz and Anderson in their understanding of pre-individual affect—the former retains "non-identificatory self-consciousness" within the Husserlian intentional tradition, while the latter breaks through subjective constraints, emphasizing trans-individual generativity and transformative potential. Ultimately, emotional atmosphere theory transcends the limitations of mind-body dualism and psychologism by revealing the co-presence and relationality of human and world at the sensible level.

The Transmission of Shared Emotion: The Circulation Mechanism of Emotional Atmosphere

This section explores emotional atmosphere as the circulation mechanism of shared emotion, developing the analysis from three levels. First, the sharing of emotional atmosphere presupposes emotional transmission; unlike traditional social psychology theories that emphasize linear contagion, emotional transmission from the atmosphere perspective is a form of bodily resonance where it is difficult to distinguish between active and passive. Drawing on Rosa's four moments of resonance operation—being touched, being moved, transformation, and uncontrollability—the body realizes the interactive generation of emotion through forms of movement, allowing pre-individual affect to condense into shared emotion through continuous bodily coordination. Second, the realization of sharing depends on the dynamic attunement between individual and atmosphere; the perceiver must adjust their own disposition to fit the emotional tone of a particular atmosphere, thereby achieving an "integrative sense of co-presence," but this process is profoundly shaped by socio-cultural context. Finally, sharing does not mean the convergence of individual feelings; the two types proposed by Böhme—"immersion" and "contrast"—indicate that atmosphere accommodates and modulates the differences of individual affect, while the situational rootedness of atmosphere ensures that differentiated feelings point to the same emotional reality. This discussion ultimately points to a critique of the ancient Greek concept of emotional introception: emotional atmosphere, by virtue of its spatiality and communicability, makes emotion originally appear in open fields, shaking the traditional doctrine that confines emotion to the private mental world.

The Aesthetic and Potential of Emotion: The Political Efficacy of Emotional Atmosphere

This section explores the political efficacy of emotional atmosphere and its generative mechanism. The structure of emotional atmosphere intrinsically gathers three conditions for the generation of emotional politics: the moment of activation, the moment of community construction, and the moment of articulation, among which the dynamic transformation between pre-individual affect and shared emotion carries the structural potential for community formation and political expression.

The political operation of emotional atmosphere is mainly realized through two levels: first, acting upon bodily senses through aesthetic means, controlling environmental stimuli to regulate the human synesthetic system, making people emotionally intoxicated with specific environmental atmospheres and losing the ability to discern real social relations, while naturalizing ideology; second, regulating the direction and intensity of collective emotion through emotional logic, making projections based on future possibilities, allowing power to govern through managing people's premonitions and expectations of the future.

However, emotional atmosphere is not completely subject to power regulation; it inherently contains potential generative forces. "Affective residues" that cannot be fully regulated are often perceived in the form of slight bodily disturbances, and under certain conditions can be reactivated, potentially breaking through original expressive categories, prompting marginalized groups to speak, and triggering the reorganization and reconfiguration of collective emotion.

In terms of theoretical logic, the discursive generation of emotional atmosphere reflects the interactive resonance between the perceiver's body and the world, integrating two different levels of emotional forms: pre-individual affect and shared emotion. According to its generative process, emotional atmosphere presents a dual logic of aggregative symbiosis and discrete differentiation. In terms of discursive significance, this research demonstrates new trends in affect studies: transcending dualistic models in emotional form, challenging the cognitive paradigm of traditional aesthetics in emotional experience, and covertly implementing emotional politics through the trinity model of "atmosphere—aesthetics—emotion" in emotional politics.