2020 is the year of the bubble. This means it has been the year of the Plague that could be collectively outwitted only by ensconcing ourselves in the bubbles of our homes. We have had to swath ourselves in a bubble-wrap of domesticity — if we are afforded that luxury — have had to make a barrier between us and others, between us and the world and its viruses, themselves floating through the air, unseen, unfathomably, in tiny bubbles, ejected from mouths in coughs, or in words, or even in an exhalation, and bobbing on the air for perhaps hours, ever ready to be inhaled, absorbed into the body, given new cells to colonize, this spiky bubble of oily lipid molecules, a vulnerable bubble, for this encasing is what is dissolved by soap bubbles. This has been the year of inhabiting the microcosm, the shrunk-down environs of delimited risk. This is the year of the bubble or bubbles, but what this means for the following reflections is not pinned — it is liable to wander. Bubbles by their very nature meander, free-float, pop, and disappear, leaving only a vague sense of having been somewhere, or even of being real. This essay follows the bubbles of our time — actual and metaphorical — and those that exceed them, in an act of poetic-political accounting.

We reside in our bubbles. We share bubbles with some. Other bubbles mix together only at their peril — if the bubble bursts, what is released? Bubbles connect some of us and they split some of us apart. The government in the United Kingdom, under Boris Johnson, began to speak of bubbles in its policy announcements, hitched to a strategy of public health management. At first it was the announcement that adults who lived alone or with just their children should form bubbles. Some adults were allowed to create a “support bubble” with one other household. These microcosmic entities could cavort and bob around together as an expanded bubble. The “bubble” of virus insulation is one that draws on the associations of bubble wrap and polystyrene foam, a substance into which gases are blown to expand it into many stiffened bubbles — coverings, barriers that cushion and protect. And then the bubble idea floated its way into more and more people’s minds. Bubbles became a way of protecting ourselves — held in bubbles, but regaining lost freedoms, we were allowed to drift and glide a little. The government mandated that people stay in bubbles of six or eight people. And it was proposed that small groups of young children return to the schools they had not set foot in for four months; to welcome their return, to make the building they had not seen for so long a time seem friendlier, colorful plastic bubble-maker machines pumped hundreds of soapy bubbles into the air and all was to be well.

As economic concerns began to surface, the utopian sense of possible other-living amidst a horror abated; our bubbles disaggregated and the term itself was stretched pragmatically to signify massive aggregations of 180 or 200 or more older school pupils, so that a school return could happen. For workers to return to workplaces from the bubbles of their home offices or from their furloughs, in order to reignite economic activity, it was necessary for schools to take charge of the children’s education again. But all this opening up, this encouragement out into the world again, was to take place in the absence of any vaccines or certainty about what had happened and how it might be prevented from happening again. The bubbles expand. The bubbles become microcosms. In Cardiff, a restaurant installed diner bubbles, cleaned thoroughly after each use by a fogging machine — for bubbles to dine inside bubbles — and so we inhabit our own little worlds. We dine in microcosms. We turn away from the whole.

That the bubble should become a new item, a matter of public policy, a word on everyone’s lips, was strange for me. Since developing a fascination with the history and theory of clouds (which became an MA course that I taught at my university in 2014) I had kept an eye out for nebulous entities: things that were almost qualities rather than definite objects, things comprised of soft matter, especially all that was defined as fog, froth, or foam. These interstitial, fuzzy, indeterminate entities — gas suffused with particulates; gases trapped in bubbles, either pliable, breakable or solid; a mass of bubbles on the surface of liquid, caused by agitation or fermentation — these airy suspensions kept nagging at me. Their social presence seemed to swell: in data cloud infrastructure, fog computing in the Internet of Things, fire-retardant foams after headline-grabbing major fires, speculative froth in markets, and the dense particulate air of tear gas that has saturated frequent protests.

A bubble or a collection of bubbles is a beautiful thing. A bubble is a delightful thing, a floating loveliness. It bobs on the air, drifting this way and that, as the wind nudges it. A soap bubble, the most beautiful, playful, childlike bubble, mirrors parts of the world around it, merging itself with its environment — bubbles are microcosms, whole worlds, like snow globes, entire to themselves. A bubble may also reflect prismatically an oily smear of ever-changing rainbow colors that are made by light but only sometimes, under very specific conditions, revealed. Such light and airy beings are the very emblems of a world in which high-street design has been pulsing with rainbows, unicorns, and sparkles. That the bubble appears to represent a projected miniaturized form of our cosmos can be attributed to our new technologies of vision. We see better, smaller, more fine-grained into our cosmos and discover how the grains — the teeming, rumbling, fizzing universe — how bubbling it is. A video from NASA on Quantum or Spacetime foam proposes that spacetime is a bubbling froth of tiny effervescent bubbles. “These regions blink in and out of existence like the bubbles in the foam of a freshly poured beer. There is no such thing as empty space; there is only ‘quantum foam,’ everywhere.”¹ Another NASA communique notes that there are blustery irregularities in the Earth’s plasmatic ionosphere, the boundary between earth and space, where energetic electron and ion particles crashing in from the protective bubble that surrounds Earth (the magnetosphere) create dazzling auroras: in different regions, there are bubbly clumps of different intensities of ionization. These clusters form a “froth” that interferes with radio signals, such as GPS, radio telescopes, and aircraft radio, especially in the higher latitudes. If it is possible to calculate at what size froth begins to distort signals in the near-Earth plasma, then the precision of GPS and other radio systems might be enhanced. A fault — the bubbling turbulence that garbles the signal — could be recaptured for utilization as a remedy, once its cause is established, meaning it could be brought into the grid to augment orientation. To err within spacetime is to find oneself within the bubbles of our universe.² And we find our own selves in bubble form too. In 2016, scientists observed through their powerful microscopes that skin is itself a foam.³ As each keratinocyte (our most common epidermal cells) ascends from the stratum basale to the stratum granulosum, where it flattens, releases its fats, loses its nucleus, and dies, it adopts a fourteen-faced shape. This process is one that was already described by Scottish mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin in 1887. He sought the perfect formula for foam, as part of a long-standing quest for the ideal shape to allow objects of equal volume to occupy a space while taking up the smallest amount of surface area. His calculations led him eventually to a three-dimensional fourteen-faced shape, formed by truncated octahedrons (tetra-decahedrons with six square faces and eight hexagonal faces) which built a honeycomb structure.⁴ The cells of foam that form skin maintain a barrier against water. We have bubbles. We are of them.

The bubble would not be in and of this world if it did not possess another side, a dark side, a malevolent air, a heaviness, a longevity that counteracts its practicality, joyfulness, its transient presence that is vulnerable to pop at any moment. Life might have begun in bubbles. There is a theory that billions of years ago, small air bubbles in water, produced in tiny volcanoes in the depths of the sea, settled on porous volcanic rocks and attracted biomolecules from the primordial soup around them. The air-water interface that the bubbles introduced — a modicum of order in the chaotic ocean world — concentrated these biomolecules and chemical reactions that took place, out of which grew life in crystals, chains, structures, and cells.⁵ There are old bubbles, the ones that brought and bring life into being. There are fragile transitory bubbles that drift up for a moment and burst. Bubbles condense contradiction.

In contradiction, there are politics and argument and a jostling around the terms of life and the limits of death. Life may also end in the bubbles produced in the present. The bubbly forms of today’s social environs include foggy pollution and the thick urban atmospheres produced by particulates hovering in the air, as well as toxic foams and froths of chemically polluted streams and oceans, a toxic waste produced by chemical effluence and climate change. In open-air laundries in India, detergents mingle with sewage and industrial effluent, and the turbulence of the barrages that control the amount of water passing through agitates this mixture into foam. In Hyderabad, toxic foam made by the reaction of sodium salts with sewage water entered homes. In Oscoda, Michigan, foam derived from per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, congregates along a lake’s shoreline and elsewhere, following its abandonment in landfill or seepage into the ground after being used in firefighting. It pollutes groundwater and drinking water, causes cancer and organ damage. In Catalonia, the streets of a town were carpeted with sea foam, flooding farms and knocking out power. Seafoam is a natural product, a result of reactions in sea water, but it enters into a historical bond with climate change. Seafoam has a similar chemistry to soap bubbles. Planktonic algae decompose and their fats and proteins act as surfactants (surface active agents) which are amphiphilic molecules: one part of these is hydrophobic, aligning itself with the air; the other part, hydrophilic, is in the water. Stabilized bubbles form — thin layers of water trapped between molecules of surfactants, stretched into spheres, the smallest volume that the bubble-layer can make — and they break through the liquid-gas interface and exist for a while. With seafoam, the more plankton and nutrients in the water, the more bubbles form, and the longer these take to burst. Seafoam is white and light and it feeds the small creatures that exist intertidally. Seafoam in recent years has become harmful, causing asthma attacks in Florida and killing fish, turtles, dolphins, and manatees on the US Gulf Coast, as well as red-necked loons, Western grebes, and common murres on the West Coast, where the surfactants strip the waterproofing from their feathers. The seafoam comes in such quantity as a result of anomalous ocean warming and acidification. Algal blooms thrive in a changing, warming climate.

All this foam is the foam of a world in turbulence, one in which there is untrammelled industrial activity and its aftereffects of runoff, in the context of a not-unrelated global warming and its own aftereffects of excessive organic productivity. Is it facetious to see this dynamic’s complement in the foams and froths that sit on top of the beverages of capitalist worker-consumers in the cities, dashing to work — “but first coffee,” as a sign near me now admonishes — or on a break, as a post-work pick-me-up to continue doing and being and acting at full capacity into the night? Coffee foam and froth is a symbol and a fuel of our networked economy, the one that takes place in every coffee bar, the networker with a microfoam-topped latte in one hand, smartphone in the other.

Milk, assailed by hot air or steam (which produces microbubbles) is made foamy, as in the topping of a cappuccino, or it settles on a latte macchiato as froth. To make foam, water vapour and air are injected into milk while it is heated. Becoming denatured, the proteins in milk — the casein, which holds its structure, and the whey, which unfolds — create spheres around the air and stabilize into bubbles. Milk’s protein chains are polar. At one end, they draw water to themselves; at the other, water is repelled, just as in all foams. There is commotion in the cup. The hydrophobic ends of the protein chain turn towards the bubble’s water-free center. The hydrophilic ends poke into a milky environment. The structure holds, but precariously. Foam is a bundle of bubbles in a comparatively small amount of liquid or solid. Gas is coarsely dispersed through liquid, its volume fractionally larger. Bubbles concentrate in the cup, and they exist to give the consumer a momentary pleasure, sinking into a pillow of foam, a cloudlike cushion, but they should also give a boost as the drinker moves through the world of work. Each consumer is a bubble of flexible labor, part of a post-world-recession economy in which jobs for life are of the past, a world of reskilling, zero-hour contracts, precarious conditions. Each bubble of labor may be caught up with on broader economic bubbles, inflations of sectors of the economy, with rapidly increasing asset prices bringing sudden rushes of confidence for investors and consumers alike (such as the Dot-Com bubble or the Japanese bubble economy of 1986-1991) until it bursts. Markets can be frothy too: froth refers to the market conditions which precede an actual market bubble, where asset prices become detached from their underlying intrinsic values as the demand for those assets drives their prices to unsustainable levels.

Bubbly froth is the very sign of transience, a trivial lather that pops and passes — its movements and rates, its dissipations are hard to map, tricky to model. Froth is a difficult entity. It has multiple flow scales, exhibiting significant, rapid physical changes. It has a tendency to coalesce. Its particles are of different sizes and densities, and they possess varying attractions to water. Froth is too lively. It foments. If it is the case that froth translates difficultly into measurement, it is also the case that it inflates all too easily as a concept. Froth lends itself to metaphor. Froth is a nothing that can be anything.

I see bubbles in the frothy coffees that hiss into being in every cafe. I see them in the high definition images from telescopes aimed at distant nebulae. I see them in the air, thick with pollution — airs so thick you could cut them with a knife. Fogs, foams, and froths are there in the world, but also as metaphors, emanations — ideological phantasms of our political and social condition. What is our environment, what bubble of world envelopes us, whoever we are and wherever we are? Do we exist in our technological — or maybe medial — bubbles, muffled by a metaphorical foam that bars from us diverse inputs, allows to settle only those that are native to each particular bubble? What bubble of atmosphere do we carry with us? Are we bound together in the same collectivity, or are we in many bubbles, proximate, joined but also closed to each other, only existing side by side, though as one vulnerable, as many perhaps aerated enough to persist?

Peter Sloterdijk has written on bubbles, globes, and foams in a trilogy of books about spheres, through which the history of humanity is retold, through which this macrocosm of the universe is described in relation to its modes of habitation, its community structures, its connections, proximities, and severances. These books follow humans who have been thrown-into-the-cosmos and the dyads — the self and the spheres — that they construct. Within the cosmos, what interiors, actual and imagined, have humans created or found? Sloterdijk’s volume on bubbles explores the intimacy of small spaces, microspheres, including the womb, and the placenta within that, conceived as models for all secluded, enveloped spaces that humans seek in their lives. His speculations on the globe allow for a narrative of globalization to be related and assessed, but also for the conveyance of thoughts on other things that might be conceived of as macrospheres: skyscrapers and nation states and cities; villages or systems of belief. There have been times when life-forms, gathered within a single sphere, under one horizon, are unified with a globe and a concept unto themselves, a circle of humans in communion, immune to all that is external. The bubble that is the globe, Sloterdijk observes, is now too vast, contains too much uninhabitable boundless space, for we know too much of endless galaxies and have traveled too far from home. Foam turns to islands and greenhouses, space stations and submarines, shopping centers and air-conditioned offices, insular places that are atmospherically complete in themselves. Foam, for Sloterdijk, is an aggregation of bubbles, and that constitutes human social worlds or networks. Society is

an aggregate of microspheres (couples, households, businesses, associations) of different formats that, like the individual bubbles in a mountain of foam, border on one another and are layered over and under one another, yet without truly being accessible or effectively separable from one another.⁶

Foam is proximate humans without solidarity, without the capacity to exchange anything meaningful between them; and yet they exist cheek by jowl. They are bubbles existing separately together. It is the city, the skyscraper, and the apartment block that are the most prevalent modern forms of foam. While there is little social solidarity and justice at work in this thinking, it has a lightness, an airiness that wants thought, like life, to float free from convention or to meander like a floating bubble.

In an interview with the Harvard Design Magazine, in 2009, Sloterdijk was asked why he considers contemporary architecture to be foam. His answer offers an image of typical modern city living, set within a metaphysics of a divided, fractured worldview:

The simple answer is: because since the Enlightenment we have no longer needed a universal house in order to find the world a place worthy of inhabiting. What suffices is a unité d’habitation, a stackable number of inhabitable cells. Through the motif of the inhabited cell I can uphold the spherical imperative that applies to all forms of human life but does not presuppose cosmic totalization. The stacking of cells in an apartment block, for instance, no longer generates the classical world/house entity but an architectural foam, a multi-chambered system made up of relatively stabilized personal worlds.⁷

The idea of proximate but unshared worlds is extrapolated by Sloterdijk from Jakob von Uexküll’s 1920s concepts of theoretical biology, which dislodged all living creatures from a shared stage in order to imagine specific life-worlds, environments or surrounding worlds (umwelte) for each alone.⁸

This insight offers us a completely new view of the universe as something that does not consist of a single soap bubble which we have blown up so large as to go well beyond our horizons and assume infinite proportions, and is instead made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles that overlap and intersect everywhere.⁹

These separate worlds, the bubble for each, are relatively stabilized, notes Sloterdijk, but that lasts only until they are upended; the bubbles collapse, the life contained within them enters into freefall or extinguishment, as occurred, for example, so fatefully at the Grenfell Tower apartment block in London on June 14, 2017.

Foam is indistinct conceptually — there is the foam that cushions us (or our devices) as we fall, a protective foam that might be a symbol of care. And yet foam, the foam that is meant to insulate — to protect by encasing and supporting — was precisely the agent of death in the inferno at Grenfell Tower, where an inner polystyrene foam, a 50mm-thick layer of Celotex RS5000 thermal insulation of polyisocyanurate, caught fire, sending flaming droplets onto floors below while aiding flames in spreading higher up the tower block and releasing toxic gas into the atmosphere. The horror, however, has not stopped. The atmosphere remains poisoned. A recent newspaper report states of the scene, many months after the fire:

Independent research from Prof Anna Stec at the University of Central Lancashire, released on Thursday, shows heightened levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the area around Grenfell Tower. Phosphorous flame retardants, toxic to the nervous system, were found in soil samples 50 metres from the tower. Dust and oily deposits were wiped from the blinds of homes close to the tower 17 months later. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were found at 160 times the level of reference samples 140m from Grenfell, along with chemicals that can cause asthma with a single exposure. These are not at naturally occurring levels in most urban environments.¹⁰

An atmosphere is made here by humans, and it is one that is hostile to the individual. It is an atmosphere that penetrates the body — not to speak of the sickening mind — and forms a toxic bubble within which the most disadvantaged are compelled to continue breathing as they move closer to death. It is a real atmosphere through which people move, a microcosm of harm in a locality of London, but it also floats out of sight, or rather, it lingers, albeit invisible to public view and social discourse. Sometimes it will be mobilized by politicians to make or score a point. Mostly it is left to a cluster of campaigners to keep it in view.

We must learn to separate the froth, the media bubbles that puff and pop, from the substance of things, to turn the foam into protection, not suffocation. We must find accords with bubbles, with matter newly present, with new metaphorical echoes in what is so unsubstantial but so fatal.