Apple - Disable SIP without recovery mode

Edit: to answer your actual question, you can't do it from anywhere except Recovery Mode, so anything you do must be done from there.

Tested on a similar 4,1 upgraded to 5,1 [but I have a flashed graphics card so I could see what I was doing]

Reboot & at the chimes hold Cmd ⌘ R for about 10s.
Wait until you get to Recovery Mode, which for me took approx 45s from the chimes [I'm on SSD but I think it may have chosen a Recovery on another HD to actually boot from] Give it a minute or so just to be safe.

Fn Ctrl ⌃ F2 will switch focus to the menu bar, specifically the Apple logo, top left.

It appears that whatever you have set in System Prefs > Keyboard for "Use all F1, F2 keys as standard function keys" that this option is disabled in Recovery, so even though just Ctrl ⌃ F2 works for me in a running OS, in Recovery I needed the added Fn key.

From there, you can navigate using the arrow keys

Pic from https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/254167/85275

From that you can see that Terminal is 4 to the right, then 4 down.
It's 4 not 3 because the first down arrow opens the menu.

Hit Enter & Terminal will launch.
Type csrutil disable & hit Enter
Type reboot & hit Enter.

If it reboots, you got it right - otherwise you'll have to have another guess.

BTW, golden rule, as you have discovered, is keep your crappy old stock Apple card somewhere safe, for occasions such as this ;-)

Additional note: Fn Ctrl ⌃ F2 is a toggle. First will select the menu bar, second will deselect, so make sure to only do it once.

This blind method worked for me:

In order to disable or enable SIP (System Integrity Protection) without being able to see recovery mode and launch the terminal, you can use single-user recovery mode which takes you right into a command prompt.

Reboot Mac holding down CmdRS

Wait 30-60 seconds depending on how fast your boot disk is.

Then hit ENTER a few times to get to the command prompt

To DISABLE SIP: type csrutil disable; reboot and press Enter

To ENABLE SIP: type csrutil enable; reboot and press Enter

Once back in macOS you can check the status of SIP with the following command: csrutil status

Note: This will only work if the recovery OS is =>10.11 (El Cap). If you upgraded (chances are as we are talking a 2011 Mac, the recovery partition will be @ Lion or some such and will not have csrutil in it. Work around is to "recover"from a boot USB with =>10.11 on it.

It is possible to boot into Recovery with Single User Mode.

To do this: Hold the Option (⌥) key during initial boot to get to the Startup Manager. While holding Command (⌘)-S, select the Recovery boot volume.

This will give you Single User Recovery Mode, a terminal from which you can run csrutil disable and reboot. You are then free to continue to normal Single User Mode to disable the Extensions that use the GPU and reboot to a system with terrible graphics, but from which you can more easily recover/backup what you need before starting repairs.